Several weeks ago, I was attending a meeting with my wife and I brought my King James translation of the Bible with me. One of the brothers came up to me after the meeting and asked me what translation did I have and I showed it to him. He asked if I knew that God's name appeared in that translation and I said, "Yes, Psalms 83:18 I do believe." He asked if he could open it and in it he showed me scripture where it says that they are to be "witnesses of Me" and said that is why they are known as the Jehovah's Witnesses. He went on to show that God's name was taken out of most bibles and was replaced with LORD. I asked him did he know that the 'more correct' transliteration of God's name was Yahweh and that most modern bibles replace the divine name with LORD because it was a general custom not to speak the divine name? As I expected, he understood that but insisted that Jehovah was the proper English translation, etc., etc., etc..
I later told my wife that the divine name never appeared in the old Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and yet Jehovah's Witnesses saw fit to insert it 237 times in their translation of the New Testament. My wife is pretty ignorant about stuff like this and dogmatically insisted that they would not have done so without good reason. Before she left for the meeting, I told her that before she dogmatically proclaims something to be true she should at least do their research because even the Watchtower noted that the divine name did not appear in the old Greek manuscripts. She must have asked the brothers at the hall about this because when she came back she went on about the Septuagint and showed me in the King James Bible where it showed LORD in all caps in certain passages of Matthew when Jesus was being tempted by Satan and in other places. She was kind of implying that the King James was a more accurate translation because of this so I asked her that if she considered the King James to be more accurate then did she agree with the rendering of 1 John 5:7-8 in the King James? These verses explicitly speak of the Trinity in that translation. Cornered, she insisted that I was just trying to not see what is clearly the truth about God's name.
I feel bad for my wife for having to defend something she knows little about and she obviously wishes to remain blissfully ignorant about such deep things so I agreed to just speak with the brother about this. I called him weeks ago and we arranged a time to meet, but at the last minute I cancelled thinking that this is a complete waste of time. He approached me yesterday at the meeting and asked if we were ever going to get together to discuss this. I said I would and we agreed to meet today at 5:30 p.m. at the Kingdom Hall. Frankly, I just want to get it over with because I feel like I am about to confront another closed mind. However, since I agreed to meet, I want to be somewhat prepared. Knowing what I am up against, I have no intentions of trying to prove anything, but I will ask if he would consider some reading material that supports my assertions that God's name did not appear in the Christian Greek NT. I'm probably going to leave a copy of a printout of this web page (http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/jehovah.php) in hopes that he will read it with an open mind. If he balks at the fact that it may be considered 'apostate' material the whole discussion ends. The way I see it, if he is not open to look at opposing views, why should I bother reading whatever WT literature he wants to present?
Any other suggestions on what I can bring up at this discussion?