by whereami 51 Replies latest watchtower bible
Yes, I've always thought it is easy to argue anything with a Bible... a few minor adjustments here, mis-translated words there, and here you have a totally different theory. Who was that small-time WT apologetic who wrote those books a few years back? Doesn't the Society warn against that?
Speaking of different theories, you should hear the one about Ezekiel's wheel being a UFO, and Aliens creating Adam - :)
jwfacts: He feels that the word worship should not be used for Jesus, but should be for the Father. To be consisent the same word, such as obesiance should be used for both Jesus and the Father, otherwise the translator is adding their own bias (and hence interpretation) depending on whether or not they believe the Father and Son are both God or not.
Don't forget where Satan asked Jesus to do one act of worship toward him ... that was also obeisance, but rendered "worship" in the NWT. So, Satan, who is a false god, gets worship. YHWH who is a true God gets worship. But Jesus, who is a Mighty God (Isaiah 9:6) and at very least a true God, if not the true God (John 1:1) even according to the NWT, is undeserving of worship.
Odd, that.
Respectfully,
AuldSoul
Well dudes who knows hebrew and koine greek says that the passages and Bible is speaking about trinity. So actualy I don't care about translation if I know original languages. Also basic rule of translation is - if it makes perfect sense, does not seek another sense. So who cares how meny Gods are there, what are their unity or prularity, if translator changes word meaning depending on his religious view, then he is adding his bias into translation, so translation becomes interpretation. But there is difference between translation and interpretation. Grammer is not the only thing what matters in translation, whole context matters. And taking into account that WT does not have real koine and hebrew scholars, why should we even consider their translation as translation?
Come on guys, help me out here!! I was sent this as "proof that our version is more acurate than any other". Show me some clear examples of where WTS "scholars" twisted things to their advantage. Do we know for a fact that this person is an apologist towards the WTS? What's his motive for swaying towards the NWT. It does sound a little weird when he says that the NWT is so this & that, & that JW's are were so unbiased when doing their translation. What say you scholars & people in the know?
A person may be able to make a case for the NW rendering of the Old Testament and their insertion of the name Jehovah. But there is absolutely NO EVIDENCE to support their inserting the name of Jehovah 237 times in the New Testament. Their justification for replacing the name LORD with the Divine Name (Jehovah) is because they feel that it was removed from the New Testament. Yet there are over 5000 copies of ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that do not use the Divine Name or Tetragrammaton. In a few cases these ancient manuscripts were written just a few hundred years after the book of Revelation was originally written.
For anyone that believes that the NW is an accurate translation of the Bible, I would suggest that they investigate the history of the Tetragrammaton. Here is an excellent site:
They lied to me about everything else - why would I then trust the self-translated, non-scholarly version of Scripture they present?
You can find critics for and against anything - the NWT is no exception is it?
Most of us agree for instance that Child Molestation is a very bad thing. If you dig under enough rocks, someone who calls himself 'scholar' will begin to elucidate the 'values' of such a lifestyle. He might even point to a degree on his wall as credentials to support his view.
When the scholars start to stack up in favor of a particular position - then I will start to pay attention. Lone Ranger is pretty alone in his view here.
Jeff
What JWfacts said.
Dr. BeDuhn limited his discussion to a handful of passages. And he makes valid points within the scope of that discussion.
By carefully selecting passages which are poorly translated (Or overtranslated as Narkissos puts it) in the NWT, it could easily be made to come out near the bottom of a similar list.
By carefully selecting passages which are poorly translated (Or overtranslated as Narkissos puts it) in the NWT, it could easily be made to come out near the bottom of a similar list.
"overtranslation" is not mistranslation, or a case of "bias" in itself. If it conveys the thought correctly is Beduhn's aim and concern . So therefore overtranslated verses often cited here- like in the case of Phil 2:5-7 (which Beduhn agrees is needlessly wordy) still get a passing grade for it falls in the range of possible meaning.
Theoretically a translation should not be clearer or more explicit than the original. But this is easier said than done, especially when dealing with ancient texts: often the cultural background of implicit communication is lost to to the modern reader, so it must be explained -- assuming that it is not lost to the translator too! That's why there will always be a healthy separation between commentary and translation, even though the exact line of separation is endlessly debatable.
However there is more to overtranslation than explicitation. Overtranslation is a frequent amateur's mistake, reading more into words than their actual meaning. Often it involves the confusion of (correct or mistaken) etymology with semantics. To take one example which is not specific to the NWT (it is actually Trinitarian in origin), translating monogenès by "only-begotten" when the etymology is actually "one of its/his/her kind" and "only" sufficiently renders the meaning.
An additional problem in Bible translation is intertextuality. "Worship" for proskuneô may be contextually correct in some cases (e.g. Matthew 4), but not all (definitely not when total strangers meet Jesus for the first time, at the simplest narrative level), yet the translator cannot avoid the issue of consistency, allowing for a kind of double entendre (in the natural act of bowing down to an important man, the Christian reads more than a common gesture of respect, just as he hears more than physical healing in the phrase "your faiith has saved you"). In the narrowest context of John 8:58 "I have been" may sound as a perfectly correct translation of egô eimi, but in the largest context of the Fourth Gospel which repeatedly uses egô eimi as a Christological formula a locally awkward "I am" is the formal price to pay for the overall consistency which is theologically more important. In such cases it seems obvious that the NWT deliberately misses the forest for the trees.
From other threads here I have gathered that BeDuhn disagrees with the NWT on the introduction of "Jehovah" into the NT... I don't know if he deals with other issues that I think important, such as the rendering of the non-commutative en by the commutative "in union with," which reduces the symmetrical expressions like "you in me and me in you" to mere tautologies...
In the narrowest context of John 8:58 "I have been" may sound as a perfectly correct translation of egô eimi, but in the largest context of the Fourth Gospel which repeatedly uses egô eimi as a Christological formula a locally awkward "I am" is the formal price to pay for the overall consistency which is theologically more important. In such cases it seems obvious that the NWT deliberately misses the forest for the trees
Slightly related question, but yet not in some way, What do you feel about Beduhn's preferred translation of John 8:58, "I existed (or have been,) before Abraham was"...... His reasoning is as follows:
"On the matter of word order, normal english follows the structure we all learned in elementary school: subject + verb + object or predictae phrase. The order of the Greek in John 8:58 is: predicate phrase + subject + verb. So it is the most basic step of translation to move the predicate phrase "Before Abraham came to be" (prin abraam genesthai) from the beginning of the sentence to the end, after the subject and verb. Just as we do not say "John I am" or "hungry I am" or "first in line i am", so it is not proper English to say "Before Abraham came to be I Am". Yet all of the translations we are comparing, with exception of the LB, offer precisely this sort of mangled word order." (Beduhn p.105)
He is equally critical of the NWT here, he argues that "ego eimi" may have theological significance, but at John 8:58 it is really just one of the most basic pron-noun + verb combinations there is, anything else is read into it and is outside the concern of a translator. Not that theology is is outside of concern necessarily, but that here the most straight forward method works fine, so why add to it.
