Recent Articles

New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (NWT) is a translation of the Bible. It is published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc. and used by Jehovah's Witnesses as their primary translation.

The New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures (New Testament) was released at a convention of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Yankee Stadium, New York, on August 2, 1950. The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) originally appeared in five volumes between 1953 and 1960, a single-volume edition being produced in 1963. The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society has never disclosed the names of the translators, who requested to remain anonymous, even after their death, a fact often pointed to by detractors of the Witnesses and this translation.

However, former members of the Jehovah's Witnesses organization have claimed the members of the committee are Nathan H. Knorr (President of the society), Frederick W. Franz (Vice-President), George D. Cangas, and Albert D. Schroeder. According to Raymond V. Franz, the "principal translator of the Society's New World Translation" was Frederick W. Franz. (ISBN 0914675230) According to M. James Penton, "to all intents and purposes the New World Translation is the work of one man, Frederick Franz." (ISBN 0802079733) It must be noted that these claims come from people who are highly critical of the organization of Jehovah's Witnesses, their views reflecting such a standpoint. Franz afterwards became the President of the organization, from 1977 to 1992, and was responsible for the revisions.

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. Watch Tower literature has quoted liberally from the King James Version, and many other editions of the Bible over the years. The Watch Tower Society advanced the following reasons for commissioning the original English-language New World Translation.

Firstly, when the new translation was commissioned in the mid-20th century, the majority of 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. The intention was to produce a fresh translation, free of archaisms.

Over the centuries since the King James version was produced, more copies of earlier manuscripts of the original texts in the Hebrew and Greek languages have become available. Better manuscript evidence has made it possible to determine with greater accuracy what the original writers intended, particularly in more obscure passages. (The New World Translation is based on the Westcott and Hort Greek text and the Biblia Hebraica text of Rudolf Kittel.) Additionally, certain aspects of the original Hebrew and Greek languages are perhaps better understood by linguists today than they were previously. More controversially, Jehovah's Witnesses felt that doctrinal misunderstandings and preconceived ideas of previous translators of the Bible had affected their work, a charge which, conversely, critics apply to the New World Translation.

Characteristics of the translation

The New World Translation is intended to be a literal rendering rather than a paraphrase. To a very great extent, one English word has been selected for each Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic word and effort has been made to adhere to this rendering, context allowing. Some maintain that this makes the translation sound wooden, stiff or verbose, whereas others feel that it favors accuracy, facilitates cross-reference work and helps preserve the flavor of the original texts.

Unlike many other versions, the translation uses the name Jehovah throughout the Old Testament portion, as well as in 237 places in the New Testament, particularly in the case of quotations from or allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures passages where the name is found. The use of the name Jehovah in the New Testament translation, although not unprecedented, is contested by many. This is because the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters reprsenting the Divine Name and usually transliterated as YHWH or JHVH and the basis the name ?Jehovah?, is found several thousand times in the original manuscripts that make up the 39 books of the Old Testament, written largely in Hebrew, but nowhere in the New Testament, written in Greek. Defenders of the translation justify this readily by noting that modern translations of the Bible often substitute the better-known Hebrew names for the lesser-known (to English-speakers) Greek forms of those names, such as "Isaiah" rather than the Greek "Esaias", "Jeremiah" for "Jeremias", etc., in the New Testament rather than the former, more confusing practice (followed in the KJV) of merely transliterating the Greek names, and that therefore the use of ?Jehovah? in the New Testament is just the logical extension of this. Detractors dispute this, and also note that the pronunciation ?Jehovah? was likely never the one used by the ancient Hebrews for the Divine Name, which many scholars feel was more likely to have been "Yahweh" or "Yahveh". Jehovah's Witnesses maintain that if the change from using the spelling ?Jehovah? were changed to ?Yahweh? on the grounds that this would more closely adhere to the believed ancient Hebrew pronunciation that then a consistent approach to the translation fo the Biblical text would produce Yirmeyah´ for Jeremiah, Isaiah would then become Yesha`ya´hu, and even Jesus would be Yehohshu´a` (from ancient Hebrew) or Iesous´ (from Greek). In any event, the term in English ?Jehovah? traditionally identifies the true God in some earlier English translations, and the correct ancient Hebrew pronunciation can only be guessed at today since long before the time of the New Testament the Hebrews had ceased to pronounce the Name aloud, having come to regard it as so sacred as to be ineffable and substituting "the Lord" instead, as most major English translations do (spelling it with all small caps as LORD, in order to differentiate the term from the Hebrew term which already translates as "Lord").

Other Editions

Since the original New World Translation was published in 1950, it has undergone minor revisions on a number of occasions, most recently in 1984, and been retranslated into many other languages. Currently the New Testament is available in 45 languages, the Old Testament in 28.

The translation has been produced in a number of editions, including a pocket-sized edition, a standard edition with cross-references, a reference edition with footnotes and appendix material, a four-volume large-print edition for the visually impaired. It is also available in Grade Two English Braille, and on audiocassettes.

The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures presents the Greek text of the New Testament, edited by Westcott and Hort, with a word-for-word translation underneath, and the text of the New World Translation in a separate column for comparison. It was first published in 1969.

Reaction to the translation

Although the translation is aimed chiefly at the Jehovah's Witness community, millions of persons of a variety of religious backgrounds have acquired and read it. Over the last fifty years, approximately 122,000,000 copies have been printed, making it one of the most widely-circulated English language translations in history. (For comparison, Jehovah's Witnesses and associates number around 16,000,000 worldwide.)

Some critics charge that the New World Translation is a rewriting of the Bible to conform to Jehovah's Witnesses' doctrines, as it does not support some of the key traditions characteristic of mainstream Christianity, such as belief in hellfire, and the Trinity doctrine. In particular, its rendering of the latter part of John 1:1, "and the Word was a god," though not unique, has been the subject of much debate.

Many argue that the NWT only selectively adheres to The Watchtower magazine.

In 1998, Rolf Furuli, one of Jehovah's Witnesses and a lecturer in Semitic Languages at the University of Oslo, published 'The Role of Theology and Bias in Bible Translation: With a special look at the New World Translation of Jehovah's Witnesses', in which he defends the literalness of the NWT.

A number of Jehovah's Witnesses have entered into online debates or published web sites in defence of the 'New World Translation'. One such site is Jehovah's Witnesses United .

External Links