In my whole life I’ve never felt as stupid as when I picked up two theology books recommended by a colleague at Lexham Press. I got Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner’s Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures, and I got sort-of-Eastern-Orthodox-theologian David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite. I didn’t finish either one. I didn’t make much progress at all. Radner was almost impossible. Hart was just super challenging. These are brilliant men. And yet, as the co-captain of my ultimate frisbee team once said before we faced the team from an intimidating school, they do not walk on air. And Hart recently said some things to Peter Wehner in the New York Times that I want to object to. Hart makes some bold claims about about the Greek New Testament that I want to subject to careful critique.
In this long discussion, D. B. Hart says a number of things, doctrinally speaking, that I can’t in good conscience agree with. And he says some things that are hard to interpret with charity, like this:
Dogma and tradition as such don’t compel me. If I find them deficient, I feel no moral or intellectual obligation to take them seriously.
Even as a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant, I just wouldn’t and couldn’t say that. I expect that the Spirit who Jesus said would lead us into all truth probably does have some guidance for me through past generations of theologians. (This comment from Hart also shows why he’s only sort-of Eastern Orthodox.)
John Piper, John MacArthur, and John Calvin also come in for some criticism in the discussion—though mostly from Wehner (who, by the way, has written quite a few articles I have enjoyed and profited from).
But it was Hart’s comments about translating the Greek New Testament and about hermeneutics that made me sit down to write a video script. If I tried to hold a candle to this man’s intellect, the wax would immediately burn me. But I have the conscience I have and the dim-watted bulb up there that I have, and by my lights I just don’t see the Bible as Hart does.
Hart’s hermeneutics
First a few brief comments about Hart’s hermeneutics, then some longer and more detailed ones about his read of the Greek.
Hart told Wehner:
The notion that the Bible is a document that’s in full uniform agreement with itself throughout is just prima facie nonsense. It contradicts itself again and again. It’s a human document. It’s not something that dropped out of heaven like a golden tablet inscribed with oracles directly from the lips of God.
I rather disagree with the point here. How did Jesus treat the Bible? As the word of the living God, as something that could not be broken. Now I don’t believe that the Bible dropped out of heaven like a golden tablet inscribed directly from the lips of God, but no responsible theologians do. God used people to write his word. Holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. His word was on their tongues, and their tongues shaped the message. Peter’s letters don’t sound like Amos’ prophecy; even Mark’s Gospel and John’s Gospel sound very different. The personality and background knowledge of the various scriptural writers figure prominently in their work.
Hart also says:
The Bible is not a revealed text, it is a text that allows for revelation.
No. I reject this apparently neo-orthodox view. The Bible consistently presents itself as the Word of the Lord. I feel compelled, as Hart does not, to harmonize Scripture passages that appear to be in tension, because I believe I am subject to all of it. Because when God speaks, even through other people, he speaks truth I must love and obey.
Hart does make one interesting and challenging exegetical argument about Romans 9–11, which you can read on your own. He’s not a dummy; he’s a serious thinker. But as a shepherd in Christ’s flock I can’t endorse his overall view of Scripture.
Hart on the Greek New Testament
Now on to Hart’s views about the Greek New Testament. Interviewer Peter Wehner asked him,
As you look back over your journey of faith of the last quarter century, . …in what important ways, if any, has your faith changed?
Hart starts by hitting a theme he’s already touched. He responds,
I have to say I’ve become more and more indifferent to dogmatic and institutional authority.
Why, Hart?
Hart on New Testament textual variants
He says:
Because one thing your studies do, if you engage in them honestly, is give you knowledge of the history of how we got where we are, but also the history of the texts we’re dealing with, the texts of Scripture, among others, of their multiplicity. I was never a biblical fundamentalist, but I certainly couldn’t have remained one if I had been when I learned the history of the New Testament and realized we don’t even have anywhere in antiquity a single text of the New Testament that matches any other single text of the New Testament. The differences are sometimes small, but sometimes not. They’re quite substantial.
It isn’t just KJV-Onlyists who say that the differences among Greek manuscripts are substantial. It’s, very occasionally, people like Hart.
And yet I insist to Hart as I’ve insisted to the KJV-Onlyists in days of yore: nuh-uh. At the “zoom level” chosen by Hart, that of generalizing about the whole New Testament, there are no—zero—“quite substantial” differences among Greek New Testament manuscripts. Let me carefully couch and hedge what I’m saying; I will use my Craftsman clippers to shape this hedge into a couch on which you can recline: I can’t and won’t say that all of the readings found in all of the Greek New Testament manuscripts we have today are all inerrant. I won’t say that they are entirely and utterly free, every last one of them, from heresy. I don’t know that. But given the sheer profusion of manuscripts we possess, the number of textual differences that are both meaningful and viable is tiny. I’m using Dan Wallace’s categories here: if certain variants are so meaningful that they materially change the teaching of the New Testament, they are nonetheless not “viable.” They are so rare or so obviously out of step with all other manuscripts that no one takes them seriously—like the misprinted 1611 KJV that said, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” How many times do I and others who read Greek have to say this? No Christian doctrines are affected by textual variants. So why does Hart say that some of the differences are “quite substantial”?
Even if he points to the two and only two textual variants that are bigger than half a verse—that would be the story of the woman caught in adultery and the so-called longer ending of Mark—what doctrines are affected by the inclusion or exclusion of these two passages? None that I can think of.
If these passages are in your New Testament, you will interpret them in light of everything else in your New Testament. You won’t conclude from John 7:53–8:11 that Jesus is light on sexual sin or from Mark 16:9–20 that Jesus was making snake-handling a third sacrament.
If these passages are not in your New Testament, you will still believe that Jesus came to seek and to save, to show mercy, and that judgment on human sin will come at a later date. You will still believe that Jesus rose from the dead. The absence of the resurrection from the Gospel of Mark doesn’t undermine that clear teaching of the New Testament one whit. If it did, then you’d see ESV and NASB and NIV users denying the resurrection en masse. (This is not happening, by the way.)
It’s time to show off to you the project I am now wrapping up final edits on, the The Parallel KJV New Testament. It’s literally open in InDesign on my computer right now. I’m making final checks and providing a little more color commentary for study guide type portions of this 1,200-page volume.
For the longest time Most Christians have had to simply trust Hart and people like him—or not. Because most Christians don’t read Greek. We had no way of evaluating claims like his that there are “quite substantial” differences among the Greek New Testaments. To be fair, he’s talking about manuscripts and I’m talking about printed editions. But I’ve looked at the manuscripts, and the kinds of differences that occur among them are exactly the same kinds of differences that occur among printed editions—and are therefore included in my parallel KJV New Testament. Preorder the volume, and soon you will see for yourself in English all the differences between the two major printed Greek New Testaments. I challenge anyone to read the whole thing and conclude with honesty that the differences are more substantial. They are not, they are not, they are not.
Hart on Bible translation
Hart is also skeptical of institutional authority and tradition because he thinks modern English—and other?—Bible translations bowdlerize the Bible. They weaken and soften and twist it to fit Western consumer sensibilities.
Hart told Wehner:
The greatest epiphany for me came when I was translating the New Testament. I’ve been reading Greek most of my life. I’d read the New Testament in Greek many times, but I was still hearing it through the doctrinal inheritance to some degree, even when I thought I wasn’t. But having to grapple with the text and realizing just how strange, just how uncannily different this is, not only from anything else going on in the Late Antique world, but from received institutional understandings of Christianity, or just our commonplace man-and-woman-in-the-pews understanding of Christianity, became much more intense for me.
This is dangerous stuff, it really is. It’s driving a wedge between people and their Bibles, and therefore between people and their God. Is the particular Protestant Reformation tradition in which I find myself truly “uncannily different” from what the Greek of the New Testament actually says? Of course Hart must give examples, or his words prove to be divisive rhetoric and nothing more. I’ve read the intro to and portions of his own New Testament translation, and I didn’t expect Hart to deliver on this promise; I didn’t expect him to give compelling examples.
He suggests he will. He says to Wehner regarding modern Bibles,
A whole set of things have been sanitized—first by doctrinal convention, but then by conventions of translation.
The Lord’s Prayer
His chosen examples come from the Lord’s Prayer. He gives two, and he explains only one. This is the real meat of my video.
Hart says,
We think that the Lord’s Prayer asks that God won’t lead us into temptation or will deliver us from evil or give us just our daily bread, whereas what the original Greek is saying is something much more radical. “Forgive us our trespasses” — there’s no word “trespasses” in the Greek. The word is opheilēmata and it literally means debts, and not moral debts. It’s during a debt crisis, and Jesus is saying pray to me that your debtors will relieve you so that you can’t be taken by the bailiff and put in prison because you’ve been dragged into a court, dragged into trial, not “led into temptation,” and reduced perhaps to slavery.
Hart spoke off the cuff, and I am not going to hold that against him. But I also can’t do anything with his complaint about or “give us our daily bread” unless he tells me what they allegedly really meant.
However: I have his translation of the New Testament. I read the preface carefully and marked it up. And I can go see what he does with the other phrases in the Lord’s Prayer.
The first three lines
This is how he renders the prayer:
Our Father, who are in the heavens, let your name be held holy; O let your Kingdom come; let your will come to pass, as in heaven so also upon earth; give to us today enough bread for the day ahead;
I don’t think “give to us today enough bread for the day ahead” is really all that different from “give us this day our daily bread.” That’s not a radical difference. He takes basically the same understanding of the difficult Greek word epiousios that the vast majority of translations take.
The next three lines
Admittedly, what he does with the three further lines is different from tradition—though I’m not sure it’s radically different. He translated these phrases this way:
and excuse us our debts, just as we have excused our debtors; and do not bring us to trial, but rescue us from the wicked man.
This is what Hart was talking about. But is this what Jesus was talking about?
Let’s check the translations. The vast majority of them stick with “debts” and “debtors.” So Hart is not radically different for using those words instead of the traditional Book of Common Prayer words, namely “trespasses” and “those who have trespassed against us.” Hart says that these are not moral debts. But why not? Paul uses the verb form of this root in his wonderful sentence, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another” (Rom 13:8). Maybe, maybe to use financial debt as a metaphor for moral debt was something strikingly new that Jesus did. My read of my lexicons suggests this is not the case, that money debt was a natural metaphor for moral debt far before Jesus—perhaps because the two have always been linked. What do we think of the moral character of people who incur debts they can’t pay, especially repeatedly? I’m not with Hart in denying that “debts” are moral debts in the Lord’s Prayer. I think he may be imposing his own tradition on this text, just as he claims I am doing.
I feel compelled to add that I don’t want to blast away at Hart, as if what he’s done here is horrible. I see translations like his as “concept cars,” trying out translation ideas that tradition may indeed have blinded us to. I’m prepared to read a journal article someday that persuades me that Hart’s translation of this passage is right, I really am. I just don’t think he is justified in saying that Christian tradition has gotten this precious phrase radically wrong and he got it radically right.
The next phrase in Hart’s translation, “do not bring us to trial,” could be read to mean just what “lead us not into temptation” means. But apparently Hart is saying he means courtroom trial, and here’s the thing: I’ve not been able to substantiate this meaning of the relevant Greek word. By a trick of English, “trial” can mean both “a person, thing, or situation that tests a person’s endurance or forbearance” (NOAD) or “a formal examination of evidence before a judge, and typically before a jury, in order to decide guilt in a case of criminal or civil proceedings.” But the Greek word had a different dual meaning, namely a test of endurance and a temptation to sin. I did not have a chance to do a deep dive in the commentary literature, but the Logos Study Assistant—the best new thing to happen to Logos since Raycast—suggests that Hart is in a small minority on this idea. Perhaps very small.
Let me repeat: I don’t mind Hart using his brilliance to put forward creative translation ideas. I like and value this. I do mind people saying, “My radically different translation of the New Testament is telling the truth about what the New Testament says, while most other major translations are too bound by tradition and therefore obscure the message.” That’s untrue on multiple levels, even though I think it is something that can happen in minor instances, and that we need people like Hart to spot this when it does. One reason it’s untrue, though, is that from what I’ve read of Hart’s translation (and I hope to read through the whole thing in the next year and do some videos on it), it’s not always radically different. For another, when I see him make specific proposals, I’m not always convinced, even if I find his ideas stimulating and interesting.
Hart says about the “debtor” lines in the Lord’s prayer,
We’ve turned all that into very anodyne and rather nebulous moral councils that a rich person can recite without feeling the irony. But that’s not what the Greek says. And having to translate that word-for-word-for-word made me aware with an acuteness that until then, I hadn’t felt just what was actually going on here.
I could be with him on that first line. Maybe Jesus had a dual meaning: maybe he did mean that we should forgive all financial debts as a matter of course every time we pray. This is plausibly consistent with some Old Testament commands and some New Testament ones. I know that I have at least once in my life permitted myself to be defrauded financially by a Christian brother. It’s still possible he’ll pay what he owes, and I’m not angry at him. He is forgiven, he truly is. Maybe Hart’s translation helps remind us of a double meaning Jesus intended: financial debts and moral debts should be forgiven. So say that, Hart. Don’t proclaim your translation to be the final word and others to be twisted and wrong.
And one final word on his rendering of the Lord’s prayer: “rescue us from the wicked man” seems to me to be a possible translation of the phrase. Jesus was definitely ambiguous there.
Conclusion
I do not disagree with everything Hart says in this interview in The New York Times. It is wearying to be a public figure; all the criticism is just tiresome. I can’t say I enjoyed being the critic of such a smart man. And I may truly have misunderstood him at some points.
I will also say: he made some bracing comments that I’ll have to consider. Like this one:
The institution of the church, to my mind, has been a 50-50 phenomenon, as evil as good, as Christian as non-Christian. In itself, it is not Christianity. In fact, what we call Christianity in itself is not Christianity. That’s just a blanket term we use for anyone who makes even an ostensible claim to loyalty to Christ.
Only God knows the numbers. May it’s 60-40—or 90-10. But Hart may be right. And I can see how this would lead him away from trust in the church as an institution.
Hart also makes this provocative argument:
The more you know about the history of doctrine and the more you understand how minimalist it actually is, when you look at the formulations of doctrine in Christian history, you realize the degree to which they’re trying to end the controversy by coming up with a bare grammar that can be agreed on, but whose contents are endlessly contestable.
I think I’ve seen that sort of thing up close, and I tend to defer to Hart’s knowledge of church history if he sees it in the past. That’s not to say that the resolutions to all theological disputes are fake, but he really could be on to something.
But I feel jealous to protect the faith of regular Christians in the basic integrity of their Bible translations. And I wish people as smart as Hart would not speak so unguardedly. I’m just a poor redheaded man trying to make it in this world; I can’t even spell MENSA. But what knowledge I have and what conscience I possess lead me away from Hart’s views on the matters I have brung up in this video.
Extras
Here—only for newsletter subscribers!—are a couple extra thoughts on D. B. Hart. I plan to do more on this topic, but here are some of my notes from the intro to his New Testament.
I sympathize with Hart’s desire here:
My thanks to my brother Addison for our conversations regarding various words in the original Greek, for encouraging me in my resolve to resist the easy path of adopting conventional solutions to difficult interpretive problems.
It is indeed possible to take refuge in conventional solutions—it’s very hard not to—and there is great value in not doing so. We always, always need to be refreshed by the pure stream of the Hebrew and Greek.
But if you think I was too hard on Hart in the piece above, does this not sound a bit arrogant?
I have come to believe that all the standard English translations render a great many of the concepts and presuppositions upon which the books of the New Testament are built largely impenetrable, and that most of them effectively hide (sometimes forcibly) things of absolutely vital significance for understanding how the texts’ authors thought.
It’s hard to give perfect grace to someone who makes charges like this:
In some extreme cases doctrinal or theological or moral ideologies drive translators to distort the text to a discreditable degree. Certain popular translations, like The New International Version and The English Standard Version, are notorious examples of this. These may represent the honest zeal of devout translators to communicate what they imagine to be the “correct” theology of scripture, but the preposterous liberties taken to accomplish this end often verge on a kind of pious fraudulence.
He has enough humility to admit his own biases …
This is not to say that I can pretend to be free of intellectual prejudices; I can only say that I have made every effort not to allow them to interpose themselves between me and the text, even when the result has at some level displeased me.
… but maybe he could do for six more fluid ounces of humility each day.
He could have done merely this and still done us a great service:
My principal aim is to help awaken readers to mysteries and uncertainties and surprises in the New Testament documents that often lie wholly hidden from view beneath layers of received hermeneutical and theological tradition. And I would hope my translation would succeed, in many places, in making the familiar strange, novel, and perhaps newly compelling.
I think he almost certainly has done this. In the places I’ve read, I liked the jolts I got from unfamiliar verbiage. I love and need these jolts. “Anointed” for “Messiah” is not bad. “A Holy Spirit” rather than “the Holy Spirit” at least got me thinking. “The Slanderer” instead of “Satan” makes some sense. And that’s just the first few pages.
I could just do without the P. T. Barnum claims of vast superiority over his competitors. Hang on for, Lord willing, more on Hart’s New Testament in the coming year or ten.
