Unlike Chesterton—and this is how you know he’s an early-21st-century guy, someone with Wi-Fi—Hart is extremely rude. Richard Dawkins, “zoologist and tireless tractarian,” has “an embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning”; Sam Harris’s The End of Faith is “extravagantly callow”; and Dan Brown’s heretical The Da Vinci Code is “surely the most lucrative novel ever written by a borderline illiterate.” (All this from the first one and a half pages of 2009’s Atheist Delusions.) He once proposed, as a thought experiment, that bioethicists such as the late Joseph Fletcher (“almost comically vile”) be purged from the gene pool: “Academic ethicists … constitute perhaps the single most useless element in society. If reproduction is not a right but a social function, should any woman be allowed to bring such men into the world?”

Yale University Press

So what has he done to the New Testament, this bristling one-man band of a Christian literatus? The surprising aim, Hart tells us in his introduction, was to be as bare-bones and—where appropriate—unsqueamishly prosaic as he can. The New Testament, after all, is not a store of ancient wonders like the Hebrew Bible. It’s a grab bag of reportage, rumor, folk memory, and on-the-hoof mysticism produced by regular people, everyday babblers and clunkers, under the pressure of a supremely irregular event—namely, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that, says Hart, is what it should sound like. “Again and again,” he insists, “I have elected to produce an almost pitilessly literal translation; many of my departures from received practices are simply my efforts to make the original text as visible as possible through the palimpsest of its translation … Where an author has written bad Greek … I have written bad English.” Herein lies the fascination of this thing: its deliberate, one might say defiant, rawness and lowbrow-ness, as produced by a decidedly overcooked highbrow.

Let’s zoom in on Mark, the roughest and tersest of the Gospels. (Hippolytus of Rome, in the third century, called Mark “stump fingered”—possibly a physical descriptor but more likely, I think, a comment on his prose.) Here’s how Monsignor Ronald Knox handled Mark 1:40–41 in his 1945 translation: “Then a leper came up to him, asking for his aid; he knelt at his feet and said, If it be thy will, thou hast power to make me clean. Jesus was moved with pity; he held out his hand and touched him, and said, It is my will; be thou made clean.” Hart’s version: “And a leper comes to him, imploring him and falling to his knees, saying to him, ‘If you wish it, you are able to cleanse me.’ And, moved inwardly with compassion, he stretched out his hand and touched him, and says to him, ‘I wish it, be clean.’ ” There’s a stumbling, almost rustically blundering urgency to this, the verb tenses tripping over one another; beside it the Knox translation feels smoothed out, falsely archaized, too rhetorical. In Hart we can hear more clearly both the leper’s challenge—heal me!—and the quickness and intimacy of Jesus’s response.