Bibles, Study Guides, and Accessories
Deciding which bibles and bible references and bible commentaries to stock is a challenge. I attempt a historical and a critical approach. We begin with the Hebrew and Greek originals. We move through the significant translations chronologically: the Geneva (with its sharp and learned Calvinist notes), the King James (safer for its sponsor), the New Revised Standard, and the excellent harvest of translations in the late 20th Century -- the New International, the English Standard, and the Common English.
Our dictionaries and handbooks tend to be a little conservative, mostly because I am skeptical of the confidence and the imagination of modern liberal scholars. Two thousand years of brilliant minds have thought about and written about scriptures (longer and more in the case of the Hebrew scriptures), and the humble approach with that perspective is useful and wise. The best approach is to begin with the basics and go from there.
On a less controversial note, protect your treasure of wisdom with a book cover or tote. We have several designs with neat features.
The New Testament: A Translation
The New Testament: A Translation
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?”
David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator, is a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He lives in South Bend, IN.