From The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament
Volume 1, The Four Gospels and Apocalypse
translated by Willis Barnstone
Published in 2002 by Riverhead Books.
Available from your local bookstore or online from Amazon.com or bn.com 

From the Preface and Introduction

        b y   W i l l i s   B a r n s t o n e

View the table of contents
of the entire New Covenant book

Yeshua and the Poor

In those days again there was a great crowd who had nothing to eat, and calling his students together he said to them,
I have pity for the crowd
and they have already been with me three days
and have nothing to eat.
If I send them hungry to their homes,
they will collapse on the road
and some have come from far away.1
           —Mark 8:1-3

The book of the canonical gospels, which treats the life and death of a rabbi named Yeshua,2 speaks many notes. It sounds danger, hope, amazement, suffering, a bit of joy, all elaborated with occasional irony and no trace of humor. It is at once riveting and repetitious, since it retells four versions of the same events. It is grave and tragic, since it ends in the terrible torture-death of the crucifixion, which the Romans devised for seditionists and criminals. In the crucifixion, the human body is spiked through and left hanging in torment until death gives it over to the vultures and dogs. There is an epilogue with a glad resurrection that provides public hope to the rich in faith. But persisting is the personal human agony of a few days earlier when a rabbi nailed to a T-cross calls out in forsaken despair as he gives up the ghost on a Friday afternoon. In response, the earth quakes and the sky blackens and cracks.

Beyond the public event of the crucifixion, the doctrine and the metaphysic, beyond the gathering of followers who will become legion and inform the world-dominating religious movement of Christianity,3 the gospels speak to the human condition of peasants in an occupied country in times of mean opportunity.

At the heart of the gospels is the wandering and compassionate rabbi Yeshua. He teaches and feeds the poor. He cures the leper and demoniac, the bleeding woman and a paralyzed on the floor. He restores life to a dead boy and a dead man. He is with Jew and foreigner, children of the carpenter and rich man, official or soldier-all who come to him for medical miracles and spiritual food. There are terrified students,4 who fear for their lives on a boat in a windstorm on the Sea of Galilee5 until Yeshua tells the winds to fall; and there are the masses whom Yeshua feeds with a few loaves and fishes to satisfy them. The primal physical needs of people living close to the edge of life and death show on virtually every page. The book of the gospels is a brief epic of hunger and humility and sicknesses. As such it stands in black-and-white contrast to Homer's prosperous gods and soldiers and islanders, whose sensuality and adventure, rather than an impoverished human condition, excite us. The gospel figures, described in rudimentary Near Eastern Greek,6 incite the reader's deep compassion.

That Yeshua comes as an earthly savior to the poor is poignant for us to observe. A woman falls to her knees begging the savior to touch her or her child and enact a cure; the man living in the tombs, possessed by demons, asks Yeshua whether he, too, has come to torment him, and then, cured by Yeshua, begs, unsuccessfully, to accompany him on his wanderings. The unclean are cleansed, the leper is washed, the hungry receive bread, the prostitute is not scorned, the woman (one of the Miryams,7 wandering in the garden) discovers a resurrected crucified who touches her with hope-all these are the figures of the human landscape which the New Covenant8 delivers without makeup or guise.

No authority other than Yeshua appeals to us in these pages. But there is a price which the poor must pay for Yeshua's powers, which is a heart-rending fear and degradation. Some call it humility and modesty. There is the shepherd and the sheep, and the sheep, apart from allegory, are beasts of the field who bend their heads to graze. In that surrender and humiliation is the pathos, which makes this picaresque, episodic book perhaps the most evenly powerful work about the poor in body, soul, and hope. All politic, doctrine, even the beautiful poetry, parables, aphorisms, and ultimate drama of the agony of crucifixion pale before the constancy of the common person, who is the human everywhere and in all time. Therein lies the ordinary art and the plain great passion of the people in the gospels. The picture of primal nakedness covered by a colorless mean cloth, of hurting bodies that speak with need from a primal poverty, insures that the gospels, independent of faith, doctrine, commandment, fearful warnings, and metaphysic, will always reach those with eyes to hear and feel the human condition of the spirited body waiting on the earth.

1Citations are from this new translation unless otherwise noted.

2The name Jesus comes from Greek jIhsou`" (Iesous), from Aramaic and Hebrew (yeshua), which was probably Jesus's name in his lifetime. See pages 459-464 for the journey of Jesus through Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin into English.

3Christianity or Messianism means those who follow the Christ or the anointed. "Christ" is a translation of the Hebrew word messiah that also means the anointed. Christ comes from Greek (Hristos), from Hebrew (mashiah).

4Disciple from Greek maqhthv" (mathetes). The plain meaning of Greek mathetes is pupil or student, which is lost in the ecclesiastical inflation to disciple.

5Lake of the Galil. Also Lake Tiberius (after the Roman emperor). In modern Hebrew it is Lake Kinnerert, Lake Chinnereth (Num. 34.11, Matt. 4.18). The land around the lake is called Gennesaret (Matt 14.34.)

6We lack the original Aramaic or late Hebrew source text or Aramaic oral witness accounts from which derive the existing texts in Greek. Aramaic, not Greek, was the spoken language of the Galilean Yeshua of Nazareth and his followers in Israel.

7Marys. Mary is from Greek Mariva (Maria), from Hebrew (miryam), often Anglicized in English as Miriam.

8New Testament is a mistranslation from Greek (diatheke). In Jerome's Vulgata version of the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew (berit or brit), meaning "new covenant," is translated as novum testamentum, meaning "new testament."

Introduction

A Reformation of Openness

Reformations bring change, and historically have informed and have been resisted with a sword. But to break the tradition of change that dresses in compulsion and death, a reformation of openness means only openness. No sword, no sin, no guilt, no infidel, no punishment. Truth has a small t, and heart a big H, and so one truth does not impose. A reformation of openness has silence mediate controversy, understanding mediate sectarian wrath, and peace mediate the stranger. The heart of openness is love (another sweet tautology), which is a better key to the world than bitter closure. There is no end to openness. Imperfection in this temporary life is a good to be open to, so that the incorruptible Maximilien Robespierre does not arrest and execute the suspected traitor who has strayed from truth. Better is an itinerant who is open to the poor. A book need not end, nor a heart, nor a spirit roaming in the blur inside. The day and night of life need not end but stay open to vision, maybe the vision of the blind and crippled. So reformation is openness, and carries in its intellectual passion a small r.
In this introduction, we may first look at the efforts, seldom loved, often greeted not with openness but fire, of the translator's way.

A New Translation

Why a new translation of a biblical text? Why the King James Version in 1611, only eighty some years after the masterful Tyndale translation, which is as austerely plain and beautiful as a field of wheat? The most obvious answer is that language changes and so, too, do literary conventions for making speech contemporary and natural. There may also be the call for a new approach, since translation is not only style and period but approach and purpose. The earliest versions in English by John Wyclif in 1380 and William Tyndale in 1525 were created to bring Latin scripture into the English vernacular. Wyclif translated from Jerome's Vulgata, Tyndale worked directly from the Greek. For their daring acts of replacing the Jerome's fourth-century Latin (the authorized Christian Bible in the West) with their English vulgate, Wyclif's bones were dug up and burned and Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake. Wyclif's and Tyndale's purpose had been to bring scriptures to the people. Tyndale, citing the aims of his model the Dutch humanist Erasmus, wrote that the word of the gospels should reach the eyes of all women, Scots and Irishmen, even Turks and Saracens, and especially the farm worker at the plow and the weaver at the loom. Then in the early seventeenth century, the Tyndale and later versions were revised into the monumental King James Version, whose stated purpose by King James I's forty and seven translator scholars was to bring forth an authorized version for the Protestant peoples of the Church of England. The King James also had a literary and didactic aim, which appears in the first line of the prefatory "Translators to the Reader": "Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light."

I undertook a new translation of the New Covenant, commonly called the New Testament,9 to give a chastely modern, literary version of a major world text. In the introduction, annotation, and text itself, I have followed some specific aims. First, I wish to restore the probable Hebrew and Aramaic names and so frame the Jewish identity of the main figures of the covenant, including that of Yeshua (Jesus), his family, and followers. Second, I would like to clarify the origin of Christianity as one of the Jewish messianic sects of the day vying for dominion. And third, I wish to translate as verse what is verse in the New Covenant as in Yeshua's speech and the epic poem of Apocalypse, following a practice which, since the nineteenth-century Revised, has prevailed in rendering Hebrew verse as in the Song of Songs, the Psalms, and Job.

On all questions of faith versus history, I take a neutral stance and minimally address them. As far as possible, I limit these matters to indicating a historical context of biblical happenings, always with the awareness that more is unknown than known.10 In her brilliant Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. New York: Knopf, 1999, 8, Paula Fredriksen presents the first fact, from which all historical speculation must radiate: "The single most solid fact about Jesus' life is his death: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion. Constructions of Jesus primarily as a Jewish religious figure, one who challenged the authority of Jerusalem's priests, thus sit uncomfortably on his very political, Imperial death: Pilate would have known little and cared less about Jewish religious beliefs and intra-Jewish religious controversy."

With regard to ascertainable fact and religious belief, while respecting all views, I have no pitch for any side. There is no more polemic or proselytizing here than were this book a new version of the Odyssey or of Sappho's fragments, yet I hope that my love for these extraordinary world scriptures will show through. My wish is also that the covenant will be read by all, and that the text and annotation will be a source of pleasure and information, while giving some awareness of the background from which Yeshua ben Yosef, Jesus son of Joseph, came.

A number of new translations have changed the word "Jew" in their versions in order to diminish the accusations of villainy and guilt against Yeshua's coreligionists for their *alleged* supposed judgment concerning the charismatic rabbi as the foretold messiah of Isaiah. So Jew is written as "opponent" or "Judean" or some other euphemism to spare the Jew abuse and to change the fact that the foundation of anti-Judaism11 was and remains the New Covenant. Such changes are inaccurate to the texts as we have them, and actually reinforce a much more significant misconception, which is that Yeshua and family and followers were somehow not Jews, that Yeshua was not a rabbi (though in the Greek gospels12 he is addressed as rabbi frequently). By a tradition of using largely Greek names for the Hebrew and Aramaic names of covenant figures, those who represent what is sometimes called "primitive Christianity" lose their Jewish identity, thereby making it possible for Christians to hate Jews, yet not hate Yeshua as a Jew, nor his mother Miryam and father Yosef, nor all his followers. The hatred of Jews is selective and occurs without awareness of the anomaly of loving Yeshua and hating his people and the religion he practiced. The disappearance of Yeshua's Jewish identity dumbfounds common sense and history, but, alas, this illusion has remained dominantly at the center of Christian reception of the New Covenant. Contemporary scholars and some readers know better, but the anachronistic portrayal of Yeshua and his circle as later Christians among enemy Jews permits an unquestioned hatred of the Jew, and is a logical, understandable, and inevitable reading of the New Covenant as we have it. Yet the reader need not be a biblical scholar to notice something awry when Yeshua, a Jew, speaks in the voice of a later gentile admonishing Jews of terrible punishment when Rome will destroy Jerusalem. Such anomalies lead contemporary theologians to make corrective comments. The Christian theologian Marcus J. Borg, corrects at all levels,

Jesus was deeply Jewish. It is important to emphasize this obvious fact. Not only was he Jewish by birth and socialization, but he remained a Jew all of his life. His Scripture was the Jewish Bible. He did not intend to establish a new religion, but saw himself as having a mission within Judaism. He spoke as Jew to other Jews. His early followers were Jewish. All of the authors of the New Testament (with the possible exception of the author of Luke-Acts) were Jewish.
Though I find it hard to believe, some Christians are apparently unaware of the Jewishness of Jesus, or, if they are aware, do not give it much weight. Moreover, Christians have frequently been guilty of conscious or unconscious anti-Semitism, identifying Jesus with Christianity and his opponents with Judaism, and thereby seeing Jesus and the early Christian movement as anti-Jewish. Parts of the New Testament as well as the popular image of Jesus. . . . The separation of Jesus from Judaism has had tragic consequences for Jews throughout the centuries. The separation is also historically incorrect, and any faithful image of Jesus must take with utmost seriousness his rootedness in Judaism.13

I address this dire and central question of disenfranchising Yeshua of his religious identity in two ways: by restoring the probable Hebrew or Aramaic names to biblical figures and framing some fiercely anti-Semitic passages in a historic context in the introduction and the textual annotation. It should first be understood that although the extant gospels are only in Greek, and Yeshua speaks Greek in the gospels, Yeshua did not use Greek, if indeed he had any knowledge of it, as his everyday language; and on the cross when he cried in agony to God, Yeshua spoke in Aramaic, which had by and large become the spoken language of the Jews after their return to Israel from the Babylonian defeat (586 B.C.E.),14 Hebrew remained the language of the temple and religion. Yet we have Greek names for Yohanan (John-although the Germans retain the Hebrew in Yohan, as in Johann Sebastian Bach), and somehow Yaakov or Jacob in the Hebrew Bible becomes James in English, and Miryam becomes the Greek Maria. By recovering what are the Hebrew and Aramaic names of Covenant personages, I believe that the Semitic origin and climate at last persuades in the gospels. In the same way that the Homeric names Zeus, Athena, and Artemis are finally heard in twentieth-century translations and no longer romanized as Jupiter, Minerva, and Diana, so, too, the Jewish names of Yaakov, Yeshua, Yosef, and Yohanan are used here rather than their irrelevant and misleading Greek or Anglicized forms.

In introducing or restoring names, I balance the urgency of restoration with familiarizing the reader with new referents. Hence in the introduction and annotation, the evangelists are still called Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John for easy reference, while in the texts biblical restorations rather than standard Hellenizations are used for many names and places. In the annotation, where other texts are cited, conventional spelling is followed. Any change in standard orthography takes a while, but, like becoming used to new jargon or currency, it is often quickly absorbed and accepted.

"Jesus Christ" is a Greek formulation and not recognizably a biblical Semitic name. If the name in English were chosen in keeping with other traditional English versions of biblical Hebrew names, he could also be "Joshua the Messiah," "Joshua the Anointed," "Yeshua ben Yosef," "Yesua bar Yosef,"15 or "Yeshua of Nazareth," and all these names have been given him by diverse commentators and scholars.

This restoration does wonders to afford a truthful perception of the identity of New Covenant peoples. It will help us recall, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, among others, has observed, that the New Covenant was written by Jews about Jews for Jews. The New Covenant-though largely unread by Jews and when known may be perceived with deep fear-is the last major Jewish text of biblical Judaism, the parent religion of Christianity and Islam.

The second way of handling traditional anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism is through the introduction and annotations in the texts where I attempt to place these remarks in a historical perspective. There was, of course, the inevitable inflated rhetoric of interfamily rival sects within Judaism, each seeking dominion during Yeshua's life. However, the texts were not fashioned in Greek until late in the first and early in the second centuries, with many unknown hands copying, redacting, and emending the stories and recreating conversations, even of secret deliberations that *allegedly* took place behind the walls of the Sanhedrin.16 By the time these texts were finally accepted by religious councils in the fourth century, what had been a first-century controversy between Jewish groups, allegedly between Pharisees and messianics, was now seen ahistorically as a conflict between Jews and later Christians, "Christian" being the word "messianic" or "messianist" in Greek translation. By then, in name and thought, Christianity was politically separated from Judaism, though it retained the Jewish Bible (Old Testament) as its own Bible, to which it added the Jewish scripture of the New Covenant.
*There is enormous, sad irony in these separations and conflicts, based on misunderstandings and contentions of power. Jews and Christians share one Hebrew Bible, and Christians read the last great biblical document of the Jews, the New Covenant, composed by Jews about and for the emerging sect of messianic (Christian) Jews. With so much vitally in common and believers sharing the same invisible God, why such division and history of hostility? Yet this initial rivalry between Jew and Christian Jew, and in the next century between Jew and Christian, was to be repeated again and again in the schisms now within Christianity. Rome broke away from Constantinople, with equal consequences of fury and death, and there began nearly two millennia of contending Orthodox and Roman Catholics. After the Western crusades against Cantharist France, Byzantium, and Islam. These blood schisms do not end. Each year, under changing names and banners, they stain parts of the globe. *
In the end, all people are people, and no people should ever be classified for whatever reason as less than another. Any marker of sect and theology that distinguishes any people adversely is human error. So the gospels and Apocalypse should not be seen for the momentary and external conflicts they may contain but for their greater universality of spirit in a world desperately poor in coming to terms with human consciousness within the perishable body. Happily, the call to spirit is deep and needs no name, and no divisive emblem. The covenant is a book of the mind; it is infused with compassion and courage and the great questions of being, death, time and eternity. For the perceptive reader, spirit eludes name, dogma and even word to reside in the silence of transcendence.

9New Covenant is an exact translation of the Greek kaine diatheke (kainhv diaqh`kh) found in the Septuagint and in Paul's Corinthians 11.25 and Hebrews 8.8-13, meaning "new covenant." The title New Testament derives from Novum Testamentum, a mistranslation, appearing in the Vulgata (the Vulgate), the fourth-century Latin translation attributed to Jerome. In English and most languages of Western Europe, the term Novum Testamentum has been rendered "New Testament." In recent translations and also in the new editions of the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) and other standard modern versions, New Covenant is the preferred title and presented (as here on the title page), "The New Covenant, commonly called The New Testament." Please see p. 00 for further discussion. If one wished to preserve the fact that the New Covenant is a post-Torah scripture composed by, addressed to, and about, Jews of Yeshua's day (including Peter (Kefa), James (Yaakov) and Paul (Shaul)), one might speak of the New Torah or New Tanakh. Since both early Christian Jews and later Christians look to the Hebrew Bible (Torah) as their bible, it would seem logical to give the New Covenant a Hebrew name.

10Events recounted in the gospels are essentially theologically framed accounts confined to the gospels themselves. External references to Yeshua tell us little. Sutorius (Nero 16.2) mentions the existence of Christiani and of Jesus; Tacitus (Annales 15.44) mentions Christians and Jesus who was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate; Pliny the Younger has a brief reference to Jesus. The main external source is the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote in Greek and lived later in Rome, and there are problems with what is authentic and what may be a later emendation.

11Anti-Judaism is a religious term based on a theological contempt for Judaism and by extension for Jews. The actual term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate anti-Jewish campaigns then underway in central Europe. Anti-Semitism had its beginnings during the first-century Roman Empire when Jews were often segregated for their refusal to participate in emperor worship and, by emerging Christians, for the Jews' failure to accept Jesus as their messiah. Many scholars argue that Anti-Judaism is a more accurate term, since Jews are only one among Semitic peoples, and anti-Judaism means hostility only to religion, not to people. But faith and people are inevitably synonymous. In Northern Ireland the anti-Catholicism, while not against Irish ethnicity, is directed against Irish people who hold Catholic beliefs. I have used both anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, depending on whether the hostility is toward the religion or people or both.

12In the introduction I examine mainly the gospels and Apocalypse, which are the books contained in volume 1 of the New Covenant.

13Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus for the First Time. (San Francisco: HarperSan, 1994), 22.

14From the seventh century B.C.E. till the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E., when Aramaic yielded to Arabic, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Fertile Crescent and the greater Mesopotamian region and competed with Greek after the coming of Alexander the Great, who conquered the region. The Syrian Christian Church used their dialect of Aramaic, but as Aramaic became associated with pagans, they spoke of it as Syriac and developed an altered alphabet.

15 Bar is Aramaic for ben, "son of."

16Sanhedrin from Greek (synedrion). Sanhedrin is a council or court of the Jews in Jerusalem. It is a Hebraized form of Greek synedrion, meaning a council or assembly. In the Mishnah, a collection of rabbinic oral traditions set down as writing (ca. 200 C.E.), the first use of Sanhedrin occurs. Therefore "Sanhedrin" in New Covenant translations to mean court is, as here, anachronistic. In the New Covenant Sanhedrin refers to judicial courts presided over by the high priest. Its usage is imprecise and the Sanhedrin may be connected to the council of elders in Israel. Sanhedrin may also mean just a "gathering" or "assembly." In Acts 22.5, Paul refers to the presbyterion (elders) as the authority that gave orders to arrest Yeshua. In Mark 15.1, it is called the symboulion (council). The use of a Greek word derived from a beginning of-the-third century C.E. Hebraized version of it indicates both an anachronism, and textually the presence of a late hand in the composition or amending of the gospels, which are said to have been set down in the late first century.

How old versions of the Bible shaped secular literature
and how new versions have not

Early in the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot pitilessly attacked Gilbert Murray's old-fashioned, wooden, Swinburnean translations of the Greek tragedians and called for a renovation of Greek and Latin classics in English. Robert Fitzgerald, Dudley Fitts, and William Arrowsmith answered his plea with consummate renditions. In our time, ancient and modern texts, from the Chinese to the Italian, Spanish, and Russian, have enjoyed a renaissance of excellent translations and translators. Yet despite a renewed academic interest in using more reliable Greek sources to translate more accurately and in reading the scripture in "the Bible as literature" courses, no imperious Eliot has shown up to rebuke contemporary old-fashioned, wooden, Swinburnean translations of holy scripture. We have not the accomplishment of philosopher-theologian Martin Buber, who gave the modern German Bible a flowing, poetic, etymologically keyed alternative to Luther's famous sixteenth-century version. During the past century, we were given variations of the nineteenth-century English and American Revised Versions editions (1898-90), of which the best was the recent NRSV (New Revised Standard Version, 1990). The NRSV aims for accuracy and softening the male-oriented articulation, yet retains the essential archaizing, proper, and pious tone of biblical language. As is often the case with literature deemed sacred, the Bible has been held to criteria alien to the art of literary translation. Reform has often come under the emblem of objectivity where "information transfer," as in technical translation of history, business, and science, is the measure. There are also, for the sake of reader comprehension, interpretive translations and dumbing-down versions of the Bible, yet not in the manner of Mark's plain Greek, but as chatty or off-key street-talk renderings.

The Bible in English deserves what our foremost writers can bring to it. It is a richly complex document, with many levels of expressive meaning, and translation that fails to bring over the maximum semantic load, and that slights poetic language, abuses the hope of true equivalence. The Bible is a volume charged with immense connotative meanings, as are all our religious classics, including the Dao De Jing, Bhagavad-Gita, and Odyssey. A version in our day that scarcely goes beyond the heresy of explanation or a word-for-word transfer between tongues signifies that again our age has failed to provide a classical work in English as Tyndale did and the Authorized did. The latter became for many, right or wrong, "an authorized original."
Today's Bible should inspire the devout and the secular reader as the Bible once did. Yet the transgression of a weak invented language persists today because the Bible in English has been largely designated off-limits to the aesthetic judgment that other great books must face to find their way into print and into the reader's critical spirit and heart. Hence, outside classrooms and religious institutions, the readers of "the great books" are not interested in contending with the Authorized or inferior updates. Readers of the Bible have in large part, and especially outside congregations, gone away.

Abandoned by our best-known writer-translators and generations of readers, we have lacked even those who dedicated themselves to turning one great book of the Bible into a masterpiece, as Sir Philip Sidney and his sister Lady Herbert from Elizabethan London did to give us a new rendition of the Psalms.17 We have had no contemporary English or American equal to Poland's Nobel laureate in literature, Czeslaw Milosz (who learned Hebrew specifically to translate the Songs of Songs into Polish), who might render distinguished books of the Bible in English. Perhaps it is an unfair burden to ask our leading contemporary religious scholars to become the English Luthers and Dantes for our time and refresh the English language. In days of territorial specialization, literature and art are not their terrain. The consequences are clear.

Old versions are remote, and contemporary ones do not sing. In contrast to the King James, whose scholars helped establish a great literary tradition, in the new Bibles, after the corrections and recorrections, the seminarian translators have kept repetition of seminal clichés intact in pedestrian speech sullenly removed from literature. So great literature is captive to neglect. It is imperative to remember that these holy books from the coastal strip of Western Asia, of history, religion, and philosophy, contain the most intense concentration of the arts of narration, drama, and poetry the world has assembled.

Apart from the gloom, there are areas of light. If there are not new resplendent Bibles, there are writers infused with Bible light, with a magnificence of language and spirit whose source remains the King James Version. Consider T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday," Murder in the Cathedral, and The Four Quartets. For all his cranky urbane anti-Semitism, Eliot is probably that last major poet in the English language who has produced enduring pieces deriving directly from the two covenants. Eliot's competitor might be James Baldwin of Go Tell It on the Mountain, who uses the full rhetoric of biblical speech preserved in the African-American church. Martin Luther King spoke the language of the Bible in his dream speeches. Of course, these examples mirror the mighty James and not the readable and more accurate Revised and New Revised and New Revised Standard Version.

One could wish that in the last twenty years of his life, when his own creative well went dry, Eliot had, in the grand tradition, turned his hand to creating the Bible in English. The task fell to the American classical scholar Richmond Lattimore. Trained in the fullness of the Greek tongue, Lattimore had spent his life turning Homer, Aeschylus, and Pindar into powerful English poetry. In his last years he turned his gaze to the New Covenant and gave us a catholic, impeccably smooth version, with dignity, freshness, and a touch of beautiful earlier rhetoric. And although his 1962 publication went largely unnoticed, it remains by far the finest version we have of the words of the Covenant scriptures in English.18 In translating the New Covenant, Lattimore (the first of the Lattimore-Fitzgerald-Fagles triad of splendid Homer translators) is the exception, but his work proves that it is possible to marry scholarship and art in translating the Bible, as was done by his contemporaries in giving us Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Wang Wei, Dante, and Seigyo. What is to be done? At the very least, one should be aware that the larger once fertile plain is arid. And then, with a hint from the scriptures, one can hope the day of a Hebrew Bible and a New Covenant scriptures resurrected in English is near.19

17The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke. Edited by J. C. A. Rathmell. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963). First published in 1823 under the title: The Psalmes of David translated into divers and sundry kindes of verse.

18Even Richmond Lattimore follows the earlier sacred tradition of blurring Yeshua's identity as a Jew through selectively false translation. After Yeshua praises Nathanael for being "truly a Jew," Nathanael says to Yeshua, "Rabbi, you are the son of God. You are the king of Israel"(John 1:49). In Greek we have Rabbi, but Lattimore, the most just literary scholar translator of his day, here as elsewhere, still renders Rabbi in Greek as "Master" in English. More recent translators, however, reflecting the present mood, uniformly translate Rabbi as "Rabbi," including the New King James Version (1979), which corrects the King James Version (1611) "Master" to read "Rabbi."

19In 1996 Reynolds Price published Three Gospels (New York, Scribners, 1996), which includes Mark, Matthew, and John, a revision of an earlier version of the four canonical gospels. It is of the same literary quality throughout as the Lattimore, less lofty and more modern, and is very close to the Greek. It has no extra words and is a literary breakthrough. Price uses "wrong" rather than "sin" as one way of reducing what he calls the "puritan" practice in translating from the koine. As pure observation and no reproach, I note that he comes closer than others, but makes no essential break with a strongly Christianizing bias in converting Greek into English and doesn't move the text from a Hellenization of name, place, and spirit back to its Hebrew Bible base. He does mitigate, where he can without stylistic contortions, the domination of male gender words.

A major change from the pedestrian Hebrew Bible translations that our century has sponsored has been the 1996 autumn publication of Genesis in versions by Robert Alter and by Stephen Mitchell and the 1999 translation of Alter's David. Alter and Mitchell are both literary, the Alter rhythmically rhetorical and austerely beautiful, with significant annotation; the Mitchell more contemporary, clean, and, like the Alter, at once close to both the King James and to modern speech. Like the Everett Fox lineated translation of the Five Books of Moses, the first lines of Genesis in Alter's version have orchestral power and balance, although Alter does so in prose rather than verse.

Yeshua speaking verse

Much of the two covenants is verse. Historically, if there are words in the canonical gospels that were uttered by an identifiable speaker, they are probably wisdom sayings in verse attributed to Yeshua the Mashiah, commonly called in English Jesus the Messiah, or Jesus the Christ or Jesus Christ.

As for these wisdom poems attributed to Yeshua, they are of extreme importance, indeed at the heart of the gospels, and are more likely than the narrations to have claims to historicity. Yet these sayings, too, though they may have been uttered by Yeshua, also have a source in the preserved wisdom sayings of earlier figures, since it is natural and expected that a charismatic sage will repeat the famous traditional wisdom phrases of the past. With respect to their prosodic form, the sayings, like Psalms, Song of Songs, and most of the words of Isaiah and Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible, may be read and lineated as poetry, even though the monumentally poetic King James Version cast them in prose. In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas,20 which has no narration and is exclusively Yeshua's sayings, Yeshua's words are also preserved in traditional aphorism that may be read as verse. Here in this version Yeshua's words are lineated as poetry, just as most of Yeshua's words, especially in John, are lineated in the French and English editions of the New Covenant in the Catholic Jerusalem Bible (1990). To most of us it is a secret that Yeshua's speech takes the form of poems. Even more obscure is the notion that the authentic core of the gospels stands in verse. This translation will introduce the Jewish messiah of the Christians21 as the great oral poet of the first century C.E., who heretofore has been our invisible poet.

20The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945, in Coptic translation from the Greek, among the Nag Hammadi texts in Egypt. The dating is problematic. Some scholars suggest 50 or 55 C.E., while others suggest it may be the late second century or even the third. Its translation from Greek into Coptic was probably third century. There also exists fragments of Thomas in Syriac.

21Christian is from Greek Hristianos, meaning "messianic" or "anointed."

Mark the vernacular story teller

The narrative means employed in the gospels would also alter the use of language. The Greek resting point at which the New Covenant exists found its lexicon and style in both the Hebrew Bible and the diverse post-biblical scriptures that make up the noncanonical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha of the period. In Mark there was something else: the perfection of the ordinary, the pure, the rude,23 and the popular. It is spare and contains no spare words. A raconteur could say or dream it, but Aeschylus or even the great Shakespeare of Lear might not notice it as art. Or if they did, their version, as Shakespeare's borrowings from Plutarch, would be fleshed out beyond recognition. Yet in its lucid minimalism, Mark prefigured a formal revolution in style of two thousand years later when Hemingway, in biblical works like The Old Man and the Sea, came upon a speech that made the novelists of America and Europe go plain. In the opening picture in the wilderness are Mark's direct rhythmic word and bright plainness:

Yohanan the Dipper appeared in the desert and preaching an immersion of repentance for the remission of sins. The whole land of Yehuda24 and all the people of Yerushalayim25 came out to him and were being immersed by him in the Yarden River,26 and confessing their sins. Yohanan was clothed in camel hair, and wore a leather belt around his hips, and he ate locusts and wild honey.

The author of Mark wrote in Koine, a form of demotic or spoken Greek, and his voice is a spoken tale-not a learned written report in elegantly difficult syntax. It is a teller's story, one largely repeated by Matthew and Luke, each of whose version varies as a teller's account will. Here the Hebrew Bible and the gospels share the medium of talk. Nothing is plainer than the talk-narration of Genesis, which is to be heard as speech or chanted as song. One must remember that God did not write but "spoke" creation through the word; his feats on those six days of labor were dictated into the Torah. Mark's gospel story of the days of Yeshua turned out to be divine talk for later Christians. His tone also reflects the unknown sources of his specific tale which, whether written, oral, or both, certainly carried the same character of common speech.

Given the spontaneity and plain tuning of the gospels, the concern for finding and keeping the fixed word, the exact letter of the Bible, seems almost an impertinence. The reader is always dealing with translation and a text which itself is a translation from an unknown written text or witness report, that is sometimes called "oral gospeling." Many layers stand between the reader and exact, documentary speech. Talk may be fixed by a playwright or scribe or digital recorder, but, with regard to biblical witnessing, such reports are obscure, and their next expression will be different and contain new revelations. This uncertainty pertains to versions of most ancient texts, especially to religious texts, and has its own virtues. The salient virtue of unfixed scripture is its liveliness, its imitation of convincing speech. Plato cast his writings in the form of the Dialogues, philosophical talk, precisely to preserve the spontaneous live speech, which, he argued, holds meanings that the written word cannot capture. Speech comes from live persons. Writing becomes dry ink. Through Socrates' voice, Plato said that "to write with pen and ink is to write in water, since the words cannot defend themselves. The spoken word-the living word of knowledge, which has a soul-is thus superior to the written word, which is nothing more than its image" (Plato, Phaedrus, 278b). So at the heart of the gospels is the living, heard voice of Yeshua, usually in the form of a platonic dialogue. The letters (epistles), too, are a form of live speech, the voice of one person speaking to others. By contrast, the thinkers Descartes and Hume are master stylists, but unlike the gospels they reason abstractly, never dialogically, nor through the voice of an author intimately addressing the reader. Their texts are eloquent, convince, but they never sing.

Each of the gospels has its own genius of style and preserves its authoritative way through discussion. Unlike the intimate tale of the gospels, the Apocalypse (Revelation),27 takes us elsewhere. Although also in koine, Apocalypse, like the many extant apocalypses of the era-Jewish and Christian-Jewish-is one long breath of Hebrew Bible prophecy of the end. Like the primeval tales of creation and destruction in Genesis and the grotesque sky beasts in Daniel, its immediate source, the primal grandeur of Apocalypse carries us in vision all over the heavens and under the earth.28 The gospels of healing, poetry, parabolic wisdom, and the culminating passion along with the angelic vision of Revelation make the New Covenant the ultimate Christian-Jewish book.

The "ultimate Christian-Jewish book" refers to the fact that although the gospels are books composed by Jews as is each book in the Hebrew Bible, the gospels can also be seen as Christian-Jewish books. The later Christians received the gospels as Christian scripture, where Christian carries the meaning of messianic. Yeshua's followers saw him as the messiah, the foretold Jewish messiah, there being not yet a separate religion one could call Christianity. An increasingly prevalent understanding holds that the gospels are Jewish books written by Christian Jews, which were ultimately appropriated and shaped by later Christians who had lost their Jewish centrality and who saw intra-Jewish rivalry in the New Covenant as a struggle between gentile Christians and demonized Jews. In John Shelby Spong's Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes (HarperCollins, 1996), the Episcopal bishop asserts that "The Gospels are Jewish Books," (title of chapter 2). He notes that although Christians have been educated to deny that the New Testament is a Jewish book, "the Gospels are Jewish attempts to interpret the life of a Jewish man" (Spong 20) and "in a deep and significant way, we are now able to see that all of the Gospels are Jewish books, profoundly Jewish books" (36). He observes that the gospels were written by four Jews (Mark, Matthew, John, and Luke, a convert) about Jews. The bishop goes on to confess his own worldwide, Christian-prejudiced education with regard to the gospels: "How was it that one whose name was Yeshuah or Joshua of Nazareth, whose mother's name was Miriam, could come to be thought of in history as anything but a Jew? . . . Not only did I not understand that Jesus was Jewish, but it never occurred to me to assume that his disciples were Jewish either. I could not imagine Peter, James, John, and Andrew as Jews, to say nothing of Mary Magdalene and Paul" (24-25). In his extensive study of the New Covenant, he tells us, "We are beginning to recognize the Gospels as Jewish books" (33), but as for their historicity, he notes that the dark Judas, the dark "anti-hero of the Christian tradition" (258), was a later Christian invention." . . . "Judas never existed but was a fictional scapegoat created to shift the blame for Jesus's death from the Romans to the Jews."

It is sad and hopeful that one must iterate what is or should be obvious to scholars and eventually to the general readership, which is the centrality of the New Covenant as Jewish scripture. It should be as obvious as believing that the Plato's Republic is Greek philosophy with a Greek cast and author. But Yeshua's Jewishness is not clear. Moreover, in the extant Greek form it is not meant to be clear. This version, which at least restores the home geography and Semitic identity of the characters has the fancy that it may incite a journey of understanding.

In a grand book-problematic, imperfect as grand books of all faiths must be since these are the writings of humans, not of God-there is a page behind the page. On the underpage lies the good news of the Jewish teacher, rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef. But on other uncertain pages in the New Covenant are words reflecting persuasions of later churchmen that have fashioned Yeshua as an alien Galilean denouncing his coreligionists and sending them to a punishment worse than found in Sodom and Gomorrah. These outbursts should be understood as perfectly implausible and unworthy of Yeshua's nature and mission. Then begins understanding and good feelings. Then Matthew of the lovely Sermon and the empathetic Beatitudes, "Blessed are the gentle / for they will inherit the earth" (5.5) reaches us and not Yeshua militant, "who comes not to bring peace on earth but a sword" (10.34). That battle-sword anger should not, with a positive twist, be explained away hermenutically but rejected outright as alien noises of sectarian rivalry penned by later anonymous hands. Then released from stains of anger, Yeshua's voice speaks an innocence of light in the heart, of "light filling the whole body." It is a covenant of the noblest and kindest love, enveloping us in a firmament of soul. And the Christian believer-or reader of any faith or joy-is released from negations to read the book of concordance.

22For further discussion of the complexity of the emerging development of the Yeshua movement, see George W. E. Nickelsburg, "Revealed Wisdom as a Criterion for Inclusion and Exclusion: From Jewish Sectarianism to Early Christianity," in Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs, eds., To See Ourselves as Others See Us: Christians, Jews, "Others" in Late Antiquity. (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press), 1985, and Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

23It is frequently speculated that the author's rudimentary Greek, a language probably foreign to the author or translator of a Semitic source text, accounts for the book's primitive force. Unfamiliarity is not, however, a key to literary innovation, though limited linguistic means may be a factor in determining the strong direct speech.

24Judea.

25Jerusalem.

26Jordan River.

27Apocalypses may be found in James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City: New York, 1983-1095), and in Barnstone, The Other Bible (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1984. All the other apocalypses are called "apocalypses," but the apocalypse in the New Covenant in most translations into English is "Revelation." In other languages, especially in those where Greek Orthodoxy is followed, the Greek word "apocalypse" is transliterated as apocalypse rather than translated as revelation.

28In Omens of Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), Harold Bloom reminds us that apocalyptic tradition, so widespread in intertestimental time and especially in the diverse noncanonical books of Enoch, has a long tradition from Zoroaster to Islam: "From Zoroaster on, apocalyptic expectations flourished and made their way into Judaism and its heretical child, early Christianity, and then into Islam, which sprang forth from Jewish Christianity"

Principles of Persuasion

So after speaking with some passion about the New Covenant, and of the equally deep need for windows to see them through, I offer some principles of presentation that have helped me to attempt this translation.

1) The English text should read with the plain grace of the Greek page.

2) The invisible Hebrew Bible and Aramaic sources are in part refreshed by giving in many instances the Hebrew Bible and Aramaic names of person and place rather than the misleading Hellenizing Greek versions of the names, where the apparent intention of Greek mediation is to remove the book from its Semitic sources. The book should read not as a Greek book in English but as a Semitic book about Semites, which has passed through Greek in reaching us.

3) The names of prophets or titles of books of the Hebrew Bible cited in the text are identified and mentioned by name. Where in the Greek it says "and it is written" or "and the prophet says," it is normal practice in annotated translations to identify these names solely in minuscule reference name initials, along with chapter and verse numbers, in the margin or at the bottom of the page.29 Matthew might have expected his informed readers to know which Jewish prophet spoke a specific passage and where that passage occurred, as in the famous first reference to the foretold messiah in Matthew 2.5-6. In the New Revised Standard Version, in answer to the question "where the messiah was to be born" it reads:

In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is has been written by the prophet. In this translation it reads,

In Bethlehem in Yehuda, for so it is written by the prophet Micah.

Here the name of the prophet Micah is spelled out. In the excellent The New Annotated Oxford Bible of the NRSV (1997) the prophet's name may be guessed from a note "Mic 5.2," embedded in an eight-line note on "the wise men" (Magi). However, it is unlikely that a reader will seek out this reference. It should be said that the prophet's names are normally omitted from the Greek scripture, but not always, as seen in Mark, which chronologically opens the New Covenant. Mark reads,

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
"Look, I send my messenger ahead of you,
and he will prepare your road;"
         – (Mark 1.2).

Here Isaiah is in the text and it is not necessary to search elsewhere for the name.

Unless the specific information of the prophet's name or source book is made known in the English text, the translation is incomplete, since the present audience in English, including scholars, will not identify the intended reference that has been cited to give ancient authority to the text. If one must look to the margin or bottom of page to find this specific name that is implied, but not stated, in the gospel, then the text becomes unreadable. In summary, most readers do not search out name references that an ancient reader might have understood, and unless such information informs the English translation, the translation fails to inform the English reader.

4) With respect to certain offensive gender-biased language, solutions are at best tentative. In the same way that anti-Semitism cannot be glossed over by euphemism or alteration of the text, so, too, the intentional male language, reflecting habits of bigotry toward women, cannot also be eliminated without falsifying these unfriendly intentions in the text. We are far from removing stylistic infelicities caused by playing with these awkwardnesses, but I have diminished the preponderance of male-gender speech where the Greek does not demand a male interpretation. An excellent example of unnecessary and misleading male-biased translation is rendering anthropos "human being" or "person," which is not to be confused with aner, andros, the normal word for "man" as gune, gunaikos is the normal word for woman. Anthropos means human being in Greek without reference to gender (though in Greek, too, some people assume that all human beings are men). Yet anthropos is normally translated into English as "mankind," which is not acceptable, since it is gender preferential. Gender-free "people" or "person" is preferred to the more abstract or sociological "humanity" or the hybrid "humankind." Yet Robert Alter in his Genesis (1996) uses "human" and "humankind" naturally and with easy authority-which has helped to establish them in some moments as the right and apparently only right words. In the past, men and women alike accepted "man" synecdochically to mean "man and woman," but that meaning of man and woman never fully worked.

The word anthropos also brings us to one of the key theological and literary word problems of the New Covenant. What do we do with the phrase Son of Man? In Greek the phrase ho huios tou anthropou (Matt 12.8) was not a negation of women, since it actually means son of a human being, probably as opposed to a divine being. Ho huios tou anthropou definitely does not and cannot mean "Son of Man," its prevalent translation, for that mistranslates the word anthropou, which, as said, means a human being, a person, humanity, and not restrictively a man. If one insists on one gender, "son of woman" would be a more logical translation in order to indicate, as apparently intended, that Yeshua is a human being born of a mother as opposed to a god or God. What "man," or more reverently "Man," means is a favorite theological discourse. The capitalization in English (not in Greek) adds another mystery to the English translation. I have a few solutions, none satisfactory, since as in all translation of multivalent words, one choice of meaning excludes another.

Given that the primary meaning of ho huios tou anthropou is "the son of a person who is human," a human being, as opposed to a divine essence, it is probable that the Greek phrase came, as Geza Vermes suggests in Jesus the Jew (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 163-68, either from Jewish Aramaic bar nasha, "son of a person," or hahu gabra, "that man," as a simple circumlocution or expression for "an Israelite from Palestine." Or huios tou anthropou could carry its full messianic title, as in the famous source passage in Daniel 7:13. In the King James Version we have:

I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven.

and in The New Revised Standard Version:

I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds
of heaven.

As for where the meaning belongs in every appearance-between a simple synecdoche for "son of man and woman," where the one represents the whole, or whether it has its more mysterious meaning of the forecast messiah as found in Daniel, Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls and elsewhere-that is the provenance of secondary writing. The problem is to find a solution for the text here, that is not stylistically crude and that rejects the unacceptable "son of man." "Son of a human" is awkward. and "son of the people" may evoke a political coloring of Red Square. While translation of connotative material is and should be as imperfect as it is rich, here the imperfection of the translation is especially troubling, since the phrase in question is key. "The Son of Man," though sacred in tradition, remains a theological minefield. I have settled on changing the adjectival genitive tou anthropou, "son of people," to a simple preceding adjective."Earthly son" seems a good way of indicating that Yeshua is a human being (which is the literal meaning of anthropou) as opposed to a "heavenly son" or "divine son."

5) This is an unbiased version. It does not proselytize by inflation, sectarian piety in the lexicon, or use any strategy to promote or demote one religious position or denomination over another, or to affirm or deny religious faith and rightness.

6) With respect to speech, I wish the English to come alive in a version close in meaning to the original, without tampering with the extraordinary metaphors by redoing them through equivalent metaphors or paraphrasing them abstractly. Similarly, images are as far as possible not changed or replaced by dubiously "equivalent" images. In this sense, the translation attempts to convey art and magic by remaining as close as possible to the Greek, discovering great freedom, essential information, and every mystery in the literal. The authors should speak, not the translator or what the translator may represent. The version should be simple and modern, without dropping into basic English. While it avoids churchy and pompous speech, it is happy, as the King James Version was, to exploit the range of the English language.

7) With respect to etymology and the Greek language in its koine form, I interpret words not only in their traditionally New Testament dictionary interpretation, which are often puffed up with a religious rhetoric, but in their classical Greek usage, which was the base of the koine-writing authors. Hence, while respecting the tradition and scholarship of earlier versions, this translation is done directly from the Greek, rather than from other English versions with a mere nod to the Greek and the Latin Vulgata. Consequently, it tries to ignore erroneous "habits," to use Jorge Luis Borges's preferred polite word for traditional practices of pious speech that have become frozen by custom. This means the translation seeks the better word, not the sanctified one. Many words and phrases have been sanctified in the course of centuries of translation from scripture. These clichés are often infelicitous and inaccurate and help enforce traditional misunderstandings of the Greek.

Although I have followed the principle of looking at each word freshly and meticulously, the effort, I wish to think, is not pedantic. My joy of discovery has been constant. An example of a minor, but perhaps representative, translation opportunity occurs in Matthew 28.8. After the crucifixion, the two Miryams are rushing off, full of fear and happiness from the place of internment of the body of the messiah, to spread the good news of the resurrection. Up to this moment in Matthew, each reference to the burial site is to Yeshua's taphos, his tomb or grave. Now taphos is replaced in Greek by mnemeion, which like mnemia means commonly a tomb or grave, but it is literally "a token of remembrance" and so carries the meaning of a memorial, and is given in Liddell and Scott the meaning in Latin of monimentum, which stresses the aspect of a "memory tomb." Following the etymology as well as a pertinent ordinary meaning of the word, I have translated mnemeion as "memorial place," retaining the implication that the messiah's burial place has already become a memorial, that is, a place to remember the dead, which fits this moment in the drama.

8) As for the sound of the Greek and the English, I have found a way that helps me hear, which I hope is transferred to the reader. Before seeking an English equivalent of the text, I read each few lines aloud to myself, and when the koine resonates smoothly I look for English words. I approach the koine as both written text and as speech and chant heard in Greek Orthodox chapels and monasteries. The gospels would be very poor if they did not live in the ear in Greek.

9) Yeshua's voice, which expresses itself in the tradition of the chanted Jewish Bible and which he alludes to and cites, should come through in English with overheard poetic rhythm.

By these means-modest yet significantly new, which neither alter, interpret, paraphrase, or clarify scripture-I hope that these concluding books of the whole Bible (the Hebrew Bible and New Covenant) will be seen as narratives about Jews specifically, by Jews, to convince coreligionists, and eventually also gentiles, that the arrival of the messiah foreseen in the Jewish Bible had come in the person of Yeshua.

The Jewish Bible has bequeathed us Christianity and Islam. By restoration of Aramaic and Hebrew biblical names in the New Covenant, these books will at last also look like Jewish, not Greek, scripture, and be read as such. Then perhaps the New Covenant, which has for millennia been the main source of the demonization of the Jews, will no longer serve that terrible end, and both Jews and Christians can read the uplifting, tragic and mysterious voyage of the New Covenant for its spiritual firmaments and literary marvels.

29The 1989 Harper Study Bible uses bottom-of-the-page references to Torah texts. It also has the most annotations of contemporary translations. Its annotations are historical, which is becoming the practice in most study Bible annotations.

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         More about poet/translator Willis Barnstone including other translations, poetry and biblical studies.