This is where it gets interesting. Whether the Reformation or the New Perspective’s conception of salvation is right hinges on how you translate key verses in Paul’s letters.

Take Romans 3:22. Paul proclaims that our salvation comes διὰ πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. There are two ways to go here. The Reformers translate it “through faith in Jesus Christ”; that is, through putting your trust in him, something you do or don’t do, believing in what he has accomplished on our behalf. The New Perspective, on the other hand, insists upon salvation coming “through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ”. What does this mean? It means that salvation comes because Christ was faithful in carrying out what he did on the cross. And this matters because if this translation is right then the universalist reading opens up. What Christ has accomplished is efficacious for all people, regardless of whether they have the opportunity to assent to it intellectually and existentially.

Hart sides with the New Perspective. He comes down on the “faithfulness of Jesus the Anointed.” Does he therefore impose his agenda on the text? Well, the truth is that the text is ambiguous. Both readings can be supported by other verses in scripture (Romans 10:9, for example, seems to support the Lutheran reading). In the end a translator must make his decisions. Hart nails his colours to the mast, which will alienate some readers, but what else can he do when facing a historic exegetical dilemma? What I think sets Hart apart as a translator is that he’s upfront about the choices he has made. In extended footnotes and essays bookending the translation he “shows his working”, as it were, explains his choices. Further: the readings he comes up with in other places — for example, the notorious proof-text for original sin in Romans 5:12 — is not a modern or idiosyncratic revisionist take on the text. It is the Eastern orthodox one.

Back to why a New Testament translation might be a New Year resolution. It is not just my spirituality this translation has transformed. It affected the translator too. During the course of the extraordinarily ambitious project Hart suffered a serious respiratory illness. But he continued to work, in the snatches available to him. Was there a particular part of the New Testament that came alive to him during this dark time? In the worst period he was in the middle of translating the gospel of Luke. He writes: “The figure of Christ as Luke presents him turned out to be crucial for my sanity and my resistance to despair. There is a luminous quality of love in the Lucan narrative that brings out the event of Christ in history as a true revelation of God’s love.”

The figure of Christ as Luke presents him is always getting into trouble for the company he keeps. Whether it’s traitorous tax collectors (essentially the equivalent of the Stasi — men who inform to the oppressor upon their own countrymen) like Zacchaeus; or Samaritan lepers (doubly outcast for the Judeans) in society; or prostitutes like the one who dares to anoint his feet with priceless unguent; or children barred from entry — it is these encounters distinct to Luke which reveal the luminous quality of love. And the translation bears this out. This is how Hart renders the tenderness of Christ’s feeling for Jerusalem: “How often I have wished to gather your children as would a bird her nestling beneath her wings.” (Luke 13: 34.)