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Good as New: A Radical Retelling of the Scriptures
By John Henson
O Books, 2004. 450 pages
Reviewed by Christy Risser-Milne
A quick check of Amazon.com’s customer reviews of Good as New will have you wondering just what sort of lunatic heretic John Henson is. After reading Henson’s decades-long project of rendering much of the Christian Bible (often referred to as the New Testament), you will realize that those attacking his efforts are either lunatic heretics themselves, or they have not bothered to read the book.
One of the most important theological lessons I learned in seminary comes, ironically, from my least favorite theologian, Augustine of Hippo (who would, himself, despise this volume because it challenges the status quo just as Jesus himself did). Some 1600 or so years ago he said, and I paraphrase, “If you think you know, it isn’t God.” I think many of Henson’s detractors could stand to take this simple axiom to heart.
Henson and his collaborators in the ONE Community for Christian Exploration have, with clear and painstaking effort, rendered the text into contemporary language with incredible and equal amounts of love and integrity. This is not to say that it is perfect or that there are not parts that don’t grate against ears accustomed to the centuries-old traditions of “biblical language,” but on the whole this attempt is, in my opinion, the best translation to date.
My use of the word translation is quite intentional. Unlike Eugene Peterson’s The Message or The Good News Bible or The Living Bible, each of which is more aptly called a paraphrase of the Bible, Good as New actually stays true to the original stories, language, and intent present in the extant Greek texts.
In his introduction, Henson rightly points out that a literal translation of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures would be confusing and confounding to people today, because the very act of translation requires choices to be made regarding the meaning or emphasis of myriad words and phrases, some of which will simply do not have an adequate equivalent in English. As Henson writes, “We need to warn people that no translation or paraphrase is any more than somebody’s intelligent, scholarly, inspired, and, one hopes, honest guess.”
To further complicate this work, Henson asserts the need to recognize that the Bible was written “by real people for real people.” By acknowledging and recognizing a common humanity between, for example, Paul and ourselves, we may better recognize his strengths, weaknesses, and opinions coming through the text. This allows some of the writers to be a bit coarse and uneducated, and others to be scholarly and “religious.” Trouble comes in, Henson says, with the history of translation itself. “The problem is that those who translate the scriptures have always been religious and scholarly and heavily committed in the matter of doctrine. To such people communicating with the rough and ready is difficult and for many of them it does not occur that they need to try. They translate in the language of an academic elite and assume this is the language that ought to be spoken by everybody else.”
The task Henson and his colleagues took as their own was to push past this tendency to understand themselves as typical readers of the Bible, and meet them where they live. Thus Peter, which in Greek is Petros -- literally rock -- becomes Rocky, a loving nickname that Jesus gave to his friend Simon. Place names that have long been rendered as tongue twisters in English are restored to the descriptive nature they once held. So Bethsaida becomes Fishtown; which is the literal meaning of that place name.
Some of the greatest rancor Henson’s detractors hold for him surround his seeming expurgation of the allegedly anti-homosexual bits from some of Paul’s letters. Henson, along with a good many other highly respected biblical scholars, declines to further the centuries-old agenda of those who use scripture as a weapon of exclusion against those they do not like. His translation of the texts challenges the sense of exclusion of those deemed not “holy” or “right” enough by some Christians.
Henson successfully turns preconceptions of the Bible upside down in Good As New, challenging, pushing those who call themselves Christians to truly be known by the example of the one they claim to follow, living and loving everyone and leaving the work of judgment and wrath up to God. And perhaps more importantly, Henson invites those curious about this ancient faith into an understandable exploration that does not require years of study to comprehend.
If history judges Henson a heretic in this effort, I hope many others (myself included) will proudly stand with him in such holy heresy.
Christy Risser-Milne holds a master of divinity degree from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, where she is relatively sure only part of the faculty would agree with this review, while the others would like to take back her degree.
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