by yogosans14 36 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
According to Dr. Thayer's Definition,
GOD, theós
In the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, published in 1984, the text in John 17:3 was translated by WT as follows:
This means everlasting life, their taking in knowledge of you, the only true God, and of the one whom you sent forth, Jesus Christ.
In the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, published in 2013, the text at John 17:3 has been changed by WT as follows:
This means everlasting life, their coming to know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.
Notice the difference between these two texts at John 17:3?
There is a huge difference between taking knowledge of someone and coming to know someone.
And it was there, mistranslated for some 30 years.
In most of Christendom’s Bible it was correctly translated as "knowing you" right from the Beginning.
Wt claims that they only have the Holy Spirit, which guides them in everything, including the Biblical Translation.
So the Holy Spirit guided them wrongly here for 30 years?
Ask
any JW about this
believe it's a terrible thing for a person to be deceived and go into eternity lost, forever lost because somebody deliberately misled him by distorting the Scripture!. . . hey should not allow themselves to be misled by the Jehovah's Witnesses and end up in hell." (Ron Rhodes "Reasoning from the Scriptures with the Jehovah's Witnesses" p.103-105)
Well, damn. Imagine being so hateful and petty that you think that people who disagree with your interpretation deserve to be sent to hell. Imagine believing that God is so stubborn and weak that he can't allow for sincere people to have misunderstandings or to inadvertently draw false conclusions on incorrect but seemingly authoritative information. Imagine believing that God deliberately created us with all of the cognitive biases that make it extremely hard to believe the right thing, and then will punish us for failing to believe the right thing.
To quickly address some of the comments in this thread:
- It's not polytheistic in the Biblical sense to consider Jesus a god, given all of the other people and entities that are also called gods. God, like many words in the Bible, has so many different meanings that the Bible, itself, even addresses this topic on a few occasions. (John 10:34-36, 1 Cor 8:5,6 - note in particular what it says about the FATHER being the one God, not the trinity nor Jesus).
- It's not contradictory to refer to Jesus as an angel (Michael) and as a god. First, see my reasoning above. Secondly, the Bible uses the word gods (Hebrew, "elohim") to refer to angels (compare Psalm 8:5; Hebrews 2:7). Third, Jesus is both referred to as a god (again, John 1:1, depending on which scholar or theologian or dogmatic zealot you choose to believe is correct.) as well as described as having the voice of an archangel (1 Thes 4:16).
Whether Jesus and Michael are actually the same person is a topic I've yet to revisit, but I do remember some years ago finding significantly more Biblical evidence for it than even the WTB&TS publishes.
In any case, unless anyone has compelling evidence that the Bible actually is God's word (I don't see any such evidence anymore...), I'm inclined to believe that there is no correct interpretation of the "true" identity of Yahweh, El, Michael, Jesus or the holy spirit because not even the writers agreed on what they were trying to say.
RE: "taking in knowledge" vs "coming to know you"
I don't know anything about ancient Greek, so I can't comment on the accuracy of either translation. I can, however, make one observation: the older NWT was significantly more literal than the current one. It might be accurate, literally, to say "taking in knowledge," but the second one might do a better job of conveying the meaning in contemporary terms. This is one reason why it's always good to look at multiple translations when trying to understand meaning. It's also why no matter how many translations you look at, you STILL might not find the answer you're looking for. (I have quite the doozy of a thread coming up soon where I tackle one verse in particular in which each and every translation you look at says something so different that you often can't even tell that it's the same verse.)
yogosans14 - "I'm tired of the Org misquoting scholars..."
Misdirection, obfuscation, and semantic pretzel-twisting... all the best sleazy-lawyer tactics to be found.
Once again, for the newbies, lurkers, and trolls...
...if you have to cheat to defend your beliefs, your beliefs don't deserve to be defended.
Not that I care much about "the truth" being in the pages of the Bible, but here's an interesting thought.
If the writer of John 1:1 INTENDED to convey the idea that the pre-human Jesus was "a god" and not "the God", then he was henotheist or polytheist. I don't believe that is the case, being that the author of the gospel of John wrote it very late into the christianity game, I am very inclined to believe he wrote it with the intention of elevating Jesus to Almighty God status, because, well, that was the growing trend that would eventually trump over the other ideas about who Jesus was.
That aside, henotheism (the belief that there are many deities in the spiritual realm, but only one rules supreme or is worthy of human worship) isn't new in the Scriptures. Despite all later scribal redacting, the traces of a pre-babylonian exile henotheistic jewish society are still there to be read in passages of the Old Testament. Examples?
Psalm 82:1 - "God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment"
Psalm 89:5-7 "5 Let the heavens praise your wonders, O Yahweh, your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones! 6 For who in the skies can be compared to Yahweh? Who among the gods is like Yahweh,7 a God greatly to be feared in the council of the holy ones, and awesome above all who are around him?"
Genesis 31:51 - Here Jakob and Laban clearly are swearing by different deities.
Deuteronomy 5:6, 7 - About the first commandment, notes Nicholas F. Gier, professor emeritus of Idaho University: "Contrary to popular understanding, the First Commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me," does not deny the existence of other deities. In his commentary on Deuteronomy Anthony Phillips maintains that "there is here no thought of monotheism. The commandment does not seek to repudiate the existence of other gods, but to prevent Israel from having anything to do with them."
Also Deuteronomy 32:8, if we follow the pre-massoretic texts, indicates that Yahweh himself has allocated the nations of the earth (see Genesis chapter 10) to different deities, while keeping Israel as his special property.
The whole story about Israel being the first monotheistic society is flat wrong. It was polytheistic, then henotheistic, and only after the babylonian exile became monotheistic, and then redacted all its ancient texts to make it look as though its past has always been about worshipping solely Yahweh. It wasn't like that, at all.
Just wanted to say what a pastor at my church said this past Sunday. "Jesus is 100% God and 100% man. Just because we don't understand it, doesn't mean it's not true."
Doesn’t mean it IS true, either.
Why do you people hold JWs to a higher standard of evidence than your new religions?
You’ve just traded one set of answers you can’t question for another.
