Introduction 3
being written, edited, sorted through, and designated as either
canonical or spurious. My hope is that I can assume a van -
tage somehow "innocent" of any number of presuppositions
belonging to the inheritance of later developments in Chris-
tian culture. In a sense, in fact, I regard this book as a compan-
ion to, or additional piece in the critical apparatus of, my re-
cent The New Testament: A Translation (Yale University Press,
2017). If possible (and I say this not simply in the hope of fur-
ther increasing my sales), I hope the reader of this book can
consult also the introduction and postscript of that volume,
and perhaps the footnotes it provides for some of the verses
cited here. Perhaps he or she might even read the translation
in its entirety (I can vouch, if nothing else, for the good faith
of the translator). I am firmly convinced that two millennia of
dogmatic tradition have created in the minds of most of us a
fundamentally misleading picture of a great many of the claims
made in Christian scripture. And I hope that my translation -
simply by restoring certain ambiguities I believe to be present
in the original texts- might help modern readers understand
how it is that a considerable number of educated late antique
Eastern Christians, all of whom were familiar with the New
Testament in the original Greek, felt entirely comfortable with
a universalist construal of its language. It is my conviction, you
see, that the misericordes have always been the ones who got
the story right, to the degree that it is true at all. That is not to
say that they were all in perfect agreement with one another, or
that I am in perfect agreement with all of them regarding every
aspect of that story. I mean only that, if Christianity taken as
a whole is indeed an entirely coherent and credible system of
belief, then the universalist understanding of its message is the
only one possible. And, quite imprudently, I say that without
the least hesitation or qualification.