For JWs who believe that Jehovah had a hand in reviving the truth in the nineteenth century this is enough explanation for how JWs managed to achieve a closer approximation to early Christian beliefs and practices than other groups. But is there an explanation for this phenomenon that doesn’t rely on supernatural intervention?
New Testament scholar James Dunn explains the difficulty of interpreting the biblical texts in this way:
We must attempt the exceedingly difficult task of shutting out the voices of early Fathers, Councils and dogmaticians down the centuries, in case they drown the earlier voices, in case the earlier voices were saying something different, in case they intended their words to speak with different force to their hearers.
James D.G. Dunn Christology in the Making: An Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of Incarnation (1980), pages 13 and 14.
The reason JWs were able to arrive at a clearer understanding of what the biblical texts were saying was because they were willing to put aside the traditional dogmas of the church and creedal statements that had steadily drifted away from the teachings of early Christianity. The leaders of the Reformation were willing to do this to some extent, but they did not go the whole way, as they were unwilling to challenge the dogmatic statements of the fourth century church on Christ and the Trinity in particular. Another biblical scholar. Jason BeDuhn, invokes this as an explanation how those who translated the New World Translation managed to produce a version that is more faithful to the original:
The Jehovah's Witnesses, on the other hand, are more similar to the Protestants in their view that the Bible alone must be the source of truth in its every detail. So you might expect translators from this sect to labor under the Protestant Burden. But they do not for the simple reason that the Jehovah's Witness movement was and is a more radical break with the dominant Christian tradition of the previous millennium than most kinds of Protestantism. This movement has, unlike the Protestant Reformation, really sought to re-invent Christianity from scratch. Whether you regard that as a good or a bad thing, you can probably understand that it resulted in the Jehovah's Witnesses approaching the Bible with a kind of innocence, and building their system of belief and practice from the raw material of the Bible without predetermining what was to be found there. Some critics, of course, would say that the results of this process can be naive. But for Bible translation, at least, it has meant a fresh approach to the text, with far less presumption than that found in many of the Protestant translations.
Jason David BeDuhn, Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament (2003), pages 164 and 165.