by gold_morning 137 Replies latest watchtower bible
They acknowlege they took the 432 times Adonay was used in the Hebrew scriptures and replaced it with Jehovah in 134 passages. leaving Lord in 298 times.
How did they go about choosing which passages would be replaced with Jehovah and which ones would not?
Only in the instances that would better support their doctrine?
Have they ever addressed this?
Regards,
I.Wonder
Great thread gold_morning!
Let's face it. I know next to nothing about the Greek language and I am admittedly lost in these types of discussions.
From what I understand----the main translator (Fred Franz) of the NWT from the WTS.....was not a Greek scholar either, so there we have the conflict of the accuracy in which this bible version was written.
Oh yes....it may very well BE much "easier to understand" than many versions one can buy......but this does not prove how correct the translating IS! We have only to do a little searching to discover that the NWT, much like the WTS that promotes it, is lacking in its true credibility.
Annie
Paul himself killed the connection you are trying to make by shifting from the feminine gender of PASHS to the neuter of PANTA. For Paul to be refering to the same PAS we would expect the same gender in the adjective.
The reason PASHS KTISEWS implies "other" is because based upon the demonstratable use of PRWTOTOKOS at that time, the text best reads as a partitive genitive. In fact, other than a genitive of source (which is impossible here) , PRWTOTOKOS is not used otherwise.
Mondo
The Watchtower Society has never had an ACTUAL scholar in the sense of somebody with a master's degree demonstrating competency under test by rigorous examination in an accredited university.
All they ever had was crackpots.
Fred Franz was a brilliant crackpot.
The fruit of his obsessive mania was the colorful interpretive nonsense that litters the road along the way in book after book and magazine after magazine leading to the utter disaster of 1974.
Fred Franz was no scholar. He was a guy who would take a picture puzzle and trim the puzzle piece to fit an opening. The resulting picture resembled nonsense. Which is exactly what Jehovah's Witnesess leave as a legacy in their theology.
Fred Franz had a library full of reference books by...GASP!..accredited scholars, mainstream thinkers, fringe lunatics and secular writers as well as Spiritualists and nutjobs.
Franz gleaned many nuggets of fool's gold in this library.
If you take the time to read the works of Aquinas, Augustine, Martin Luther, etc. you find where Freddy's eyeball lingered over the page here and there. The rest was pure imagination.
All of this, mind you, was passed off to the rest of us gullible dimwits as FOOD AT THE PROPER TIME. It was not food at all.
The intellectual dishonesty of the Watchtower methodology only becomes obvious when it is pointed out repeatedly. And even then, you have to WANT to see it happening to disapprove of it and draw the logical conclusions.
If you are a member in good standing; why would you wish to know this awful truth? You wouldn't!
If you are standing on the outside of the organization and you see it; it does you no good either because nobody inside is allowed to listen to a word you say.
Consequently, the religion marches on in self-induced trance of utter complacency.
I too get lost in these greek topics, but I agree with Terry and his conclusion. I discuss these things with members of my family - as I am not DA/DF or any other D at present. When I point out these things you can hear the cogs grinding and cracking as they fight against the thoughts, give up and say 'Well Jehovah will show us what is right' - or that well used 'I will leave it in Jehovahs hands' cop-out. You have to have a good reason to want to know this stuff and most dubbies don't.
Yep. I wrote 'em and told 'em I knew what they were doing with those brackets, but they really don't give a shit, since they had me df'd so I couldn't tell anyone else that mattered to them.
What's really, really interesting is to locate some of these bracketed words in their NWT, then look up the scripture in the INTERLINEAR to see how it really DOES affect the original translation. How very tricky they are to do this!
Frannie
Frannie,
An interlinear translation is a completely different type of translation and should not be used by those without at least a basic understanding of Greek and translation principles. You would find the same "issues" that you see with the NWT with any other Bible too if they were compared without understanding what is going on in the text.
Mondo
Mondo,
Paul himself killed the connection you are trying to make by shifting from the feminine gender of PASHS to the neuter of PANTA. For Paul to be refering to the same PAS we would expect the same gender in the adjective.
I don't know whether you have studied Greek and are just being facetious, or you are playing with concordances and analytical lexica and simply showing ignorance.
Of course pas occurs in two different cases, because in v. 15 it functions as an adjective qualifying ktisis (feminine) and in v. 16 it is substantivated as a noun with the article in the neuter (ta panta = "all" or "all things"). The real issue is whether "all creation" in v. 15 and "all things" in v. 16 refer to the same signifié or not. In the NWT they don't, since "all creation" includes Christ and "all (other) things" excludes him. This introduces a breach of logic in the reasoning, and the link hoti ("because") doesn't work quite as well imo.
You (or the WT) interpret prôtotokos in a purely chronological sense, as a "firstborn" among siblings (tell me if I'm wrong). To me this hardly suits what follows. Are all the younger brothers and sisters in a family begotten in (en), through (dia) and for/into (eis) the eldest son (v. 16)? Do they all subsist in him(en autô sunestèken, v. 17)? Sure, for this to happen the prôtotokos has to be chronologically (or metaphorically) anterior (pro, 17a), but if chronological anteriority is the only point which the author tries to make (as the NWT implies) he is trying to kill a fly with a bazooka (hope you'll get this metaphor).
As to the hierarchical meaning of prôtotokos -- comparable to the use of prôtogonos for the logos in Philo -- it makes a lot of sense on the LXX background: check TDNT VI, 871ff for a start.
Paul himself killed the connection you are trying to make by shifting from the feminine gender of PASHS to the neuter of PANTA. For Paul to be refering to the same PAS we would expect the same gender in the adjective.
No. The change in gender does not imply a shift in reference. The first instance of the word is feminine because it has nominal agreement with ktiseós "creation". But in v. 16ff it is used substantively and it doesn't agree with anything. It has the neuter sense of "all things" (i.e. not all men or all women). The feminine equivalent pasas is never used as a substantive in the NT; all instances of it involve agreement with feminine nouns (cf. Matthew 4:8, 9:35, 28:20; Mark 4:13, Luke 4:5, Acts 8:40, 26:11; Ephesians 3:21; 1 Peter 2:1). The same is true in the case of the singular. An example of a feminine substantive pas is pasai in Matthew 25:5, where it means "all (the women)" in reference to the virgins in the preceding sentence. The change in gender in Colossians 1:15-16 is similar to the shift in Matthew 4:8-9:
"And the Devil took him up a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms (pasas tas basileias, pasas = feminine plural) of the world and their glory. And he said to him, "All these things (tauta panta, panta = neuter plural) I will give you if you will fall down and worship me".
Here again we have a shift from feminine to neuter without a change in reference.
Note also Narkissos' point about the logical relation indicated by hoti "because". Verse 16ff is indicated to clarify the reason why Jesus is the "firstborn of all creation". These verses describe not his created status but his role in creation and his status as supreme over all things. This makes a genitive of subordination a plausible reading. There has been much speculation in the literature on the prehistory of this hymn and I suspect that the language did have its origin in Wisdom poetry that posited the figure as created (cf. ektésato me and the use of the genitive in ho theos ektésato me prótistén tón heautou ergón "God acquired me as the very first of his works" in Philo of Alexandria, pas that excludes the created Wisdom in protera pantón ekistai sophia "Wisdom was created before all [other] things" in Sirach 1:4, etc.), but I am doubtful that the present form of the hymn in Colossians reads the same way for the reasons mentioned earlier.
Good response! We seem to have been writing at the same time.
