David Bentley Hart, what do you think of the New Testament in terms of its quality as a work of literature? I think it's a mixed bag. Um, you know, I.
. . it has its singular moments of beauty or power, but it's not like the Hebrew Bible.
It's not a judiciously selected and redacted collection of centuries of literary inheritance. There's nothing, you know, like the Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes. The Gospels—each of the four canonical Gospels—has its merits and its flaws; the same is true of Acts, the narrative works.
Among the various Epistles, you know, again, some have their literary strengths and weaknesses. Then, of course, there's the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, which I think, at least in terms of the quality of its Greek, is extremely poor. As for what one makes of its imagery, that's a matter of taste.
But I think it's wrong to think of the New Testament as a literary production. There are moments, like Hebrews, which is written in a very high-flown and elegant style. Luke is a very urbane writer.
John's Gospel is written in an almost childish Greek—childlike, I should say, because it's not crude. But it's a very sophisticated and beautiful work in any number of other ways. Paul could scarcely compose a coherent sentence of Greek when he was dictating on the run.
Almost every translation has to supply more than he actually gives in the Greek, but there are moments of beauty and power that have to do with the intensity of his vision. So, um, but I think it's wrong to approach it as one might approach the narratives of the Kings of Israel. You know, it just doesn't stand comparison in those terms.
Yes, friends, it's really an honor to have David Bentley Hart, who will be known to many of our viewers. He is the author of many books. You may or may not know that, in addition to his New Testament translation, which we'll be speaking about in this brief episode, he's written quite recently, also with Yale University Press, a really influential book on universalism titled "That All Shall Be Saved.
" But he's written an immense amount of things, both fiction and non-fiction, not only on religion and theology but also on arts, politics, culture, and baseball. I'd really like to encourage all of our viewers exploring the Quran and the Bible to engage more deeply with his works in his Substack, which is entitled "Leaves in the Wind. " There’s going to be a link to that in the description below.
There will also be links to many of David's works in the description below. We're going to focus here on his New Testament translation, but also on, I think, the 2017 first edition. I think so, yeah, 2017.
I don't. . .
the second edition was 2022, was it? Maybe? I'm not sure.
Someone will note it in the comments. You know, it's been a subject of controversy, you know, rave reviews, and also the theological questions raised by certain passages have led to lots of back and forth. So we're going to speak about a couple of those elements.
I mean, that conversation has not gone away. In fact, with the book on universalism, in a way, people have turned back to David's New Testament translation. I just want to address one point that sort of came up in regard to the first question, which is the nature of the New Testament as a work of literature.
But just turning to translations: what do translators do with the mixed bag of New Testament Greek? I mean, probably I suspect you’re going to say both, but do they try to cover up the messiness and beautify it, or are they thinking about dogma? Do they want to get into their translation a certain theology that they prefer?
Well, I mean, as you said, both. I mean, it depends on what your aims are. As for the former issue of beautifying or at least trying to elucidate the Greek as you understand it, if your aim is simply to try to capture what you take to be the import of the text, that's a perfectly honorable way of proceeding—just render it all in more or less the same voice in an idiom that's reasonably contemporary and that you're fairly sure will be understandable to your readers.
In the second case, though, it’s both a conscious and an unconscious aim in one sense. I mean, remember, the very idea of translating the Bible into common speech. Of course, translation from Greek into Latin or Greek into Syric occurred in the ancient church, but the notion of translating it into the modern demotic begins in the Modern Age.
By that time, you have a millennium and a half of doctrinal, theological, and devotional development, so many of the doctrinal overlays that are clearly there say in the King James or the Douay-Rheims or everything after that aren’t so much intentional as instinctive. They’re not an attempt to force a reading on the text so much as they proceed from the assumption that this is what the text is already saying. And, of course, the history of doctrine and the history of scriptural reception is a late modern invention, taking shape in the early 18th century in Germany and elsewhere.
Then there are also, you know, after that, translations that are more tenuous in a somewhat more problematic way. I think my bete noire when I talk about this is the New International Version, in which, again and again, rather than a translation, what you have is a paraphrase. And then a paraphrase that promotes the theological preferences of a group—principally evangelicals—who produced it.
So if the text seems to suggest, say, that there’s such a thing as postmortem repentance or that Christ preached to the dead or something, and that doesn’t fit with evangelical theology, then the translators felt absolutely no compunction about deeply—and it would seem consciously—distorting what the Greek said. That’s considerably more discreditable than the earlier tendency, for instance, to see references to the Holy Spirit, whereas in the Greek, it’s often clear that that’s not what’s going on. There, a fully developed theology of the Holy Spirit is a couple of centuries off, you know, a few centuries off.
So I’d like to make just a brief observation on the point. I can’t resist noting, you know, the irony which you suggest in your observations about the NIV. Because, of course, an evangelical would think, you know, biblical authority above all things.
It seems to work sort of backwards. Well, there’s a problem. If you’ve already—you sort of invert the Protestant critique of papal infallibility, where they say, well, or conciliar infallibility: if you’ve decided it’s infallible, then you see what looks like a contradiction, and you have to go back and kind of nuance it so that it’s just a paradox.
But this is worse, because if you’ve decided that the literal acceptation of the text is the sole ground of your doctrine, right? But then you’re obliged to alter your rendering of the text to conform to the doctrinal expectations you bring to it, this should create a cognitive dissonance. Right?
But, you know, faith—it's a strange thing. I’d like to turn to universalism. I mean, it’s inevitable—you’re probably fed up with speaking about this.
I am, but I can take it from a different angle, which is introducing Islamic thought on hell. You know, in the Quran, the most common word for hell is just Arabic نار, meaning fire, but there are many other words, including جحيم, which is coming ultimately from the Hebrew through the Greek, which sometimes just kept basically as Greek in New Testament translations as GΝΑ. In Islamic thought, you know, there are lots of debates.
Actually, the question of the duration of the individual in hell—whether that is an eternal duration or not—becomes actually an object of serious theological dispute. And, you know, the standard Sunni position, which I think many non-Muslims aren’t aware of, is that faithful Muslims who bring to the day of resurrection unrepented grave sins will go to hell, to the fire, but they will not be there permanently—either through the prophet's intercession or simply when the therapeutic effect of hell sort of runs its course or has done its job, whenever that happens, one or the other. Then they will be taken out and, you know, welcomed into the garden of Paradise.
The point of hell as therapy, though, does come up and is interesting in Islamic debate about this because it redounds to the merciful nature of God. Everything must have a purpose; hell must have a purpose; consequently, it must be therapeutic. You know, not all Muslims kind of follow the logic to the end, but even conservative Muslim thinkers hold this sort of view.
The problem for non-Muslims is another one: usually they don’t get out of hell, but the gravely sinful Muslims do. Anyway, so I don’t know if you have a reflection on that. But also, if you could introduce viewers to the history of Christian universalism, its patristic roots or biblical roots, and clarify then—well, as for its biblical roots, I mean, I don’t think there’s a clear picture that emerges from the New Testament, but I’m sure of one thing: the notion that the New Testament has a picture of hell of eternal torment somewhere in there is sheer fantasy.
I mean, it just doesn’t show up. There’s one verse in Matthew about entering either into eternal life or to eternal penalty. But the kolasis in Matthew 25— is that it?
Yeah, and, you know, two problems with that. Well, it could sometimes just mean—the proper original meaning of it was a corrective chastisement. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what it means in Matthew, because by late antiquity, it could just be a forensic term for the penalty in a court.
But usually, aus in that sense, if you talk about aus kolasis, means destruction or execution in a court. Many of the things that are treated as references to hell in the teaching of Christ are just images of destruction, and then there are images of being excluded from a party. It sounds very grave in English—outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth—but it’s really about not being at a wedding feast and you’re outside in the dark, and you’re crying because you got left out.
Then there are things about going to prison or being chastised. But those you know come with a term; you know it's like until the last farthing is paid. But there's no, you know.
. . And then also, even in that Matthew passage, the word "aionios," which has been misrepresented.
Just to clarify—sorry, David, to jump in—just to clarify, the Greek here, uh, in the, I guess, accusative, uh "a," is usually translated something like "the eternal punishment" or something. But that's what's at stake here, right? What do those words in their historical and social context actually mean?
And people are under the impression I've said that "aionia" only means "for a long period," or "aion" means, uh, "in the age to come. " You know, actually, the word "eon" itself, uh, is incredibly vague. I mean, you find it used by authors of the time to mean, yeah, for a long time.
It can be eternal; it can be, uh, in the age to come. If you follow, uh, especially Second Temple readings of the New Testament, it can mean as much as a year; it can mean for life; it can mean something heavenly, like "aionian fire. " You know, at one point, it means the fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah—means, you know, the fire from heaven and things like that.
And, uh, but other than that, you're kind of left very much at sea because the pericopes you can take from the New Testament that seem clearly universalist, I mean, are far more numerous and seem far more unequivocal. That God wills, not just wishes, but wills, as even the King James translation puts it, the salvation of all, or the atonement for Christ is not just for us—that is, in this community—but for the whole cosmos. Or that, you know, if you had only the pastoral epistles, for instance, if you were just to get rid of the rest of the New Testament, all you knew about the early Christians was the pastoral epistles, you would just say this is a universalist creed.
So the truth is, the texts—people who think it has some unequivocal teaching about, uh, Heaven and Hell—it doesn't. It has teaching about the age to come, and the question is, you know, when all things will be renewed—not a heaven beyond this world, but a reborn creation. The fate of those who are not among the, uh, you know, the body or the, say, whatever.
. . Well, you go to the earliest documents, the letters of Paul, you get both impressions at times that in the world to come, those who—because for him, resurrection is salvation.
There's not a resurrection to a general judgment, and some go to hell and some go to heaven. For him, the raised are for the saved. Now, among the raised, there are those whose good works, as in 1 Corinthians chapter 3, good works will merit a reward, and those whose works will have to be destroyed—have to be consumed by fire—but they will be saved through that fire.
You know, so, um, but he had no category of hell. For him, Christ overcame death, but not, you know, the very notion of an eternal torment to which people were to be condemned is simply not part of Paul's thought. And if it were, you'd think he'd mention it; I mean, you know, somewhere that this is part of the stakes.
But that's not what he's talking about. It's always about overthrowing death and being raised into the age to come in a spiritual body. Um, so in the early church, yeah, I mean, universalists about—I mean, I think how what their numbers were is hard to say.
Um, we get some reports that they're in the majority in some places, but, you know, is that exaggeration or not? I mean, both Basil and Augustine suggest some things like that at times, and we know who the clear universalists are, like Origen or Gregory of Nyssa. You get people who do the same argot, "Oh no, he wasn't really a universalist," and you have to, first of all, misread a great deal of his pronouncements to think that they can be read in any other way.
But then you willfully have to ignore this entire system as universal. This is the one—or figures like Isaac of Nineveh in the Syria, so. .
. And so they are there. Uh, but you know, many things that were more robustly present in the early centuries fade away over time as the institutional definitions fall into place.
They never entirely died out; they had a great revival in the 19th century and continue. Um, but I mean, my book on universalism has a chapter on scripture, but it's—the argument is admittedly not about what scripture says; it is a meditation on what the logic of the doctrine would be. So, before we speak about at least one other passage where your translation differs from many English translations, I wanted to circle back to something you mentioned earlier, which is postmortem repentance.
So this is something that many Christian thinkers disagree with, and Islam generally also disagrees with. So you know, if you ask. .
. Bar—I’m sorry, there’s Barach, there’s Barak, yes—so Barak exactly is this waiting period. But I mean, according to the standard articulation of, you know, the way things go for humans, it’s not a time for repentance; you just have to wait for your body so that you can be, you know, actually experience punishment or reward in, uh, hell or Paradise.
But, I mean, the idea is, you know, you have a chance in this life to choose. Rightly, even you know many Muslims in the Quran may suggest this at the moment of your death. So, there's an Arabic expression for this; I guess in English we call it the "death throes.
" That’s already too late. You know, when you know that death is imminent, that's already too late. Repentance at that moment will not be accepted.
So, could you speak about this, whether in the Christian context or just, maybe more broadly, the question of postmortem repentance? Well, I mean, you know, in the case I was talking about before, it was about Christ and what it literally says in the Greek—evangelizing those who had died. The New International Version introduces instead the notion of evangelizing persons who, since that time, have died, which is not what the Greek says; it speaks about evangelizing the dead.
You know, so literally preaching the Gospel to them, not just telling them something; you know, announcing the good news. At least as far as those who had perished, even in sin, the early Christians tended to have some idea—many of them did, at least—of repentance. In modern times, I mean, again, over time that got nuanced away in just about every tradition.
I mean, Roman Catholicism has the notion of immediate judgment at the point of death; your eternal destiny is now. Purgatory is a place of repentance and purification, but it's not a place where there's any chance of backsliding. I mean, you're on your way.
The Orthodox don't have the same panoply of doctrine, but the general tendency is to think that death is a barrier—in the sense of the barrier you've crossed. So, whatever the case, and then, of course, there are later systems such as Thomism that come up with a metaphysics of this. Once without a body, yes, intentions—we become like angels, where you can no longer make decisions.
“Voice has disappeared on me. ” Oh, can you hear me? I've lost you.
Oh gosh, okay, sorry. No, can you hear me now? Yeah, I can hear you now.
Okay, there's no problem. We can just take like a three-second pause, and then, if it's okay, I'll start with a follow-up question about theism, and then we'll continue from there. Is that okay?
Okay, right. Isn't the idea with Thomas that without a body we basically become like angels, where our will, since it's the body that's subject somehow to time and space, our will is no longer changeable? Which is something of a problem, for two reasons I would think are obvious.
One is that the theists believe in the fall of the angels, and make of that what you will. But, you know, Christianity is a creed about resurrection. So, I mean, the notion that… but anyway, I mean, the whole thing, to my mind, is silly.
Anyway, I mean, it's an incredibly impoverished and silly notion of intellectual desire. It is based on a desire to—or a wish to—give a rationale for something that’s not particularly convincing. So, I don't worry about that, and I'm not Catholic or Thomas, so it doesn’t affect me one way or the other.
But yeah, that's the idea that without corporeality, the will is fixed in a state. My arguments regarding this, again, in the book, though, have to do with the things we're saying about God in all these claims. And, I am not going to reiterate any of the arguments here.
Most of the people who criticized the book didn’t seem to follow the arguments anyway. They, you know, I thought they were exceedingly clear, but it seemed to be the rule that the people who hated the book were reacting to arguments they thought they’d already heard before. So, I've never had an interesting debate on the topic.
I've had people who agreed with me and so understood me, but that doesn't do much for people who disagreed with me but who weren't disagreeing with me, but with something else. So, I've given up talking about that book for the most part. But I mean, I do believe that this is an unconscionably incoherent belief and it requires us to say things about God that can't be true in any possible world.
You know, just if they're true, then nothing else is true. I want to ask about another topic, although possibly related. In your translation, there’s something wrong with the equipment here.
Let me switch over to a different problem. We only have basically two more questions, so it’s okay. Can you hear me again?
Oh gosh, I don’t know why it’s doing this, but for some reason the sound keeps… Okay, it’s on again. Okay, you can hear me? Yeah, great.
Okay, no problem; we’ll just take a pause, and then I’m going to shift to another topic—the about John 3:16. So, shifting to another element of your translation, perhaps the most famous New Testament verse among American Christians is, football games exactly, is John 3:16. So, people—I don’t know if they memorize it according to King James or the NIV or what—but something like people are used to hearing, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.
” You keep… The Greek word "kosmos," or accusative "cosmon" in English, is kept as "kosmos" instead of translating it as "world. " Why is that? Throughout the translation, I have some people who dislike that, but the thing is, there are different words that I like to keep.
For instance, "stin akron," the inhabited world, is one thing; you even have the word for house in it. It speaks of the human world. Often, when we speak of loving the world, we use the word to mean only the human world.
But again and again in the New Testament, when the word "kosmos" is used, it seems to have a wider, far wider connotation. It is, as I said, a theology throughout the New Testament. The theology is the theology of two ages, whether that's understood in terms of "present" and "future" or "here below" and "there above.
" Nonetheless, there's a notion that in the age to come, you know, in the Hebrew context, there will be a renewal of all things—Heaven and Earth, the new sky and a new Earth, and all of the creatures of Heaven and Earth praising God and all that. Therefore, I chose that wherever that word appears in the Greek, without making ad hoc decisions from verse to verse, I was just going to make it "kosmos. " I explain why in the notes.
In John, it's especially important because there really is the imagery of ascent and descent. The idea of descending into the kosmos and then ascending out of it again is very important. The one who is from above and the one who is from below, "I am from above; you are from below.
" We, of course, tend to make that more symbolic in our thinking, but in the first century, the distinction between the spiritual and the physical constitution of the kosmos would not have been made as we do now. Could you add a word about popular discourse around science, particularly cosmology? One of the Spider-Man movies was called "The Spider-Verse," so it’s in sort of the popular chat these days.
Critical notes involve thinking about the multiverse and these sorts of things. As you know, some work on physics, time, and space is becoming more prevalent in the public forum. Are things becoming more intelligent regarding the understanding of the kosmos, or are people falling for, I don’t know, simplistic ways of thinking about the existence of the kosmos?
What would you say? Well, I mean, there's nothing in the advance of the sciences that obliges us to be materialists. It would be odd if we continued to cling to a Stoic cosmology.
However, in another sense, how can I put it? The picture of reality presumed in John can be metaphysically and spiritually true without being a map or cartography of the heavens. I don’t think we have to acknowledge the degree to which the writers of the New Testament, for the most part, including Paul, do envisage a world that is cut off from God's empyrean by a number of heavens, which are presided over by archons.
So we are cut off from God spiritually but, in a sense, spatially too. There’s a lot of this in the Quran as well. Even the stars are seen as, what’s the term…I’m forgetting now, but basically guardians of the celestial realm.
If we are unwilling to acknowledge that, then we find ourselves in the bind of the true fundamentalist, which is someone who has to take a literal approach to scripture. And "literal" in the modern sense means viewing this as a documentary account of the factual structure of reality and history, while knowing that it’s not true at that level. However, you can make the opposite mistake of thinking that the truth value of these claims has to do with how they were imagined in terms of the time.
When Paul believes that Christ joins us to the Father, the spatial elements as he imagines them are more concrete than they would be for us. But the spiritual element remains the same; Christ is really God in our midst, and dwelling in Him is to dwell in God. So, as a final question, circling back to the New Testament, what is your assessment of the King James TR translation of the Bible?
It's, you know, one of the touchstones of English prose. It's incomparably beautiful, especially in Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs; those two, especially. In some ways, it's more accurate than some more recent translations like the NIV.
The King James uses the majority text, while the NIV uses the Nestle-Aland critical edition, so there are differences there. Anyway, most modern translations use the critical edition. In the second edition of my translation, I put the majority text in brackets in the text, so you have both there, whether I should have or not is a different matter.
But the King James, as I said, is written at a time when a millennium and a half of doctrinal and theological development has gone by, so that if you read the King James, you are going to see things. . .
There are terms that are not explicitly there, or even really there, in the Greek. For example, you'll see references to the Holy Spirit, which are not references to the Holy Spirit, you know? So, you just, um, you know, you should always read the King James, but, uh, um, understand that the texture of reading is not, uh, a direct transposition of the content of the Greek into English in every instance.
David, thank you very much. Friends, please, uh, take a moment to look at the links in the description, uh, to David Bentley Hart's works. In a special way, you'll see, um, the, uh, link to the Substack; I mean, uh, it's "Leaves in the Wind," but you'll see the link below, so click on that and subscribe.
You know, I don't want to throw shade on, uh, all the stuff that's published, but especially in the online world, uh, you know, it's easy to spend time watching short-form videos and things that, you know, don't elevate your mind or your soul. Uh, and so, uh, if you're interested in the elevation of the mind and the soul, subscribe to the Substack "Leaves in the Wind. " Um, you will gain immense value from it.
David, thank you very much for being with me. Thank you for having me.
