The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (NWT) is a modern-language translation of the Bible published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc. and the International Bible Students Association of Brooklyn, New York (corporations in use by the religious organization commonly known as Jehovah's Witnesses). It was not the first, nor the last translation to be published by them, but it was their very first original translation of the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts.

History

In October 1946, the president of the Watch Tower Society, Nathan H. Knorr, proposed a fresh translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures. Work got under way on December 2, 1947 when the New World Bible Translation Committee was formed. On September 3, 1949, Knorr convened a joint meeting of the board of directors of both the Watch Tower Society's New York and Pennsylvania corporations to announce that work on a modern-language English translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures was completed and had been turned over to the Society for printing. It was assigned to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania for publication, with the request that the names of the translators not be published. Their stated intent was, "to honor Jehovah God, the Divine Author of his inspired Word." This fact is very frequently cited by critics of the translation in order to suggest that its scholarship is of inferior quality, as the identities of the translators and hence their credentials could never be conclusively verified. However, Raymond Franz, a former member of the Society's Governing Body and nephew of Fred Franz, identified the members of the translation committee as being his uncle Fred Franz, Nathan Knorr, Albert Schroeder and George Gangas. None of the latter had ever studied Bible languages at a college level.

The New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures (New Testament) was released at a convention of Jehovah's Witnesses at Yankee Stadium, New York, on August 2, 1950, to the 82,075 present. The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) was gradually released as five volumes in 1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, and 1960. The complete New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures was released as a single volume in 1961.

The translation does not contain any of the Apocryphal books, as the translators believed that any claim for canonicity on the part of these writings is without solid foundation.

Since the original New World Translation was published in 1950, it has undergone minor revisions on a number of occasions, most recently in 1984. The Watchtower's goal

Why a New Translation Was Commissioned

From the publication of the first issue of The Watchtower magazine in 1879, until the release of the NWT in 1950, Jehovah's Witnesses in English-speaking countries generally used the King James Version or the American Standard Version. In the literature they have produced, Jehovah's Witnesses have quoted liberally from the King James Version and many other translations of the Bible over the years.

According to the publishers, one of the main reasons for publishing a new translation was that the majority of existing Bible versions in common use employed archaic language. The English language has undergone significant changes since 1611, when the Authorised (King James) Version was first published and many words in the KJV are no longer in common use today, or are used in a sense different from that in which the translators intended them. particularly in more obscure passages. (The Hebrew Scriptures as found in the New World Translation is based on Codex Leningradensis B 19A as found in Rudolf Kittel's Biblia Hebraica and the Greek Text is based on Westcott and Hort's The New Testament in the Original Greek. Also considered were texts by Bover, Merk, and Nestle. Newer editions make use of newer texts, for example Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, or BHS, by Kittel, Kahle, Alt and Eissfeldt, from 1967/1977, for the part of the Hebrew Scriptures, and Novum Testamentum Graece, by Aland, Black, and Metzger etc. from 1983, as well as newer lexicons and dictionaries, such as Zorell's Lexicon Hebraicum Veteris Testamenti from 1984 and Würtwein's Der Text des Alten Testaments from 1988.) Additionally, certain aspects of the original Hebrew and Greek languages are perhaps better understood by linguists today than they were previously.

Critics of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the New World Translation argue that the new translation was commissioned not so much to bring the language up to modern use but to remove the strongest evidence of the deity of Jesus Christ from the Christian Scriptures. For this and many other reasons they contend that it was designed specifically to support Jehovah's Witnesses' theology and doctrine.

Characteristics of the Translation

The New World Translation is intended to be a literal rendering rather than a paraphrase.

God's Name in the Old Testament

The Hebrew divine name of God, the Tetragrammaton ("YHWH"), is found in Masoretic versions of the Old Testament 6,828 times, but not in the older Septuagint. Most English translations of the Old Testament follow the standard convention of rendering the Tetragrammaton as "God" Living Bible, or Holman Christian Standard Bible) render the Tetragrammaton as either "Jehovah" or "Yahweh" only a handful of times. The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (NWT) differs significantly

In addition to the 6,828 instances of the Tetragrammaton, the NWT translators introduce 145 more instances where they believe the name should be there, but is not. They cite the works of C.D. Ginsburg (1831-1914) as justification for the additional 145 instances. for the "Author of our salvation."

God's Name in the New Testament

The text of the New Testament is one of the most firmly established of all ancient documents, Of the approximately five thousand discovered ancient New Testament (NT) manuscripts none contain the Tetragrammaton. Despite these texts, Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the Tetragrammaton was removed from the original documents.

The New World Bible Translation Committee theorised that the divine name was removed from NT manuscripts over the first century, post Christ, due to superstition. With this theory in mind, they introduce 237 instances of the divine name into the New Testament. In none of these instances does the Watchtower Society's Greek Kingdom Interlinear Translation use the Tetragrammaton. In 223 of the 237 Jehovah references the Greek word Kyrios is used. In 13 other instances the word is Theos, but never the Tetragrammaton. The Committee used several reasons as justification for the inclusion:

• Passages where the NT writers directly quote Old Testament Scriptures that contain the divine name.
• New Testament scriptures that suggest, according to Jehovah's Witness doctrinal beliefs, that the name would be there if 1st century manuscripts were discovered, most notably Jesus' words as recorded by John (John 17:6): "I have made your name manifest to the men you gave me out of the world.."
• Some post-Christian Greek versions of the Old Testament that contain the Tetragrammaton in paleo-hebraic script within the Greek text.
• Modern Hebrew translations of the New Testament contain the Tetragrammaton in some New Testament passages. of the Tetragrammaton as the exclamation: "Hallelujah!" (Literally: "Praise Yah!" (Truth in Translation pg. 170): "Both practices violate accuracy in favor of denominationally preferred expressions for God."

  See also Jehovah in the New Testament

  Rendering of σταυρός (staurós)

  The cross is an ancient symbol worshiped around the world for centuries before the birth of Jesus. It is also the symbol of Christians worldwide, but the word does not appear in the NWT.

  In the NWT, the Greek word "staurós" is rendered "torture stake," which is rendered "cross" in most other translations. Jehovah's Witnesses maintain that "staurós" has the same basic meaning, of a single piece of timber or pole, as it did in other ancient Greek texts such as the writings of Homer and other classics and that there is nothing in the New Testament itself that says that two pieces of wood were used to crucify Jesus Christ.

  The Anchor Bible Dictionary says about crucifixion: "The act of nailing or binding a living victim or sometimes a dead person to a cross or stake (stauros or skolops) or a tree (xylon)..Under the Roman Empire, crucifixion normally included a flogging beforehand. At times the cross was only one vertical stake. Frequently, however, there was a cross-piece attached.."- Volume 1, pp.1207, 1208. The NWT shows that only "one vertical stake" was used in Jesus' case.

  Comments by such scholars as W. E. Vine in his Expository Dictionary support this, as do others, such as A Critical Lexicon and Concordance to the English and Greek New Testament, by E. W. Bullinger, which states on p. 819:

  "Used here for the stauros on which Jesus was crucified. Both words disagree with the modern idea of a cross, with which we have become familiarized by pictures. The stauros was simply an upright pale or stake to which the Romans nailed those who were thus said to be crucified. Stauroo , merely to drive stakes. It never means two pieces of wood joining each other at any angle. Even the Latin word crux means a mere stake." (The Latin word 'crux' is the root of the word cross.)

  Other Characteristics

  • This translation uses "sheol", "hades", "gehenna","tartarus" where other translations often use "hell".
  • This also uses "presence" as the equivalent of Greek Παρουσία Parousia.
  • It consistently translates into "soul" where the Hebrew word ne'phesh or the Greek word ψυχή psykhē occur.

  The New World Translation in Other Languages

  The New World Translation has been released in 60 languages.

  The complete edition of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures is available in 36 languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Cebuano, Chinese, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English Braille, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Iloko, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese Braille, Portuguese, Sesotho, Shona, Slovakian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tsonga, Tswana, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu.

  The New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures is available in 24 languages: Albanian, Bulgarian, Cibemba, Croatian, Efik, Georgian, Igbo, Italian Braille, Lingala, Macedonian, Malagasy, Maltese, Romanian, Russian, Sepedi, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin script), Sinhala, Slovenian, Spanish Braille, Sranantongo, Turkish, Twi and Ukrainian.

  The Kingdom Interlinear Translation

  The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures contains three Bible texts. The New testament in the Original Greek, by B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, 1881, with a word-for word translation from 1969 underneath, as rendered from the Original Greek Language, by the New World Translation Committee, and English text running alongside it taken from the 1984 revision of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures.

  Further Reading

  Critical

  • Countess, Robert H.: Jehovah's Witnesses' New Testament: A Critical Analysis,
  • David A. Reed Jehovah's Witnesses: Answered Verse by Verse - Note: Author is a former Jehovah's Witness
  • Anthony A. Hoekema The Four Major Cults: Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism (1963, ISBN 0802804454)

  Neutral

  • BeDuhn, Jason: Truth in Translation - Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament,

  Supportive

  • Stafford, Greg: Jehovah's Witnesses Defended. - Note: Author is one of Jehovah's Witnesses
  • Furuli, Rolf: The Role of Theology and Bias in Bible Translation: With a special look at the New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses, 1999. - Note: Author is one of Jehovah's Witnesses
  • Byatt, Anthony and Flemings, Hal (editors): ‘Your Word is Truth’, Essays in Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (1950, 1953), 2004. - Note: The essays' authors, including Rolf Furuli (above), are Jehovah's Witnesses.

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