The New World Translation is a Mess

by Amazing 144 Replies latest jw friends

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  under_believer

  Yes, those are things which I, being the good little JW true believer, glossed past and accepted as perfectly reasonable "adjustments" to the scared text. However, those are, from the beginning, clearly delineated in the NWT as being just what they are: insertions, not translations.

  I find that argument to be disingenuous. When you were a Witness, did you think about how the NWT was translated? Whether "Jehovah" in the New Testament was an insertion or a translation? Whether this was acceptable to you? Perhaps you can honestly say you did, but how many of your Witness peers did the same? For 99% of these folks, the NWT is simply the Word of God, and they see "Jehovah" in the NT as being in the original text. The Society's honesty on this matter is irrelevant given the weight the translation is given elsewhere and how little attention is called to that particular method of translation.

  Even though the Society admits the facts of the matter in the Divine Name brochure, many Witnesses are unaware of this fact and will actually argue it until it's pointed out to them. I've personally experienced this on a number of occasions.
• 

  onacruse

  under_believer:

  Yes, those are things which I, being the good little JW true believer, glossed past and accepted as perfectly reasonable "adjustments" to the scared text. However, those are, from the beginning, clearly delineated in the NWT as being just what they are: insertions, not translations.

  When you were a Witness, did you think about how the NWT was translated?

  No, I did not. I accepted, without question, and offered it to countless people in the d2d work, as the best translation on this planet, rendered from the hands of the only truly spirit-anointed people, who were thereby better than any other scholars on this planet.

  Whether "Jehovah" in the New Testament was an insertion or a translation? Whether this was acceptable to you?

  I'm being really honest here: I took the insertion of "Jehovah" into the NT as being a totally justifiable and reasonable rectification of the errors that Babylon the Great had committed over the previous centuries.

  Perhaps you can honestly say you did, but how many of your Witness peers did the same? For 99% of these folks, the NWT is simply the Word of God, and they see "Jehovah" in the NT as being in the original text.

  And for that same 99% of folks, they never cracked the cover of their Reference Bible, nor, even if they had, they wouldn't have had a clue what "p46" or "aleph" or "Vaticanus" meant.

  The Society's honesty on this matter is irrelevant given the weight the translation is given elsewhere and how little attention is called to that particular method of translation.

  Translation by democracy?
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  Hoping4Change

  I havent fully read through the chapter in Jason BeDuhn's book on the John 1:1 subject, but in his concluding paragraph, "Summing up" (pgs 132-133), he states this:

  "Grammatically, John 1:1 is not a difficult verse to translate. It follows familiar, ordinary structures of Greek expression. A lexical ("interlinear") translation of the controversial clause would read: "And a god was the Word." A minimal literal ("formal equivalence") translation would rearrange the word order to match proper English expression: "And the Word was a god." The preponderance of evidence, from Greek grammar, from literary context, and from cultural environment, supports this translation, of which "the Word was divine" would be a slightly more polished variant carrying the same basic meaning. Both of these renderings are superior to the traditional translation which goes aganist these threee key factors that guide accurate translation. The NASB, NIV, NRSV, and NAB follow the translation concocted by the KJV translators. This translation awaits a proper defense, since no obvious one emerges from Greek grammar, the literary context of Jon, or the cultural environment in which John is writing." ........ "The NW translation of John 1:1 is superior to that of the other eight translations we are comparing. I do not think it is the best possible translation for a modern English reader, but at least it breaks with the KJV tradition followed by all the others, and it does so in the right direction by paying attention to how Greek grammar and syntax actually work. No translation of John 1:1 that I can imagine is going to be perfectly clear and ovious in its meaning. John is subtle, and we do him no service by reducing his subtlety to crude simplicities. All that we can ask is that a translationbe an accurate starting pointfor exposition and interpretation. Only the NW achieves that, as provocative as it sounds to the modern reader. The other translations cut off the exploration of the verse's meaning before it has even begun."
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  TopHat

  MAD! Are you saying that NO Bible translation can be trusted?
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  metatron

  I have to agree that there may be a subtlety in John 1:1 that is hard to capture. However, the

  writer of this Gospel had some odd, almost Gnostic ideas. If John 1:18 really did say 'only begotten

  god' then it gets really weird. Imagine a Witness saying things like this on the platform and getting

  dragged off. However, the injection of "Jehovah" is clearly the most outrageous error of the NWT.

  Again and again, Jesus avoided using the Tetragrammaton - of which the Lord's Prayer is the most

  surprizing example.

  metatron
• 

  Narkissos

  Add the rhetoric in 10:33ff for good measure... in the Johannine perspective of inclusive divinity extending to the elect, which is explained away by both Trinitarians and (neo-)Arians.

  Among the most questionable renderings of the NWT, I would count the translation of the non-commutative en by a commutative "in union with" (already mentioned), which reduces the paradox of the reciprocal statements in John (I in you and you in me) to a mere tautology.

  The untenable rendering of Jeremiah 29:10, already discussed at length with scholar a couple of years ago (although this one is taken from the KJV).

  The addition of quotation marks to "Samuel" in 1 Samuel 28...

  The addition of "his" in Romans 6:7, discussed recently.

  We should get to a dozen of serious cases if we think about it long enough.
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  Outaservice

  I actually like the rendering 'sod pottage' better than 'beef stew'!

  Outaservice
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  Frannie Banannie

  While I'm not qualified to discuss scriptural verbiage, there's another matter that drew my attention when I was checking out the accuracy of the NWT rendering by the WTS before my exit. It has to do with adding words TO the scriptures, which (under penalty of having the plagues added to them) the WTS heirarchy has repeatedly denied doing.

  Now, just grab up a copy of the NWT. Any copy will do, be it green or black or fine leather-bound. Look in the scriptures and locate the words which are in [ ] (brackets). Those words are ADDED IN. They are not to be found in any of the alleged WTS original text translated from Greek or Hebrew.

  Once I saw this and confirmed it to myself, I determined that if the WTS can ADD words, they can also take them away and deny, deny, deny to their egos' content. And I threw the NWT away as worthless.

  Frannie
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  Narkissos

  Frannie,

  "Adding words" is a bit of a misnomer, as there is no such thing as word-to-word translation. We tend to consider words as units of meaning, a definition which better suits sentences. A 7-word sentence in the source language can be properly rendered by a 10-word sentence in the target language, that doesn't mean 3 words were "added". Otoh many words which function as mere syntax markers in ancient languages (which lacked our system of punctuation) are often left untranslated -- which doesn't constitute a substraction either.

  The NWT brackets (like the italics in the KJV, if I remember correctly) unduly attract the reader's attention to those apparently "added" words, which is often misleading. First, because some of those "additions" are necessary in the normal process of translation; second, because the reader wrongly concludes that in the absence of brackets/italics the text s/he reads is formally identical to the original, which is almost always wrong.

  The problem is not in the principle of "adding words," but that some additions (as mentioned in previous posts) are unnecessary or outright wrong. It requires a case by case study.
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  onacruse

  Frannie:

  Once I saw this and confirmed it to myself, I determined that if the WTS can ADD words, they can also take them away and deny, deny, deny to their egos' content. And I threw the NWT away as worthless.

  At risk of getting my head chopped off! LOLOL...then you might as well throw away every translation of the Bible you have, and, if really intent on understanding the original Bible, then become fluent in Hebrew and Greek...after, of course, you have determined which collection of original manuscripts is satisfactorily accurate...and then, be satisfied that you have simply approximated the approximate approximation of those writings.

  edit to add: Nark, our posts crossed...Frannie, how 'bout you take off his head instead of mine?