Hart comments on this in the introduction to the translation (a fine essay in its own right). He puts it too well not to quote him at length:

Before embarking on this project, I doubt I ever properly appreciated precisely how urgent the various voices of the New Testament authors are, or how profound the provocations of what they were saying were for their own age, and probably remain for every age. Those voices blend, or at least interweave, in a kind of wildly indiscriminate polyphony . . . but what all have in common, and what somehow forges a genuine harmony out of all that ecstatic clamour, is the vibrant certainty that history has been invaded by God in Christ in such a way that nothing can stay as it was, and all terms of human community and conduct have been altered at the deepest of levels.

“Perhaps I could never have come to this realisation had I not undertaken this task,” he concludes. Perhaps we will never come to this realisation if we don’t read his translation.

One great achievement of this translation, then, is to restore the urgency of the New Testament. A second is to do rhetorical justice to the great passages of what scholars term “high” Christology.

This past Christmas my church played a nasty trick on the mayor of our borough. We invited him to do a reading at our carol service, only to give him the impossibly difficult reading of John 1. The poor man, fumbling through the fiendish passage as the congregation squirmed, wax from their candles burning their thumbs, willing him through to “This is the word of the Lord.” Here is how the tongue-twister goes (in the New International Version):

1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2. He was with God in the beginning. 3. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Familiar? Obscure? For me, both at once. Hart can’t wait to get his hands on it:

In the origin there was the Logos, and the Logos was present with GOD, and the Logos was god; This one was present with GOD in the origin. All things came to be through him, and without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be. In him was life, and this life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it.