Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze 48 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  Earnest

  Earnest : The RSV reads "... to care for the church of God which he obtained with the blood of his own Son" with a footnote "Greek with the blood of his Own or with his own blood".

  aqwsed12345 : The RSV appeared in 1952 with the literal wording “with his own blood”; the wording you quote is the 1971 “Common Bible” revision produced for ecumenical use and reprinted in the NRSV family.
  

  This is just to report back that I checked the 1952 RSV and it does read "with his own blood" but it has a footnote "with the blood of his Own" showing that even back then they recognised there were two ways of translating this verse. No one (except Hort) has claimed that the word "son" stood in the original, although Metzger does say that palaeographically such an omission would have been easy.

  The claim is, as the NET bible explains, that the genitive construction could be taken in two ways: (1) as an attributive genitive (second attributive position) meaning “his own blood”; or (2) as a possessive genitive, “with the blood of his own.” In this case the referent is the Son, and the referent has been specified in the translation for clarity.

  You keep on insisting it can only be translated in one way i.e. "his own blood", but many translations either translate it differently or record alternatives. Most translators will translate in a way they think is in harmony with the rest of scripture which is why so many translate it as "with the blood of his own Son".
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  aqwsed12345

  @Earnest

  The 1952 RSV confirms rather than overturns the point at issue. Its main line keeps the formally exact rendering “with his own blood,” and the marginal alternative you cite—“with the blood of his Own”—does not add the word Son. It simply signals the well-known fact that τοῦ ἰδίου can be read as a possessive standing alone, exactly parallel to John 13:1 (“having loved his own”), Acts 4:23 (“to their own [people]”), and Acts 24:23 (“permit none of his own to attend upon him”). The footnote therefore preserves the same lexical surface as the text; it does not license the step that the New World Translation takes when it inserts a noun absent from every Greek witness.

  The grammatical question is real, but it is limited. In Luke’s sentence the phrase διὰ τοῦ αἵματος occupies the first position in a double-attributive construction:

    αἵματος | τοῦ ἰδίου
    head-noun | attributive adjective in the second position

  In Koine prose that pattern almost always marks simple attribution (“his own blood”). When ὁ ἴδιος functions substantivally for a cherished relative the usage is vocative or nominative and precedes the noun, it qualifies; the papyrological examples scattered through Moulton-Milligan follow that pattern and never stand after a genitive “blood.” Hebrews 13:12, written in a style indistinguishable from Luke’s, offers an exact syntactic parallel—διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος—and no translator has ever felt impelled to supply “Son” there. Luke himself, whenever he wants to say “his own Son,” does so explicitly (Luke 9:35; Acts 3:26).

  Because the syntactic default is so strong, every essentially literal version—RSV 1952, NASB, ESV, CSB, LSB, NET, NJB (2019), the Tyndale House Greek New Testament translation (2022)—prints “his own blood” in the running text. Where an edition elects the alternative, it either does so in a dynamic-equivalence setting (TEV, CEV) or flags the addition with brackets or a note, conceding that the noun is interpretive. Even the NRSV (1989) keeps the literal wording in its main line and places “his own Son” in a footnote, precisely because the editors understood that the word is not in the text.

  That leads to the textual point. The possessive reading is grammatically imaginable, but it remains conjectural: no Greek manuscript—uncial, minuscule, lectionary, papyrus—contains υἱοῦ here; no version, Syriac or Coptic or Latin, translates such a word; no patristic citation includes it; and no ancient commentator says that a term was lost. Hort’s suggestion that υἱοῦ “may have slipped out” was acknowledged by Hort himself to be pure hypothesis offered to relieve what he (unlike Luke) found theologically awkward. The phenomenon he conjectured—a single-word omission in every single line of transmission—would be unique in the entire corpus of New-Testament textual history.

  When translators nevertheless write “with the blood of his own Son,” they are not presenting an alternative Greek reading; they are offering an interpretive paraphrase for readers who may be unfamiliar with the idiom. That is why the RSV (1952) footnote, the NET note you quote, and the formal translations that retain the literal line all treat the possessive paraphrase as secondary and advisory, not as the text itself. The underlying scholarly judgment is unanimous across Nestle-Aland 28, UBS 5, the SBLGNT, and the Tyndale House Edition: the autograph read ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ … διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου, and the unforced reading of those words is “the church of God … with his own blood.”

  Disagreement over meaning therefore cannot be projected back onto the text. Luke’s Greek is crystal-clear; what remains for the interpreter is to decide whether Luke can ascribe the shedding of that blood to “God.” The New Testament itself answers in the affirmative. In 1 Corinthians 2:8 Paul can write that the rulers “crucified the Lord of glory,” placing a divine title and a human act side-by-side. Ignatius of Antioch, a decade or two after Acts was published, speaks unself-consciously of “the blood of God” (Eph. 1:1). The idiom rests on the communicatio idiomatum, already implicit in apostolic preaching: the one person who is God the Son and the man Jesus can be described with predicates drawn from either nature.

  In short, the extant Greek text of Acts 20:28 does not contain “Son,” and the grammar most naturally yields “his own blood.” All alternative renderings are post-Greek paraphrases introduced for theological or stylistic reason, not because the wording of the autograph is in doubt.
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  peacefulpete

  If you are arguing that the NWT, being it claims to be a fairly literal translation, ought to have put 'son' in brackets, no gets no argument from anyone.
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  peacefulpete

  Boy, that's bad...."...you'll get no argument from anyone."
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  slimboyfat

  Perhaps a good translation is “the church of God which he purchased with the blood of his Own”. That’s fairly literal and most would get the point of what it’s saying. Adding “Son” just makes more explicit what the author meant and what the early readers likely understood. The idea that God himself died and gave his own blood is much later and not anything that would have remotely entered the imagination of first century Christians. It doesn’t even sit all that comfortably with Trinitarian orthodoxy either which in many respects is a fruitless exercise in trying to combine incompatible statements in various combinations, which is perhaps why even some Trinitarian scholars and/or apologists have not pushed the so-called Trinitarian reading for this particular text.
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  slimboyfat

  Murray J. Harris wrote a book (“Jesus As God”) exploring instances in the NT of Jesus being called “God” and he concludes this verse is unlikely an instance of that. This is notable as a Trinitarian who believes there are other instances where Jesus is called God. This was his conclusion on Acts 20:28:

  
  
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  Blotty

  Lets see if AQ can read that last line... specifically "it remains unlikely"
  
  AQ needs to learn twisting words of actual experts, who are more credible than himself (hence I rely on them in debates with him, they are not infallible - just more credible & reasonable to talk too, even JW are more easy to talk too) wont help him... We know what MULTIPLE credible sources have said.. David Bentley Hart, Harris, Barclay (Hebrews 1:8) etc in their proper context have conceded the JW position is/ may be feasible!
  
  AQ just cant stand that, because it destroys his trinitarian fantasy and his urge to be like Athanasius.. writing screeds and screeds relying on the argument "[insert text] was not written, instead it says [insert text]"
  However unfortunatly, no matter how many times he tries to shove it down my throat (and others) he wont succeed unless he can cite a single scripture in context that explicitly says "God is 3 persons"
  
  From my reserach I have gleamed:
  Begotten and created are synonyms - Logos is IDENTIFIED as Wisdom
  proverbs 8's poetry style would force such a meaning.
  NT doesnt have to say it (it does in its own way) trying to limit such things to the NT is limiting the scope of the argument & is not a wide example of word usage (No credible source ONLY uses the NT)
  
  These 2 are synonyms as Strongs popints out: SYNONYMS: θεότης, θειότης
  One just fell out of common usage
  
  Homosious and homoisious Atha was prepared to accept the latter and uses the latter more commonly (despite AQ's claims)
  
  
  Just 3 as an example, the rest of what AQ spouts is also trinitarian propaganda not backed by actaul facts.
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  Sea Breeze

  @SBF,

  Do you personally believe that examining they way the first Christians used this verse has any bearing on determining how a verse should be translated?
  
  

  Here are some examples:

  Tertullian: Tertullian, a prolific writer in the late second and early third centuries, is noted for using the phrase "the blood of God," which appears to be a direct reflection of Acts 20:28. He emphasizes that the "Lord's flock" is the people of the Church, purchased with this divine blood.

  Ignatius of Antioch: Ignatius of Antioch, an early Bishop of Antioch who wrote in the early second century, uses the phrase "rekindled in the blood of God" in his Letter to the Ephesians. This echoes the language and sentiment of Acts 20:28. His writings often emphasize the importance of church hierarchy and the leadership of bishops, further aligning with the context of Acts 20:28, where Paul addresses the elders (overseers/bishops).

  So, regardless of any ambiguity that some modern critic might introduce, we know how the early church leaders quoted this verse.
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  aqwsed12345

  The linguistic and historical questions that surround Acts 20:28 are admittedly intricate, but none of them yield the verdict that the traditional rendering—“the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood”—is either impossible Greek or a late theological invention. The case can be set out in four coordinated observations.

  First, the grammar. In Luke-Acts every instance of the double-attributive construction noun + article + ἴδιος is straightforwardly adjectival (“their own hands,” “his own life,” “his own disciples”). The collocation αἷμα + τοῦ ἰδίου therefore conforms to Luke’s regular usage and to the broader Koine pattern attested in papyri and in Hebrews 13:12: διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος, “by his own blood.” The alternative, a possessive genitive suppressing an implied “Son,” cannot be ruled out a priori, but it must be judged the marked reading, for it would create in Luke a syntactic innovation without parallel elsewhere in his writings. It is this grammatical datum—not an a priori “Trinitarian lens”—that prompts most essentially literal translations (RSV 1952, NASB 2020, ESV, CSB, LSB, NET) to place “his own blood” in the text and leave the possessive paraphrase to a foot-note. Dynamic-equivalence versions that supply “Son” in the running text do so expressly to aid readability, not because ὁ ἴδιος forces the supplement.

  Second, the manuscript evidence. Modern critical editions (NA 28, UBS 5, SBL-GNT, Tyndale House GNT) agree that ἐκκλησία τοῦ θεοῦ is the earlier reading; ἐκκλησία τοῦ κυρίου is a well-attested early change (𝔓74 A D Ψ 33) that plausibly arose precisely because scribes stumbled over the implication that “God” could be said to bleed. That impulse reveals how naturally second- and third-century copyists heard the Greek: if τοῦ ἰδίου is read attributively, to say that “God purchased the church in his own blood” is to identify the crucified Lord with the God whom Paul and Luke elsewhere call θεός.

  Third, the first-century horizon. To claim that no reader in Luke’s generation could imagine divine blood is to overlook the apostolic idiom itself. Paul can speak of “the Lord of glory” being crucified (1 Cor 2:8); John can report Thomas hailing the risen Christ as ὁ θεός μου (John 20:28); the author of Hebrews can ascribe the Exodus to Christ (Heb 11:26). Within two decades of Acts, Ignatius of Antioch could exhort the Ephesians to “be renewed in the blood of God” (Eph 1:1) and the Smyrnaeans to “await the one who is above time—timeless, unseen—who for us became visible, impassible, yet for us suffered” (Smyrn 3). Ignatius’ diction is not a post-Nicene artifice; it is the natural outgrowth of the communicatio idiomatum already visible in the NT. Luke’s theology of God’s self-involvement in the saving mission of his Messiah (cf. Acts 2:36; 3:15; 20:28) therefore sits comfortably in its first-century milieu.

  Fourth, the appeal to Raymond E. Brown or Murray J. Harris. Both scholars are careful, not skeptical. Brown’s caution—“we are by no means certain that this verse calls Jesus God”—registers precisely the point at issue: the verse is not the sole datum on which Christology stands, but neither can its most natural sense be suppressed. Harris’ own conclusion (“unlikely, although not impossible”) rests on the grammatical judgment that τοῦ ἰδίου might be a Christological title. Yet his prior 130 pages have already conceded multiple unambiguous uses of θεός for Christ; his refusal to add Acts 20:28 to that list hardly vindicates the NWT’s conjectural “Son.” On the contrary, Harris specifies that if one construes ἰδίου adjectivally (the default Greek), “God” refers to Jesus and the phrase enshrines the ancient confession that the Church was bought in divine blood.

  The subsidiary assertions advanced in support of the NWT paraphrase fare no better. “Begotten” does not mean “created” in either Second-Temple Jewish discourse or Nicene theology; Proverbs 8 is read christologically because Wisdom there is said to be with God “before the ages,” not because the verb κτἰζω licenses Arianism; θεότης and θειότης are cognates but denote, respectively, the fullness of deity and divine quality; Athanasius rejected any formula that made the Son merely “like” the Father because only ὁμοούσιος safeguards the apostolic proclamation that all God is, the Son is. None of those points stands or falls with Acts 20:28, but each underscores why the church perceived that a merely subordinate Christ could not account for the language of Scripture.

  A translation such as “the church of God which he purchased with the blood of his Own” is grammatically serviceable, yet it concedes the very logic the objection resists. If “his Own” is elliptical for the Son, then the verse still predicates the redemptive act to God and ascribes the cost—the cross—to the one who is God’s Own in a unique sense. Luke’s audience, steeped in a narrative where the exalted Jesus bears divine titles and exercises divine prerogatives, would hardly have balked at that communion of subject and predicate.

  The bulk of the translation tradition, the earliest patristic witness, and the syntax of Luke-Acts therefore converge: Acts 20:28 most naturally speaks of the flock as God’s precisely because the shedding of Christ’s blood is the act by which God himself secures it. That reading neither invents a later metaphysic nor stretches weak evidence; it follows the Greek where it leads and lets the theology of the NT say what it has said from the first generation onward.