The Bible is full of so many contradictions and discrepencies you cannot avoid them if you read the Bible itself rather than merely books about the Bible. This is one of the reasons the WTBTS discourages it's members from reading the Bible directly, or from studying it without Watchtower aid of some kind. At least, when I was a JW over thirty years ago that was the policy. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, was just as strict with its members, but no one saw any similarity. I did.
All sorts of things were my "first doubt" about the WTBTS, but I successfully beat these terrible 'mental demons' into submission, and this allowed me to stay in the New World Society until I was shown the door. A few that I recall offhand:
Church steeples and wedding rings. I recall reading an article about the pagan origins of church steeples. They were borrowed from 'pagan' phallic worship, hence were unclean and unfit for Jehovah's Sparkling Clean Org to use. Then, an article about wedding rings that demonsrated their pagan origin, but excused their use on the grounds they no longer possessed the pagan connotations. Evem at age fifteen I knew this was inconsistent. A church steeple no longer carries any phallic connotations either.
In every instance in the NT where the Greek words "ego eimi" occur, the NWT renders it properly as "I am" except for John 8:58 where it is rendered in the NWT: "Before Abraham was born I have been." There is absolutely no linguistic reason for any other translation than "I am." Of course, such a rendering would identify Jesus with Deity, so it couldn't be allowed to be accurately translated. The usual WTBTS smoke generator was used to confuse and confound the issue.
John 1:1, "a god." The convoluted argument for this translation, based on the lack of the definite article ho before theos, was just too much. As I recall, the argument was that since the definite article is lacking when theos is applied to the Logos, it should be rendered "a god." I found this to be an obvious bit of translational bigotry when I looked at 2 Corinthians 4:4 with my Kingdom Interlinear and discovered that Satan is referred to as "ho theos" (THE God of ths Aion, or Age/Eon). Yet the NWT 'translators' do not render it as The God as they should because of the presence of the definite article. Instead it's rendered "the god." (For those of you who are unaware, the earliest Greek manuscripts of the NT, called Uncials, were written in all capitals, so one cannot make an appeal to the Greek text as to whether one should capitalize "theos" in this verse or not) I brought this up so many times I was eventually told to shut up, though not in those exact words.
On a humorous note, when I was a JW the New English Bible was very much all the rage among the friends in San Jose. The NEB rendering of John 1:1 is "What God was the Word was." This was held up to me by one of the elders as a magnificent translation of this verse (which it is), as if it somehow supported the grotesque and indefensible "a god" rendering of the NWT. Out loud, in the presence of many, my seventeen year old self pointed out to the elder that such a translation of John 1:1 did not support the NWT. He looked at me, obviously puzzled, so I said "God is eternal, infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, so if the Logos is what God is, then the Logos is also these things." A shocked look came over his face and he didn't say a word. No one in my unit ever brought up the NEB again.
I realized this guy wasn't the brightest bulb on the tree by a thousand miles.
I was again, in essence, told to shut up when I kept bringing Isaiah 43:10-11 to everyone's attention, where it says "before me there was no god formed and neither shall there be after me." I would juxtapose this with John 1:1 in the NWT where it reads "a god" and ask them to reconcile these verses. Are we polytheists? I would ask. No one could reconcile the two verses in anything but a convoluted manner full of mental gymnastics, verbal contortions, and special pleading. I was not impressed.
"System of things." This is an excellent translation of Kosmos. It is ridiculous, however, to use this phrase to translate aion as the NWT often does, such as in 2 Cor 4:4. Aion means an aeon or eon, an age, epoch, era, long (but finite) period of time. It has no relationship with kosmos. I am unsure what doctrinal reasons the WTBTS has for hiding the time aspect of aion, but I'm sure it's something they consider dangerous and do not want the 'rank n file' to know about.
To stay a JW one must shut down one's mind, hand it over to the WTBTS and tell them "Here, do my thinking for me and fill my brain with whatever gabble and nonsense you like."
Nate
