The familiar becomes strange and the strange familiar. Out goes beginning. In comes the freshness of origin. A bolder move: refusing to translate Logos at all, allowing it to remain an impenetrable subject. “With God” becomes “present with God”: more familiar. There’s greater simplicity: “through him all things were made” becomes “all things came to be through him”. And there is greater drama: conquer is better than overcome. “Nothing” is elaborated to “not a single thing”. What’s more a few verses later the familiarity of “the word became flesh and dwelt among us” becomes the literal, “And the Logos became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”

“Pitched his tent among us.” There is something satisfactory that in describing the incarnation so freshly Hart attests to it. For theologians down the ages have long stressed that the Bible itself is an incarnation. Fully human, fully divine; written by men, inspired by the Spirit. And translation into the vernacular, into the language “understandeth by the people”, to quote Cranmer again, participates in that process.

So the translation is compelling, and it is beautiful. But the all-important question: is it accurate? Does Hart fulfil his vow to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Or does he, at key junctures, veer away from an original meaning when he finds it unpalatable? Does he take liberties with the text? Do we have a case of traductor traduttore — the translator as traitor?

Critics have been quick to accuse Hart of imposing his own theological agenda on the text. For example, hailing from the Greek Orthodox tradition as he does, Hart is a universalist. (Universalism is the belief that Hell was evacuated by Christ on Holy Saturday and that in the end all are saved). And he’s upfront about the fact that he sees this universalism in the biblical text. Well, is he right?

An in-depth analysis of the 2,000-year history of Christian soteriology and the fiendishly complex interplay between scriptural exegesis and doctrinal development lies beyond the scope of this review. Suffice it to say that if you want to defend universalism in the New Testament you have to weigh in the defining debate in New Testament scholarship since the 1960s — the so-called “New Perspective”.

The New Perspective, associated with E.P. Sanders, James Dunn and N.T. Wright, overhauls the Reformation reading of the New Testament’s claims about salvation, particularly as they are worked out by St Paul. Martin Luther famously equated the merit-based views of salvation, which he identified in gross medieval practices like indulgences, with Paul’s criticism of “the works of the law”. Earning your way to salvation through your own effort: that’s what Paul was attacking then, and what — c. 1517 — should be attacked now.

According to the New Perspective, Luther couldn’t have got it more wrong. For Paul actually had in his sights not law as human effort but law as the particular customs and ceremonial rights of a particular people, which had come to be used by the elite as “badges of membership.” On this view, what Paul was really saying was now that the promise given to Israel was opened up to all people through Jesus, it followed that salvation was no longer achieved by adherence to those customs.