Nobody who knew Jesus called him "Jesus." In the beginning, he was Yeshua. The New Covenant, a translation of the four Gospels and Revelation by the poet and biblical scholar Willis Barnstone, corrects for that error--and a whole lot of others, as well. One insight impels this translation. "Although the gospels have been traditionally accepted as Christian, they deal with a period before the later followers of Yeshua established a religion now called Christianity," Barnstone explains. "The gospels are simply Jewish texts." The New Covenant, though translated from the Greek, restores the probable Hebrew or Aramaic name not only to Jesus, but to many other familiar people and places, and it renders many speeches in poetry, as they were originally written. Barnstone gives no court to the idea that Jesus’ ministry was a debunking of anti-Semitism. He makes the Gospel a plain book about poor people who find a measure of relief for their suffering, a more shocking and more hopeful story than the reader knew before. --Michael Joseph Gross