The New World Translation

New World Translation

“So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.”

2 Peter 3:15–16

Jehovah’s Witnesses read a Bible of their own — the New World Translation, produced by the Watch Tower Society and used by Witnesses almost to the exclusion of every other version. They present it as the most accurate English Bible ever made: a faithful, literal rendering from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, with God’s name “Jehovah” restored to its rightful place.

But is it? A translation should be judged not by whether we like its theology, but by whether it renders the original text honestly — and whether the translators’ own stated rules are applied evenly, rather than bent wherever the text resists a cherished doctrine. By that fair standard, the New World Translation runs into serious trouble: at John 1:1 (“the Word was a god”), at Colossians 1:16 (“all [other] things”), and at a long train of verses touching the deity of Christ, the personhood of the Holy Spirit, and the sacraments.

Let’s put the translation on trial — by its own rules, and by the verdict of scholars across the traditions — and see … Is the New World Translation an honest rendering of the Bible, or a system of belief dressed as a translation?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Watchtower View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

Jehovah’s Witnesses regard the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (NWT) as the most accurate and trustworthy English Bible available, and use it almost exclusively. They present it not as a sectarian paraphrase but as a faithful, largely literal rendering made directly from the original languages.

What They Affirm

A translation from the original languages. The Watchtower describes the NWT as “a translation of the Holy Scriptures made directly from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into modern-day English by a committee of anointed witnesses of Jehovah,” who felt a “special responsibility to transmit his thoughts and declarations as accurately as possible.” For the Hebrew text they used Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica; for the Greek, the text of Westcott and Hort.1

Accurate and consistent, not paraphrased. The translation committee stated its aim as “as literal a translation as possible where the modern English idiom allows,” assigning “to each major word… one meaning” and holding to it as far as context permitted. On this basis Witnesses hold that the NWT is more consistent and less doctrinally colored than the traditional versions, which (they argue) import the creeds of “Christendom” into the text.2

The divine name restored. The feature Witnesses prize most is the restoration of God’s personal name, “Jehovah,” to the Scriptures — 6,973 times in the Hebrew Scriptures and 237 times in the Christian Greek Scriptures. They argue that the name stood in the original Hebrew, that the New Testament writers (and Jesus himself) used it when quoting the Hebrew Scriptures, and that an apostate Church later removed it in favor of “Lord,” obscuring the distinction between Jehovah and his Son.3

Anonymous, that God may receive the glory. The translation committee chose to remain anonymous, the Watchtower says, because “it is the truth rather than its servant that should be honored.” The translators “did not seek prominence for themselves,” wishing the credit to go to the Divine Author rather than to men. The Society notes that some other versions (such as the New American Standard Bible) likewise do not name their translators.4

Endorsed, they say, by scholars. The Watchtower cites a number of scholars and reviewers — among them Edgar Goodspeed, Alexander Thomson, Benjamin Kedar, Jason BeDuhn, and others — whom it presents as praising the NWT’s accuracy, and points to grammarians and translations it reads as supporting its rendering “a god” at John 1:1.5

Endnotes
  1. “New World Translation,” in Reasoning From the Scriptures (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, 1985), 276–277, and the foreword to the Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures. As the basis for the Hebrew Scriptures the committee used Rudolf Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica (1951–1955 editions); for the Christian Greek Scriptures, the Westcott and Hort text (1881). ↩
  2. The committee’s stated principles appear in the foreword to the Kingdom Interlinear Translation (1969 and 1985 eds.), pp. 9–10: “We offer no paraphrase of Scripture…. To each major word we have assigned one meaning and have held to that meaning as far as context permitted.” The claim that the NWT is uniquely consistent and free of creedal bias recurs throughout the Society’s literature. ↩
  3. On the restoration of the divine name, see The Divine Name That Will Endure Forever (Watch Tower, 1984) and the appendix to the Kingdom Interlinear Translation. The Society appeals in part to the work of George Howard on the Tetragrammaton in the Septuagint. ↩
  4. The appeal to anonymity and the quotation of C. T. Russell (“It is the truth rather than its servant that should be honored”) appear in Awake!, October 22, 1989, 20, and Reasoning From the Scriptures, 277. ↩
  5. For the Watchtower’s roster of supporting scholars and translations, see the appendix to the Kingdom Interlinear Translation (1985), the NWT 1984 Appendix 6A, and Awake!, March 22, 1987, 10–14. ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic Church has no objection to new translations of Scripture, nor to translations made by those outside her communion. The objection to the New World Translation is narrower and graver: at the points where the Watchtower’s distinctive doctrines are at stake, it does not render the Greek; it corrects it. Words are added that no manuscript contains, a word is translated one way for the Father and another for the Son, punctuation is placed where doctrine requires it, and a divine name is inserted into a New Testament that never uses it. The evidence for this is not a matter of interpretation. It can be checked.

The Translators They Hid

No major modern version hides its translators. The New World Translation committee was kept secret, and its names are known only because insiders disclosed them; of the five, only Frederick Franz had any claim to the original languages. How thin that claim was became a matter of public record in 1954, when Franz testified under oath in a Scottish courtroom. Asked who the translators were, he answered, “That is an absolute secret.” Asked to render Genesis 2:4 into Hebrew, he declined: “No, I won’t attempt to do that.” It is the kind of exercise a second-year seminary student performs without difficulty.

Judged by Its Own Rule

The best-known reading is John 1:1, where the New World Translation has “the Word was a god.” The defense offered is a grammatical rule: theos stands without the definite article in the third clause, and a noun without the article, it is said, is indefinite.

The decisive objection is not that the rule is debatable but that the Watchtower does not follow it. Robert Countess counted every instance: theos appears without the article 282 times in the New Testament, and the New World Translation renders it “a god,” “god,” or “godly” in sixteen of them, six percent. The other ninety-four percent are “God.” In the prologue of John itself, theos stands without the article in verses 6, 12, 13, and 18, and the translation renders every one of them “God,” except 1:1c, where doctrine requires otherwise. A rule applied six percent of the time, at the convenient places, is not a rule but a pretext. Daniel Wallace makes the point from the other side: applied honestly to the same prologue, the principle would yield “in a beginning,” “the Word was a life,” and a man sent from God whose name was “a John.”

The Word They Added

At Colossians 1:16–17 Paul writes that in Christ all things were created, and that He is before all things. If Christ created all things, He is not among the things created. The New World Translation cannot allow this, and so inserts a word: all other things. Christ becomes the first creature, who then made the rest.

There is no word for “other” (allos) in the Greek. The translators know it, which is why later editions enclose the word in brackets. The telling detail is historical: the first edition of 1950 printed it without brackets, as though it belonged to the text, and the brackets appeared only after scholars objected.

The Words They Changed

Once the pattern is seen it recurs, always running one direction. Proskuneō is a single Greek word; the translation renders it “worship” when the object is the Father and “do obeisance” every time the object is the Son (Matt. 14:33; Heb. 1:6). The word did not change, and the seam shows, because earlier editions had Jesus worshipped at Hebrews 1:6 until the 1971 revision altered it.

At John 8:58 Jesus says egō eimi, “I am” — the absolute phrase that echoes how God names Himself at the burning bush and through Isaiah. The translation renders that phrase “I am” everywhere else in John and only here reads “I have been,” dissolving an allusion the crowd plainly caught, since they at once took up stones for blasphemy.

Nor does the pattern stop there. “Eternal punishment” becomes “everlasting cutting-off” at Matthew 25:46 — a meaning no lexicon assigns kolasis, which means “punishment.” And at Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1, “our great God and Savior” is split into two persons against a fixed rule of Greek syntax (Granville Sharp’s), which some eighty parallel constructions confirm without exception — but only here, where the undivided reading would call Jesus God.

At Luke 23:43 the method needs no Greek word at all, only a comma. Every other translation reads “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise”; the New World Translation moves the comma one word to the right, so that Christ merely speaks today and the promise recedes into an indefinite future. The manuscripts have no punctuation, so the comma is the translator’s decision, and “truly I tell you” occurs some seventy-six times in the Gospels, never once joined to “today.”

The Name They Inserted

The feature the Watchtower is proudest of is the appearance of “Jehovah” in the New Testament 237 times. A word of fairness is owed here: reverence for the divine name is not wrong, and where the Hebrew name genuinely stands in the Old Testament, no Catholic need object to rendering it.

But the New Testament authors did not use it. Where they quote even the most sacred texts, they write kyrios, “Lord,” and not one of the thousands of surviving Greek manuscripts contains the Tetragrammaton. The insertion is also selective: “Jehovah” replaces “Lord” where the referent is taken to be the Father, and never in the some four hundred places where “Lord” is applied to Jesus. The rule is built to produce its own conclusion: a clean separation, in English, that the Greek does not make.

The seam shows wherever the New Testament applies an Old Testament “Jehovah” text to Christ. At Romans 10:13 — “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved,” quoting Joel’s “name of Jehovah” — the substitution is quietly suspended, because here it would make Jesus Jehovah. The tool built to divide Father from Son breaks in the one place it would unite them.

The Scholars They Quoted

Faced with the weight of scholarship against it, the Watchtower has assembled a list of authorities said to support “a god.” Read in context, most of them say the opposite. Julius Mantey demanded a retraction. William Barclay wrote that judicious cutting had made him appear to say the reverse of what he meant. C. H. Dodd is quoted granting that “a god” cannot be faulted word for word, with the next sentence omitted, in which he calls it unacceptable because it runs counter to the whole current of Johannine thought. George Howard, whose Septuagint theory the Society borrows for the divine name, protested that the use made of it “goes beyond the evidence” and was “designed to support JW theology.” Others on the list are not New Testament scholars at all. The list is not evidence of scholarly support; it is evidence of how far one must go to manufacture the appearance of it. For years the Society even cited the New Testament of Johannes Greber — by his own account a spiritist medium whose translation came with the help of the “spirit world” — dropping him only in 1983.

The newest name on the list, Jason BeDuhn, deserves separate treatment, because unlike the others he is not misquoted: his Truth in Translation (2003) genuinely does rate the NWT among the most accurate of the nine versions it compares. Three things should be said. His degrees are in religious studies and the comparative study of religions, not Greek or linguistics — the fields whose settled judgment he sets aside — and the fullest published review of his book catalogues elementary errors in his linguistic terminology. He stands nearly alone against the field. And, decisively, the Watchtower’s own best witness condemns the translation’s signature feature: introducing “Jehovah” into the New Testament, BeDuhn writes, “is not accurate translation by the most basic principle of accuracy: adherence to the original Greek text” — a “conjectural emendation” unsupported by a single Greek manuscript. The one modern scholar the Watchtower can cite in its favor endorses the grammar of “a god” and testifies against the insertions that give the organization’s Bible — and the organization itself — the divine name they are built on.

The Reply in Brief

A translation is a promise: that what the reader meets in his own tongue is what the author wrote. Every departure catalogued here runs in one direction, and each arrives exactly where Watchtower doctrine needs it: a word added at Colossians, a rule suspended at John 1:1, a comma shifted at Luke, a name supplied 237 times that no manuscript supplies. Any one might be an error of judgment. Together they are a method.

What the Catholic owes the word of God is reverence, and reverence begins with letting it say what it says.

This is the short answer. The full treatment — the translation committee’s history in detail, the Greber episode at length, and complete documentation for every reading cited here — is available as a Word document at the end of this page.

Summary

The Watchtower presents the New World Translation as the most accurate English Bible, made from the original languages and freed of creedal bias. Tested by its own stated rules, and by the judgment of most scholars outside the organization, it proves to be the reverse: a translation engineered to defend Watchtower doctrine, altering the text precisely where the text resists and leaving it alone where it does not.

Anonymous and untrained translators. No major modern version hides its translators. The NWT committee was kept secret, and its names are known only because insiders disclosed them. Of the five, only Frederick Franz had any claim to the languages, having studied two years of classical Greek and taught himself Hebrew. In a 1954 Scottish courtroom, asked under oath to render Genesis 2:4 into Hebrew, he answered, “No, I won’t attempt to do that.” A second-year seminary student could have done it.

“A god,” by a rule followed six percent of the time. The NWT’s “the Word was a god” (John 1:1) rests on the absence of the Greek article before theos. But theos stands without the article 282 times in the New Testament, and the NWT renders it “a god” or the like in only sixteen of them, about six percent, translating the rest “God.” Even within John’s prologue (vv. 6, 12, 13, 18) it reads “God” every time except 1:1c. Applied honestly, the rule would yield “a beginning,” “a life,” “from a god,” “a John,” none of which the NWT ever writes.

The grammarians, including their own, disagree. Daniel Wallace finds the indefinite reading “weak” and suspects “strong theological bias.” Julius Mantey, whose grammar the Watchtower had cited in its own defense, wrote to demand a retraction: “It is neither scholarly nor reasonable to translate John 1:1 ‘The Word was a god.’… The evidence appears to be 99% against them.” Metzger called it “a frightful mistranslation”; Barclay, “intellectually dishonest”; Rowley, “an insult to the Word of God.”

A word added. At Colossians 1:16–17 the NWT inserts “other” four times, giving “all [other] things,” though no word for “other” (allos) appears in the Greek. The insertion converts Christ the Creator of all things into one creature who made the other things. In the 1950 edition the word appeared without brackets, as if it were Scripture. The brackets came only when scholars objected.

Words changed, always in one direction. “Worship” becomes “obeisance,” but only where Jesus receives it (Matt. 14:33; Heb. 1:6). “I am” becomes “I have been” at John 8:58 alone, erasing the echo of Exodus 3:14. “Eternal punishment” becomes “everlasting cutting-off” (Matt. 25:46), a meaning no lexicon allows. “Our great God and Savior” is split into two persons (Titus 2:13; 2 Pet. 1:1), against Granville Sharp’s rule. The Spirit becomes an “active force” and an “it.” “This is my body” becomes “This means my body.” Every change falls on the side of Watchtower doctrine.

A comma moved to fit a doctrine. At Luke 23:43 the NWT shifts a single comma, giving “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise,” so that Jesus’ promise of Paradise no longer falls on that very day. This supports the Watchtower denial that the soul survives death. The manuscripts carried no punctuation at all, so the comma is the translator’s choice, and Jesus’ formula “Truly I tell you” appears some seventy-six times in the Gospels without ever once being expanded to “truly I tell you today.” What He said was, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

A name inserted, selectively. The NWT puts “Jehovah” into the New Testament 237 times, though no Greek manuscript contains the Tetragrammaton. The desire to honor God’s name is not wrong in itself. The problem is that the substitution is made only where the referent is the Father, never in the some 400 places where “Lord” names Jesus, and it is quietly dropped where an Old Testament “Jehovah” text is applied to Christ (Rom. 10:13). The tool built to divide Father from Son fails at the one verse that would have united them.

Scholars quoted against their meaning. The Watchtower’s list of supporting authorities collapses on inspection. Mantey, Barclay and Dodd each protested that they had been quoted to say the opposite of what they meant. Many of the rest are nineteenth-century Unitarians and Christadelphians who denied Christ’s deity on principle, and one of them, Benjamin Wilson, actually rendered the verse “the Word was God.” For years the Society even cited the spiritist medium Johannes Greber, dropping him only in 1983.

In short: a translation is a promise that what the reader has in front of him is, as nearly as honest labor can make it, what the inspired authors wrote. Measured against that promise the New World Translation does not qualify. What it offers is the theology of the Watchtower, printed in the form of a Bible. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1), not “a god.”

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Is the New World Translation Accurate? (.docx)

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