David Bentley Hart undertook this new translation of the New

Testament in the spirit of “etsi doctrina non daretur,” “as if doc-
trine is not given.” Reproducing the texts’ often fragmentary for-
mulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a

pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts’ impen-
etrability and unfinished quality while awakening readers to an

uncanniness that often lies hidden beneath doctrinal layers.
The early Christians’ sometimes raw, astonished, and halting
prose challenges the idea that the New Testament affirms the kind
of people we are. Hart reminds us that they were a company of
extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of

society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most rea-
sonable and decent. “To live as the New Testament language re-
quires,” he writes, “Christians would have to become strangers

and sojourners on the earth, to have here no enduring city, to be-
long to a Kingdom truly not of this world. And we surely cannot

do that, can we?”