The New Covenant Hardcover - 2001

From the publisher

From an award-winning poet and scholar of Greek and Biblical Studies: the New Testament's four gospels and Revelation, newly translated from the Greek and informed by Semitic sources. "Willis Barnstone has a problem: he's too good. Everything he writes, from his invaluable The Other Bible, a compendium of holy texts no writer should be without, through his brilliant translations and beautiful poems, is a breathtaking achievement". Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet This new literary translation of the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, and the Apocalypse (Revelation) returns the bedrock of Christianity to its origins as an outgrowth of Judaism. In place of the Greek names we are accustomed to, he restores probable Hebrew or Aramaic names to New Testament figures, and as in the Hebrew Bible, he lineates poetry as poetry. In translating Apocalypse in blank verse, he reveals it as the great epic poem of the New Testament. Barnstone uses all his talents as a poet, translator, and scholar to reshape our understanding of these seminal books of the Bible and of our own long-held assumptions about our historical and religious heritage. In a hundred-page introduction that is itself a fully developed work of scholarship, Barnstone places the Christian Bible in new perspective, transporting us back to the pre-Hellenic world and the Jewish tradition from which the New Covenant emerged. Notes. Bibliography.