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.
An Anonymous Committee
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 the Douglas Walsh trial at Edinburgh (the transcript is in print, and the exchange is cited in the essay). 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.” Credentials, though, are the weakest part of any case against a translation, and this page does not rest on them: a translation is judged by its renderings, and those follow.
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, counting the original 1950 edition, found that 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, and only where doctrine needs it, is not functioning as a rule. 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.”
A Word Added at Colossians 1
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 2013 study note concedes as much, and the word’s dress has changed with the audience: the first edition of 1950 printed it without brackets, as though it belonged to the text; brackets appeared after scholars objected; and the current revision of 2013 has removed them again, printing “all other things” as plain Scripture — while its own study note concedes that the Greek text reads “all things.”
Words Changed Where Doctrine Is at Stake
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 John uses as a divine self-designation, echoing the “I am he” of Isaiah 41–48 rather than matching Exodus 3:14 word for word (the Septuagint there reads ho ōn); the force is Johannine and contextual, not a lexical identity. 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 the lexicons of New Testament Greek do not assign 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. Virtually every standard 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 — the New World Translation’s placement is a minority theological reading, not a grammatical impossibility — and “truly I tell you” occurs seventy-six times in the Gospels (seventy-four in the critical Greek text), never once joined to “today” — every occurrence is listed on the soul page.
A Name Inserted 237 Times
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. Peter applies Psalm 34’s “taste and see” — said of Jehovah — to Christ, and the NWT keeps “the Lord” (1 Pet. 2:3). Peter takes up Isaiah 8:13, where it is Jehovah of armies who is to be sanctified, and the NWT reads “sanctify the Christ as Lord” (1 Pet. 3:15). Hebrews addresses to the Son the psalm in which Jehovah laid the foundations of the earth, and the NWT keeps “O Lord” (Heb. 1:10). In each place its own rule would make Jesus Jehovah, and in each place the rule is withheld. At Romans 10:13 the insertion is made — “everyone who calls on the name of Jehovah will be saved” — but the Lord of Paul’s own argument, confessed with the mouth and “the same Lord over all,” is Jesus (Rom. 10:9–12), so the inserted name severs the very chain it sits in. Withheld or supplied, the tool built to divide Father from Son breaks wherever the apostles unite them.
The Scholars Cited in Support
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 shows how thin the support becomes once each citation is read in context. 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 Strongest Reply
The Society’s best defense is grammatical and textual, and it has
real scholars behind it. On John 1:1 it cites Philip Harner’s 1973
article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, which found that
anarthrous predicate nouns before the verb “are primarily
qualitative in meaning,” so that the clause describes what the
Word was rather than who; and it cites Jason BeDuhn, who rates the New
World Translation among the most accurate of the versions he compared.
On the divine name it points to Papyrus Fouad 266, a Septuagint fragment
of the first century B.C.E. in which the Tetragrammaton stands in Hebrew
letters inside the Greek text, and argues that the copies of the Greek
Old Testament the apostles quoted “likely read” the divine
name (NWT 2013, Appendix C1), so that “Lord” in the New
Testament manuscripts is a later substitution the translation reverses.
Harner’s article does not say “a god.” His conclusion
is that the clause is qualitative — his own suggested rendering is
“the Word had the same nature as God” — and the
indefinite reading the New World Translation prints is not the one he
defended. BeDuhn, as noted above, accepts “a god” and
rejects the insertion of “Jehovah” as “a conjectural
emendation” against “the most basic principle of
accuracy”: the Society’s witness on the grammar is the
prosecution’s witness on the name. As for Fouad 266, it is a
Jewish copy of the Old Testament, and it shows what Jewish scribes did
with the Hebrew name in a Greek Bible. The question is what the apostles
wrote, and there the evidence is not thin but total. Every one of the
more than five thousand Greek manuscripts of the New Testament reads
kyrios, “Lord,” and the earliest papyri, from the
second and third centuries, already write it as a sacred abbreviation. A
reading attested by no manuscript is not a restoration.
The translation’s own foreword makes fidelity to the text its
principle. The 237 insertions are the one place it abandons that
principle, and they are the place its theology most needs.
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.
What remains if this claim fails. You do not have to lose the Bible if a translation is flawed. What this page establishes is that the New World Translation departs from the Greek at the verses where its doctrine needs it. What it does not establish is that everything else in it is wrong, or that any other version is beyond criticism. Several reliable translations are named in the References panel, and the Greek is the judge of all of them.
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.
