What is Reddit's opinion of The New Testament: A Translation?

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I've begun wondering how the eternal conscious torment version of hell is consistent with:

> Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8)

> There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. (1 John 4:18)

If God is love, how can God motivate us via fear of hell? I can see him warning us of logical consequences to our actions—like warning ancient Israel that if it continued along its current path, it would get conquered by other nations. But God warning us that God will subject us to eternal conscious torment? I can't square that with the above 1 John passages. It also doesn't square with the fact that the threat of punishment failed in the OT. In fact:

> Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. (Hebrews 2:14–15)

Fear of death doesn't drive you to God, but to slavery. Depending on how you translate the following passage in Romans, there's alignment with the ineffectiveness of the threat of death:

> Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man, and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all sinned (Romans 5:12, David Bentley Hart)

> Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned (Romans 5:12, ESV)

Hart has a long note on this in his The New Testament: A Translation, and I think it makes sense to read Paul as being consistent with John and the author of Hebrews. Thoughts?

I heard the translator of this new translation of the New Testament interviewed on NPR last week.

I forget the precise word he used to describe America's overall version of Christianity but it was along the lines of 'twisted'.

Interview here - Was Jesus a Socialist?.

David Bentley Hart

I don't have a dog in this race but it was an interesting interview, what I heard of it.

I don't speak Greek [yet!], but I do know that translating can be tricky. Here's David Bentley Hart, who translated the entire NT, talking about Romans 5.12:

> A fairly easy verse to follow until one reaches the final four words, whose precise meaning is already obscure, and whose notoriously defective rendering in the Latin Vulgate (in quo omnes peccaverunt) constitutes one of the most consequential mistranslations in Christian history. The phrase ἐφ᾽ ᾧ (eph’ ʰōi) is not some kind of simple adverbial formula like the διὰ τοῦτο (dia touto) (“therefore”) with which the verse begins; literally, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ means “upon which,” “whereupon,” but how to understand this is a matter of some debate. Typically, as the pronoun ᾧ is dative masculine, it would be referred back to the most immediate prior masculine noun, which in this case is θάνατος (thanatos), “death,” and would be taken to mean (correctly, I believe) that the consequence of death spreading to all human beings is that all became sinners. The standard Latin version of the verse makes this reading impossible, for two reasons: first, it retains the masculine gender of the pronoun (quo) but renders θάνατος by the feminine noun mors, thus severing any connection that Paul might have intended between them; second, it uses the preposition in, which when paired with the ablative means “within.” Hence what became the standard reading of the verse in much of Western theology after the late third century: “in whom [i.e., Adam] all sinned.” This is the locus classicus of the Western Christian notion of original guilt—the idea that in some sense all human beings had sinned in Adam, and that therefore everyone is born already damnably guilty in the eyes of God—a logical and moral paradox that Eastern tradition was spared by its knowledge of Greek. Paul speaks of death and sin as a kind of contagion here, a disease with which all are born; and elsewhere he describes it as a condition like civil enslavement to an unjust master, from which we must be “redeemed” with a manumission fee; but never as an inherited condition of criminal culpability. It has become more or less standard to render ἐφ᾽ ᾧ as “inasmuch as” or “since,” thus suggesting that death spread to all because all sinned. But this reading seems to make little sense: not only does it evacuate the rest of the verse of its meaning, but it is contradicted just below by v. 14, where Paul makes it clear that the universal reign of death takes in both those who have sinned and those who have not. Other interpretations take the ἐφ᾽ ᾧ as referring back to Adam, not as in the Latin mistranslation but in the sense that all have sinned “because of” the first man; this, though, fails to honor the point Paul seems obviously to be making about the intimate connection between the disease of death and the contagion of sin (and vice versa). The most obvious and, I think, likely reading is that, in this verse, a parallelism (something for which Paul has such a marked predilection) is given in a chiastic form: just as sin entered into the cosmos and introduced death into all its members, so the contagion of death spread into the whole of humanity and introduced sin into all its members. This, as we see in Romans and elsewhere, is for Paul the very dynamism of death and sin that is reversed in Christ: by his triumphant righteousness he introduced eternal life into the cosmos, and so as that life spreads into the whole of humanity it makes all righteous (as in vv. 15–19 below, or as in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28). (The New Testament: A Translation)

For reference:

> Therefore, just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man, and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all sinned; (Romans 5:12 Hart)

> Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned— (Romans 5:12 ESV)

> Διὰ τοῦτο ὥσπερ διʼ ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου ἡ ἁμαρτία εἰς τὸν κόσμον εἰσῆλθεν καὶ διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ὁ θάνατος, καὶ οὕτως εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους ὁ θάνατος διῆλθεν ἐφʼ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον— (Romans 5:12)

> Propterea sicut per unum hominem peccatum in hunc mundum intravit, et per peccatum mors, et ita in omnes homines mors pertransiit, in quo omnes peccaverunt. (Romans 5:12)

> Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world and by sin death: and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned. (Romans 5:12 Douay-Rheims)

Now, there are opinions in opposition to Hart. However, other texts can be brought to bear. Here are two:

> Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. (Hebrews 2:14–15)

> The word of YHWH came to me: “What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’? As I live, declares the Lord YHWH, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul who sins shall die. (Ezekiel 18:1–4)

> “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I YHWH your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20:4–6)

Hart's reading aligns Romans 5:12 far better with Hebrews 2:15. It also keeps Paul from contradicting two key passages in the Tanakh.