For many years, the late Coy Roper taught Critical Introduction to the New Testament for Heritage Christian University. The New Testament: A Study Guide is a collection of the notes he used to teach that popular and challenging course. In addition to chapters on the content, value, and authenticity of each New Testament book, Dr. Roper includes chapters on \
From one of our most celebrated writers on religion comes this fresh, bold, and unsettling new translation of the New Testament
David Bentley Hart undertook this new translation of the New Testament in the spirit of “etsi doctrina non daretur,” “as if doctrine is not given.” Reproducing the texts’ often fragmentary formulations without augmentation or correction, he has produced a pitilessly literal translation, one that captures the texts’ impenetrability and unfinished quality while awakening readers to an uncanniness that often lies hidden beneath doctrinal layers.
The early Christians’ sometimes raw, astonished, and halting prose challenges the idea that the New Testament affirms the kind of people we are. Hart reminds us that they were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. “To live as the New Testament language requires,” he writes, “Christians would have to become strangers and sojourners on the earth, to have here no enduring city, to belong to a Kingdom truly not of this world. And we surely cannot do that, can we?”