Читать книгу The Letter of James - Addison Hodges Hart - Страница 14

Throughout this book I will be using the recent English version of the New Testament that my brother, David Bentley Hart, translated for Yale University Press (2017). I haven’t chosen it out of a sense of familial loyalty, although that loyalty exists. My chief reason for choosing David’s version, admittedly a self-serving one, is its labor-saving benefit to me. It is as painstaking a literal rendering of the Greek original as one could hope to find. It has saved me the trouble of “re-rendering” verses here and there from a less literal translation such as, for instance, the Revised Standard Version (the version I have tended to use in previous books). All the odd phraseology of the original text is preserved, making it both a little strange to our ears, accustomed as they are to the cadences and customary choices of words that we find repeated in most other English versions. As a translation, it is fresh and new, and yet its close adherence to the original reminds us that the text of the New Testament is ancient and therefore removed from us in time and culture, and so, in some ways, it is not really as familiar to us as we are sometimes lulled into believing. It has been a real boon to make use of this work, and I want to thank David for it here.