Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedDavid Bentley Hart: belief
12 Jul 2023 Conversations with Tyler David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought
“Her translation of Augustine is the best in modern English. But I think her insistence on translating philologically in the sense of taking the meaning of words from their roots and doing other things of that sort all the way through was horribly ill-advised.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- David Bentley Hart
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 12 Jul 2023
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…Why? It’s just very bad. I just think it’s barely literate. I think it’s very inaccurate. She’s done other translations that are quite wonderful. Her translation of Augustine is the best in modern English. But I think her insistence on translating philologically in the sense of taking the meaning of words from their roots and doing other things of that sort all the way through was horribly ill-advised. I think she also just doesn’t know the period very well. She’s a classicist in one sense, but late antiquity and certainly Second Temple Judaism and late antique Christianity are just not in her wheelhouse, and there are just so many things that she gets wrong. I just think it reads exceedingly badly. I agree with Luke Timothy Johnson, who, with all the goodwill in the world, just described it as a mess. What do you think goes wrong when that book is translated by committees?…
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