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The Original New Testament: A Radical Translation and Reinterpretation

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An earlier version of this translation was published as "The Authentic New Testament: Edited and Translated from the Greek for the General Reader," in Great Britain by Dobson in 1955, with a paperback from Panther, and reissued in the United States in a Mentor Paperback from New American Library in 1958 (478 pages in very small print). It preceded by a decade Hugh J. Schonfield's controversial bestseller "The Passover Plot: New Light on the History of Jesus" (1965; just reissued in A Special Fortieth Anniversary Edition) and its sequel "Those Incredible Christians" (1968), which I tend to see as the outlines and documentation for a set of brilliant, but unfortunately unwritten, novels about Jesus and the early Church. The translation followed and accompanied a number of earlier, much less sensational, books on the origins of Christianity.

(For Schonfield's life, and his interesting but often odd views on both Judaism and Christianity, see "Passing Over the Plot? The Life and Work of Hugh Schonfield (1901-1988)" by Richard Harvey, available online in a pdf of "Mishkan" 37 for 2002; the orientation is very much "mission-to-the-Jews," but the information seems sound.)

The revised edition was published in 1985 with the new title of "The Original New Testament: A Radical Translation and Reinterpretation" (Waterstones in the U.K. and Harper & Row in the U.S.). It was reissued in an Element Books paperback edition in 1998 with the less happy apparent subtitle (on the cover) of "The First Definitive Translation of the New Testament in 2000 Years," which isn't what Schonfield claimed it to be. (I suspect a publicity statement or blurb got "promoted.") At this writing, all editions are out of print, although the Harper printing seems to be fairly readily available on Amazon through dealers. The 1985 edition was updated, and in much more legible print than the old mass-market paperback, but some useful features (see below) were dropped. (It still runs to 594 pages, not counting the 34-page Introduction.)

Schonfield's is a strikingly interesting approach, highly personal, but well-informed, like Richmond Lattimore's contemporary translations (1962-1982; collected as "The New Testament," 1996); although Lattimore, a classical scholar, avoided both theology and history in favor of reflecting Greek style. Schonfield is certain to infuriate some people, and to annoy almost every reader at one point or another; but the translation and commentary are never dull, and despite glossing over some issues as too boring for the General Reader, mostly reliable as to facts, if not conclusions. (One sometimes has to read carefully to tell the difference.)

The translation was not originally undertaken to support Schonfield's decidedly quirky "take" on Jesus (whose career he later interpreted as that of an apocalyptic messianist, who stage-managed a "Scripture-fulfilling" confrontation with Rome), but to present the lay reader with two then (circa 1950) less familiar ways of approaching the New Testament; as Greek texts whose contents and order are less securely established than official translations would suggest, and as the products of Jewish communities, not yet clearly differentiated into "The Early Church."

As for the first, it still seems to be new and shocking to some to think of the New Testament as a set of writings with a complex manuscript history. Although this fact is not very obviously reflected in the standard, ecclesiastically-sponsored translations, which smooth over most such difficulties, particularly those popular printings with minimal textual notes, fuller editions make this clear (the Catholic "New Jerusalem Bible," for example, is available in study versions, with elaborate references to variants, and simplified presentations for the "ordinary reader"). There is a substantial body of scholarship which has attempted to figure out how the text reached its present state, not to be confused with historical speculations about "what really happened."

As part of offering a non-standard presentation, emphasizing unexpected and "difficult" variants, Schonfield often disregards traditional divisions, introduces new ones, separates out some passages as secondary elaborations, and shifts others from their accustomed places. He substitutes a reconstructed chronological order for the somewhat arbitrary arrangement in most printed texts. (The manuscript evidence on this is somewhat chaotic, and the usual order is a convention that lacks the authority assumed by many readers.)

The original "Authentic New Testament" edition contained a finding table for converting King James Version references to page numbers; a helpful feature dropped in the revised edition. The introduction of a somewhat better, but still not completely satisfactory, indication of the standard chapter and verse numbers is not a full substitute. The omission of the original "Index of Persons and Places," and the replacement of the "Index of References" with a "Bibliography of Antique Sources Employed," are also regrettable.

Schonfield often looks like he is merely imposing his own preferences on someone else's sacred texts, but he claims that many of his variations can be traced quite readily in the apparatus to a critical Greek New Testament. I've used his versions for years alongside a 1960 pocket-size printing of Nestle and Aland's "Novum Testamentum Graece" (1924), which was probably among the (unspecified) editions he used, and found that he does, indeed, often reflect specific manuscript evidence, and offers resolutions to real problems. (I've also compared it to the 1966 "The Greek New Testament" of Aland, Black, Metzger, and Wikgren, and occasionally to other critical texts.)

In other cases, such as his treatment of the Pauline Epistles, he drew on existing theories about their structure and compilation. I am less happy about this, for, although some of the suggestions look plausible, I can't imagine how we can know for sure that, for example, a given canonical epistle is stitched together from several discrete letters, and was not dictated in several sittings instead.

There is interesting evidence for such practices of repackaging in the letters among the so-called Apostolic Fathers, another set of very early Christian writings, which Schonfield cites; too bad he didn't add a translation of some of those works, as well, illustrating the approach with less sensitive materials. (There is a recent bilingual Loeb Classical Library edition of these texts, which have lately come in for renewed attention. They should not be confused with Christian apocrypha, such as non-canonical Gospels and Acts, which Schonfield also draws on for evidence.)

Some of Schonfield's re-arrangements, such as shifting Revelation 1:8 to follow 1:3, make excellent literary sense (in this case rounding off one passage more neatly and allowing the next to conclude with "Amen"), but don't seem to have any other justification. But trying to "restore" the logic of apocalyptic writings, which tend to describe themselves as dreams, is not a failing confined to Schonfield.

His clustering of at least nominally related materials (Luke with Acts, the Johannine Epistles with the Gospel and Revelation) is actually helpful. His separation of Hebrews (as "Homily on the High Priesthood of Christ") from the letters of Paul will not surpise anyone aware of the literary and linguistic problems the attribution presents, but may offend those unaware that the conventional "The Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews" in many editions follows not the sacred text, but a tradition already questioned in the early Church.

The second feature is offering the New Testament as a set of documents written by Jews, for other Jews, but read, and usually misunderstood, by non-Jews who have brought to it centuries of misconceptions. From my point of view, the great weakness of this approach, when applied to the accepted Christian canon, is that it takes for granted the relatively early dates and generally non-gentile context of (almost) the whole corpus -- which I think is what needs to be demonstrated for some portions. It is one of points on which Schonfield is closest to traditional Christian views!

Schonfield attempts to clear away what he regards as confusion about what Jesus and Paul (in particular) were talking about by resorting to Jewish texts, mostly the Hellenistic and traditional Rabbinic sources mined by scholars since the nineteenth century, with additional light from the Pseudepigrapha, originally Jewish (probably) works involving "Old Testament" characters which have survived, for the most part, only in Christian translations. He also drew on the emerging documentation offered by the Dead Sea Scrolls, so far as they had been published.

(These texts have turned out to include fragments of Hebrew and Aramaic versions of some of the Pseudepigrapha, supporting some but not all of Schonfield's suggestions, but these were mostly published too late for Schonfield to make much use of them.)

He was conversant with halacha (Jewish law and practice) and midrash (homiletic exposition of scripture) and non-Biblical aggadah (story-telling), and drew on them constantly; not unprecedented, except that most Christian writers through the first half of the twentieth century had been very much concerned to "prove" either the superiority of Christianity or the blindness of "the Jews," and often rather worried about undermining Christian theological readings of the allusions they were explicating. Back in 1986, at least one reviewer of the Harper edition suggested that Schonfield was taking sides in an inner-Christian dispute over the proper form of Baptism. I don't see it that way.

Schonfield, simply unconcerned over whether baptism should be *carried out* by sprinkling or by immersion (which is what might be called Christian halacha), cheerfully pointed out that John the Baptist must, contextually, be John the Immerser. Ritual immersion in "living water" for purification was, and is, a Jewish practice. The only remotely relevant sprinkling ritual, with water in which the ashes of a red heifer have been dissolved, was for exposure to a dead body, and was associated with the Jerusalem Temple, not wandering preachers, and a special category of contagious impurity, not repentance for sins. The public reaction to John suggests that he was adapting something familiar, not offering a strange innovation. No suggestions are offered by Schonfield on how, or even whether, this information should inform practice.

I can see the reviewer's problem; the application is a living issue for some Christians. But offering a simple explanation from Jewish practice and theory at points where Christians have spent almost two millennia fighting over complex ones drawn from doctrine does have its attractions.

On the Jewish side, Schonfield's treatment has some problems. On the one hand, he (very properly) discussed the astonishing variety of Judaisms co-existing in Roman times, and tried to reconstruct the messages of Jesus and Paul to fit among them. On the other, he tended to cite the modern "traditional" Jewish prayer-book as if it clearly reflected First Century liturgical practices. The antiquity of both the whole service and specific formulations in it are open to debate; some is clearly ancient, large portions are definitely medieval, some sections later still. One would have to read very closely indeed to gather that from Schonfield. (Shelby Spong, an Episcopal Biship, fell into a similar trap in 1996 in his "Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes." He there tries to explain the structure of the Gospel narratives as originally linked to a Synagogue reading cycle of Scripture, which, alas, is not securely dated itself.)

Given the actual post-Christian date of most of the texts Schonfield was working with, this is only an extreme example of the problem. As mentioned earlier, he acknowledged this in general in his introduction, but declined to offer detailed explanations of his conclusions in particular cases, which, he explained would be too long and tedious. He was probably right about that, but, unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have gone into the matter in detail in his other books on early Christianity (mostly out of print), either.

This is by-far my favorite translation of the New Testament. For me, this translation with commentary brings the scriptures to life in a more interesting way than most translations. For example, the opening to John (In the beginning was the Word ...) can be read as a hymn, and I had never realized that until reading this version. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in coming to a deeper understanding of the scriptures.