There is pleasure in turning oneself over to David Bentley Hart: he is brilliant, polemical, vigorous; his prose is aptly described as virtuosic; his insights seem never to end. Even when he is being pedantic, he is interestingly pedantic, as in this footnote in Galatians: “Paul’s syntax here is even more vagrant than usual.” “Vagrant” is the surprisingly perfect word.

Hart succeeds in making the New Testament strange again.

His new translation of the New Testament aims to be, first of all, linguistically provocative. Jesus “Christ” makes no appearance here. Taking his place is a character called “the Anointed.” The Anointed has come not into the world but into the cosmos. There are no Jews here, and not only in the difficult passages of John’s gospel where “the Jews” in traditional translations are the enemies of Jesus (Hart concurs with current scholarship in lamenting that translation); Paul calls himself “a Judaean man . . . trained in the Law.” No one here is “uncircumcised”: men are either circumcised or with foreskins. It is not “the letter” that killeth; rather, “scripture slays but spirit makes alive.” With self-described mulish stubbornness, Hart pursues an English translation that is “pitilessly literal.” He succeeds in making the New Testament strange again.

We find a breathless quality that races across the authors of the various parts of the New Testament. The gospel writers give us a jumble of tenses present and past that most translators smooth over. (The jumble is