I had been very much looking forward to Sarah Ruden’s translation of the Gospels, but now that I know that it features such sentences as 

• “Then he ordered them to have all the people recline in communal cohorts that abutted on the verdant turf. So they reclined by fifties and hundreds, all lined up as in garden allotments.”
• “Happy are the destitute in the life-breath because theirs is the kingdom of the skies.” 
• “But he has it coming, that specimen of mankind through whom the son of mankind is handed over.”

— well, maybe not so much. I understand and in a way approve of the desire to make the character of the Greek visible to the Greekless reader, but when a translation deviates that far from standard English vocabulary and syntax, then I think that the curious reader is better off with an interlinear Greek-English New Testament. Such a text can be forbidding at first, but after a while it becomes a wonderful gift to the person who has no Greek — and (this is what happened to me) it can greatly stimulate the desire to learn Greek. My koine Greek isn’t good, but it’s no longer contemptible, and it’s getting better; and I owe that largely to the time I spent, starting many years ago, in my interlinear New Testament.