The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do?
Seventy-nine scholars worked six years on this new translation of the Gospels in order to "produce in the American reader an experience comparable to that of the first readers--or listeners--of the Gospel." Most attempts to translate the Bible into contemporary English fall flat because they're blatantly agenda-driven or because they rescue the Gospels from limp Victorian prose only to encrust them in awkward contemporary jargon.The Acts of Jesus, by contrast, listens closely to the Greek styles of the Original texts, then renders each distinctive voice in modern English. Consequently, Luke sounds like a good college English professor, but Mark sounds rougher, like street language. The text is color-coded--words in red indicate events that the translators believe to have actually taken place, for instance--and the volume also includes exhaustive commentary and indices by the members of the Jesus Seminar. Only the heartiest of readers will make use of all this auxiliary information. For most of us, the freshness of the language ("You scholars and Pharisees, you impostors! Damn you! You slam the door of Heaven's domain in people's faces.") is the most valuable discovery inThe Acts of Jesus.--Michael Joseph Gross