David Bentley Hart has lately written a piece in the Church Life Journal with the somewhat unwieldy title of “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients”. Like everything Dr. Hart writes it is worth reading. His piece gets no further than five words when he names Bishop N.T. Wright as his main antagonist, though he admits that Wright “functions here only as emblematic of a larger historical tendency…
David Bentley Hart’s The New Testament: a Translation has come to a bookstore near you. I have already written about Hart’s article (published in Commonweal in September 2016) in which he spoke at length of the genesis and need for such a new translation. Here I would like to look at the New Testament translation itself. Full disclosure: what follows are general comments about the work, not an in-depth examination of it.…
