The greatest achievement of Hart’s translation is to restore the urgency of the original.

In the central chapter of The Everlasting Man, “The Strangest Story in the World”, G.K. Chesterton assails the often-widespread picture of Jesus of Nazareth as a wandering teacher. Many of the pagan sages may indeed be described this way, he says. Apollonius of Tyana, the Peripatetics, Socrates — we find them always walking and talking, their wisdom arising from their rambles, glimpses of their genius gleaned from their ad hoc conversations with people they encounter roundabout the place. Jesus of Nazareth is different. “Compared to these wanderers,” Chesterton writes, “the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all dramatic.” He continues:

From the moment that the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment that the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words.

Hart has captured the speed and direction of that drama. How? One example: he follows the original tenses slavishly and adopts the historic present.

Take Mark’s gospel. We find Jesus teaching: “they enter” Capernaum’s synagogue. Next he picks his team/recruits his troops: “and he goes up into the mountain, and summoned to himself those whom he wanted, and they went to him . . .” Then the fireworks begin: “a leper comes to him”; a demon is “crying out with a loud voice.” The Anointed and his band criss-cross the country, causing havoc wherever they go: “they come to Bethsaida”; “he comes into the region of Judaea [and] beyond the Jordan”; “they come into Jericho.” Then news gets out of all that’s happening, spreading like wildfire until it reaches the authorities. “And the Pharisees and some of the scribes coming out from Jerusalem gather about him.” They’re roiled by the attention he’s getting. They’re appalled by the blasphemy. And so they strike: all of a sudden, before we know it, the Anointed is being arrested — “And immediately Judas arrives, and with him a crowd with swords and bludgeons” — and after a show trial, quickly executed: “And they crucify him, and portion out his garments.”

Usually the gospel of Mark seems bare, leaving you cold (the fact the grass the five thousand sit on is green is about the only detail). But Hart’s rendering of the prose gets across the sense of gathering momentum, allowing the whole story to move on wings. The most unpalatable gospel suddenly becomes a page-turner.