THE RESTORED NEW TESTAMENT by Willis Barnstone has been reviewed a couple of time recently. I have not yet seen this new translation.

First, "Writer seeks to restore Bible's Jewish roots" by Don Lattin in the San Francisco Chronicle. Excerpt:

We're here to talk about this extraordinary opus, a lifetime of work that seeks to radically restore the historical Jewish context of these all-too-familiar stories about the lives and times of an itinerant rabbi named Yeshua, a.k.a. Jesus Christ.

Back to Jewish names

That's the first thing you notice about this Bible. The names have been changed, and not to protect the innocent. Other Bibles make it too easy to forget the fact that Jesus and his first 12 followers were Jews. This Bible starts by restoring the Jewish names of the purported authors of the familiar gospel stories. Matthew becomes Mattityahu. Mark morphs into Markos, Luke is Loukas. John appears as Yohanan. John the Baptist is renamed Yohanan the Dipper.

Barnstone adds three other versions of the story, the recently discovered Gnostic gospels of Toma (Thomas), Yehuda (Judas) and Miryam of Magdala (Mary Magdalene), and argues in his commentary that they are at least as important and potentially accurate depictions as the canonical accounts that made it past the theological censors and into that ancient anthology we call the Bible.

The next thing you notice about the Barnstone Bible is the poetry, which is this translator's real passion.

Sitting in his kitchen, which like every other room in this house is filled with books, Barnstone lights up when he starts talking about how these texts began as spoken stories. They were later sung and chanted in verse. Most modern Bibles have lost that sense.

"It's poetry locked in prose," he says between bites of his bagel.

Then "The New Testament as Dan Brown conspiracy theory" by Fr Richard Ounsworth OP in the Catholic Herald. Excerpt:

Well, it would be ridiculous to deny that anti-Semitism has been a powerful force in the history of Christianity, and perhaps some readers of the New Testament are unaware of the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples and of St Paul and the other apostolic writers. If so, then perhaps a fresh translation that gives us the Aramaic names these men probably had is no bad thing. I must confess I find it rather contrived and irritating after a while, but perhaps I am fortunate in being more familiar with the thoroughly Jewish milieu of the New Testament, able to see in the word "Jesus" the Greek "Iesous" that translates the Hebrew "Yehoshua" and the Aramaic "Yeshua".

But it is quite unfair of Barnstone to imply that he is uncovering a 2,000-year-old plot to pretend that Christianity did not emerge from Judaism and that Christ and the Apostles were not Jews.

For every modern Scripture scholar who appears in the footnotes of this book denouncing the Church for inventing the figure of Judas there are a dozen or more others whose serious and sober scholarship engages seriously with the historical and theological questions of the origins of Christianity and is entirely ignored.

Barnstone himself is a serious scholar of literature, especially of poetry. Indeed, he discerns in many of the words of Jesus a poetic resonance which he shows by printing them as poetry within his translation; he does the same thing with many of the Epistles, and with the Apocalypse. Some of this versification is more convincing, some less.

I cannot decide whether I think these translations are powerful and resonant, offering a fresh and exciting reading of texts that are always in danger of becoming stale, or irritatingly idiosyncratic and eccentric. Perhaps they are both.

I suggest that readers make up their own minds. Just beware of accepting uncritically the impression that scholars all acknowledge a picture of Jesus and the origins of Christianity that the Church has been hiding from you for generations.

Regarding the latter review, the title is a little over the top, although the reviewer probably was not the one who came up with it. But he did say this:

So after the four canonical gospels Barnstone gives us his new and very good translations of the "Gospels" of Thomas, Mary (Magdalene) and Judas, and I can see no reason why these should not be read and studied. It is, though, perhaps a little sneaky to call a book that does this the Restored New Testament, with the implication that somehow these were hitherto either lost or hidden.

There is a little of the Dan Brown conspiracy theory about this. I suppose if one does not believe in inspiration, or the authority of the Church to determine the canon of scripture, then one can simply devise one's own canon according to one's historical theories or aesthetic preferences.

Or, whatever one's beliefs, a historian can approach these documents as a historian without worrying about the anachronistic conception of "canon." And, if I may say it, it is a little disingenuous (or perhaps just ill-informed) to imply that these documents were not "either lost or hidden." All three were lost for many centuries and the Gospel of Thomas survived complete only by virtue of someone having hidden a copy with a collection of other non-canonical scriptures (etc.; the Nag Hammadi Library) in a buried jar, possibly to prevent them from being destroyed during a time of persecution. The Gospel of Mary is known from one Coptic manuscript that was rediscovered (in a tomb?) at the end of the nineteenth century but only published in the 1950s. Small fragments of both Gospels in Greek were also recovered among the Oxyrhynchus papyri. The Gospel of Judas may also have been found among grave goods in a tomb.

UPDATE (30 December): Dead link fixed now. Sorry about that. And more here.