Posts by aqwsed12345

23

Hebrews 1: 8 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

the watchtower translates this verse like this: .

but about the son, he says: “god is your throne forever and ever, and the scepter of your kingdom is the scepter of uprightness.

- hebrews 1: 8 nwt.

aqwsed12345

@slimboyfat

Raymond E. Brown’s discussion of Acts 20:28 is regularly invoked as though it dismantled the traditional reading, yet the passage is almost never quoted in full. When it is read in sequence his argument proves considerably less helpful to the NWT paraphrase than the polemical summary above suggests.

Brown begins, as any textual critic must, with the variant between ἐκκλησία τοῦ θεοῦ and ἐκκλησία τοῦ κυρίου. He canvasses the witnesses, notes the suspected theological motivation behind κύριος (“to prevent God from bleeding”), and judges—rightly, in line with modern editors—that θεοῦ is the more difficult and therefore earlier reading. At that point the textual question is settled. Now the problem becomes exegesis: how should the genitive τοῦ ἰδίου be construed?

Brown rehearses the two possibilities that had been in the secondary literature since Ezra Abbot (1876). Either τοῦ ἰδίου is a simple attributive, yielding the long-standard translation “with his own blood,” or it is a possessive standing for a suppressed noun, “with the blood of his own (Son).” Brown notes that J. H. Moulton had cited papyrological parallels for the substantival use of ὁ ἴδιος as a term of endearment and that Hort had hypothesized a lost υἱοῦ. He therefore concludes—cautiously, as any historian of interpretation would—that “even if we read ‘the church of God,’ we are by no means certain that this verse calls Jesus God.”

A right reading of that sentence depends on keeping the logical structure clear. Brown is not saying the text does not call Jesus God; he is saying that its doing so cannot be treated as certain. He is marking the verse as less probative than John 1:1 or John 20:28, not eliminating it from consideration. Nothing in the paragraph licenses the further claim that Brown deemed the NWT gloss “with the blood of his own Son” to be superior, and much in the paragraph points the other way: (i) he treats “church of God” as the earlier form; (ii) he labels the conjectural insertion of υἱοῦ only a possibility; (iii) he offers no example of Luke using ὁ ἴδιος elliptically when a specific relative is meant. In his later Introduction to New Testament Christology (1994) he repeats the same judgment: Acts 20:28 may call Jesus God but the evidence is short of proof (§ 5.1). That is scholarly reserve, not skepticism about the traditional wording.

When the syntax is examined in the broader corpus the reserve narrows. Luke uses the double-attributive structure noun + article + ἴδιος nine other times (Luke 8:1–3; 9:23; 14:26; 18:29; 23:12; Acts 1:7; 4:32; 27:19, 38). In every instance ἴδιος functions as a concordant adjective (“his own disciples,” “his own life,” “their own hands”); never as a bare substantive. Hebrews 13:12, written in a Greek indistinguishable from Luke’s, gives the exact form διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος with the transparent sense “by his own blood,” and no commentator has proposed an underlying υἱοῦ there. The papyrological parallels on which Moulton relied all stand in nominative or vocative constructions and precede the noun; none reproduces Luke’s post-genitive pattern. The purely grammatical case for seeing “Son” behind τοῦ ἰδίου is therefore slender; it gains plausibility only when supplied by a prior theological conviction that someone other than the referent of θεός must be the source of the blood.

Nor does Brown’s summary exhaust the theological context within Acts. The writer is willing elsewhere to apply a divine title to the crucified Jesus: the rulers “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8, Luke’s close companion Paul). Luke attributes to Jesus prerogatives otherwise reserved for God (Acts 3:15 “Author of life”; 4:12 sole name for salvation; 7:59 prayer addressed to “Lord Jesus”). For the Lucan imagination the communicatio idiomatum—the attribution of acts of one nature to the single person—creates no offense. If the apostle can say that “God purchased the church with his own blood,” he means that the incarnate Son, truly God, shed truly human blood, a Christological logic present in Ignatius of Antioch a generation later when he exhorts the Ephesians to “be renewed in the blood of God” (Ign. Eph. 1:1).

What then of the claim that “many translations” choose the other rendering? When the data are sorted by method, a consistent picture emerges. Every essentially literal translation that marks conjectural supplements prints “blood” in the text and, if it mentions the possessive reading at all, demotes it to a footnote (RSV 1952, NASB 1995/2020, ESV 2016, LSB 2021, CSB 2020, NET 2019, NJB 2019, NRSVue 2022). The only versions that place “Son” in the running text are functional-equivalence Bibles (CEV, NLT, TEV/Good News) designed to paraphrase difficult idioms or, in the single outlier of the NWT, a sectarian edition whose theology requires the paraphrase. The translation line thus tracks hermeneutical philosophy, not newly discovered manuscript evidence.

Finally, the rhetorical claim that Acts 20:28 is a “desperate” Trinitarian proof-text collapses once the verse is placed where mainstream theology places it: as one member of a converging series (John 1:1; 5:23; 20:28; Romans 9:5; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:6-10; 2 Peter 1:1) rather than the single keystone on which the doctrine stands. The church did not formulate the Nicene confession because a lone verse forced its hand; it confessed a triune God because the entire narrative and idiom of the NT required it. Acts 20:28 belongs to that idiom, not because every grammatical ambiguity can be wrung out of it, but because its most natural construction matches the larger pattern: the church is precious beyond price because the God who redeemed it did not withhold even the lifeblood that was his to give.

Raymond E. Brown, far from dismantling that reading, urges only that scholars speak with the precision the evidence warrants. On the text he is decisive: θεοῦ is original. On the grammar he is judicious: the normal reading is “his own blood,” though a less likely possessive is possible. On the theology he is cautious: the verse may call Jesus God, and if it does not it certainly unites Father and Son in the one saving act. That is sober historical criticism, not the dismissal your caricature requires.

43

Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

here's how this verse should read: .

take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the holy ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of god, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

- kjvhere's how it reads in the nwt: pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the holy spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the congregation of god, which he purchased with the blood of his own son.. here is how it reads in the kjv with the greek keyed to strong's: take heedg4337 thereforeg3767 unto yourselves,g1438 andg2532 to allg3956 theg3588 flock,g4168 overg1722 the whichg3739 theg3588 holyg40 ghostg4151 hath madeg5087 youg5209 overseers,g1985 to feedg4165 theg3588 churchg1577 of god,g2316 whichg3739 he hath purchasedg4046 withg1223 his owng2398 blood.g129 .

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.

23

Hebrews 1: 8 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

the watchtower translates this verse like this: .

but about the son, he says: “god is your throne forever and ever, and the scepter of your kingdom is the scepter of uprightness.

- hebrews 1: 8 nwt.

aqwsed12345

@slimboyfat

Raymond E. Brown’s paragraph does exactly the opposite of what you claim.
He surveys the variant κύριος / θεός because that is the ordinary first step of historical-critical method, but he immediately judges the evidence to “favor ‘the church of God’ as more original.” Once that decision is registered the textual problem is, for him, finished; the rest of the paragraph turns to the second issue, namely how the genitive τοῦ ἰδίου should be taken. Brown’s closing caution—“even if we read ‘the church of God,’ we are by no means certain that this verse calls Jesus God”—is therefore not a retreat from the textual choice he has just endorsed; it is a reminder that, even with θεός firmly in the text, grammar still permits two construals:

attributive: “with his own blood,” which points naturally to the nearer antecedent, God, and so calls Jesus God;
substantive: “with the blood of his own [Son],” which keeps θεός for the Father and treats ὁ ἴδιος as an implicit christological title.

Brown’s doubt is therefore located in the second of the two problems he enumerates, not in the first. That is why in the very article you cite Acts 20:28 appears under the section “Passages Where the Use of the Title God for Jesus Is Dubious.” The dubium concerns the application of θεός, not the presence of θεός in the text. Your appeal to the heading only confirms this: a passage can be grouped there precisely because, although the word “God” is almost certainly original, the syntax may still allow an alternative reading in which the word refers to the Father, not to Christ.

Consequently the summary you contest is accurate: Brown regards ἐκκλησία τοῦ θεοῦ as the better reading; his reserve about Acts 20:28 as a proof-text for Christ’s deity rests on the grammatical ambiguity of τοῦ ἰδίου, not on lingering uncertainty over whether Luke wrote θεός or κύριος. To represent him as still uncertain about the textual question or as siding with the NWT's interpolation of “Son” is simply to ignore his own conclusion that the textual weight “favors ‘the church of God’ as more original” and that the suggestion of an omitted huiou is no more than a conjecture advanced by Hort, not a reading Brown accepts.

23

Hebrews 1: 8 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

the watchtower translates this verse like this: .

but about the son, he says: “god is your throne forever and ever, and the scepter of your kingdom is the scepter of uprightness.

- hebrews 1: 8 nwt.

aqwsed12345

@slimboyfat

Raymond Brown’s remarks do not supply the escape route you imagine, nor do they leave the traditional wording of Acts 20:28 dangling in historical or theological limbo. The distinction Brown draws between possible and probable is pivotal, and the passage you abbreviate reverses the weight of his own argument.

In the 1965 article Brown lists Acts 20:28 among texts where “the application of theos to Jesus is dubious,” not because the reading ἐκκλησία τοῦ θεοῦ is in doubt or because he thinks an invisible huiou lurks in the line, but because the genitive τοῦ ἰδίου allows two grammatical analyses. He therefore sketches a spectrum:

Possessive-attributive (the long-standing rendering) “with his own blood”, a phrasing that presupposes the communicatio idiomatum.
Possessive-substantival “with the blood of His Own [Son]”, a reading he merely calls “possible” because papyrological parallels show ὁ ἴδιος can function as a term of endearment for a close relative.

Brown’s perhaps signals nothing more than methodological restraint: without an explicit noun the syntax cannot be nailed to the desk. What Brown pointedly does not do is conclude that Luke wrote an ellipsis which copyists failed to transmit. On the contrary, in his Anchor Bible volumes (1970, 1982) he continues to cite Acts 20:28 as one of “a small group of passages where theos may be applied to Jesus,” and he never once advocates inserting υἱοῦ. The “Son” in the NWT remains conjectural, unattested in any Greek, Latin, Syriac, or Coptic witness and unsupported by Brown’s own text-critical practice.

Brown merely acknowledges the presence of manuscript variants (“Lord” vs. “God”), but he clearly states that the weight of evidence favors “God.” Brown’s primary hesitation concerns how to construe the genitive τοῦ ἰδίου—whether it should be read attributively (“his own blood”) or substantivally (“the blood of his own [Son]”). That is the focus of his linguistic caution, not the authenticity of “church of God.” Thus, your statement is simply incorrect: Brown accepts “church of God” as the likely reading and discusses only the grammatical and theological possibilities of the phrase that follows. Any assertion to the contrary mischaracterizes both Brown’s published scholarship and the textual consensus reflected in modern critical editions.

The leap from Brown’s possibility to “undermining Nicene Christology” is historically anachronistic. Nicene language codifies what the apostolic writings already presuppose: a single subject—Jesus the Messiah— who may be described with predicates proper to both natures. When Luke has Paul say that God acquired the flock “through the blood of his own”, listeners steeped in the economy of Acts 2 – 3 (where God exalts the crucified Jesus to the right hand of divine majesty) hear one seamless redemptive act. Whether τοῦ ἰδίου is read attributively or as an affectionate substantive, the referent of the blood is the incarnate Lord whose death accomplishes what the Psalmist ascribes to YHWH alone—purchasing a people for himself.

Nothing in Brown’s cautious exegesis “vindicates” the NWT’s gloss; at most it reminds dogmatic polemicists on every side that a single clause should not be played as a check-mate. That reminder has never been in dispute. What can be asserted with textual and grammatical confidence is that Luke wrote τοῦ θεοῦ and that every extant line of transmission construes τοῦ ἰδίου without an accompanying noun. Rendering the verse exactly as it stands—“the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood”— neither manufactures evidence nor suppresses it; it refuses to supplement the apostle with words he demonstrably did not pen.

23

Hebrews 1: 8 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

the watchtower translates this verse like this: .

but about the son, he says: “god is your throne forever and ever, and the scepter of your kingdom is the scepter of uprightness.

- hebrews 1: 8 nwt.

aqwsed12345

@slimboyfat

Raymond E. Brown’s well-known caution about Acts 20:28 is not the trump card you think it is, nor does it vindicate the New World Translation’s gloss. It is true that, in the 1965 article “Does the New Testament Call Jesus God?,” Brown devotes a section to “passages where the application of the title ‘God’ to Jesus is dubious,” and that Acts 20:28 appears there. But when one reads the next two pages instead of a single adjective, Brown’s nuance becomes evident. The doubt he registers is not about the text (“church of God” is accepted) but about how the genitive τοῦ ἰδίου should be construed. He lists three possibilities: (i) the traditional possessive, yielding “with his own blood”; (ii) the same construction understood Christologically, i.e. “with God’s own [blood],” presupposing the communicatio idiomatum; (iii) a substantival use, “with the blood of His Own [Son].” Brown goes on to say that the third rendering would “fit Paul’s theology” and that “perhaps” Luke intended it. The term “dubious,” then, reflects Brown’s reluctance to treat any single verse as a conclusive proof-text on its own for the full deity of Christ, not a judgment that the traditional rendering is false. That is why, in the Anchor Bible Epistles of John (1982) he still cites Acts 20:28 among the “small group” of texts in which “theos is or may be applied to Jesus” (§6.1), repeating that “some ambiguity remains.”

Your complaint that I did not quote Brown’s phrase “by no means certain” simply mistakes the point at issue. No responsible theologian claims that Trinitarian doctrine stands or falls with this verse; the question is whether the verse, when its grammar and textual history are weighed, naturally yields a high-Christological reading. Brown’s answer is possibly yes, possibly no; the Greek allows either, and on that ground alone it should not be made the cornerstone of dogma. My summary—that he “never dismisses the text” and that he warns only against isolating it—captures precisely that balance. Nothing he writes lends support to inserting a word (“Son”) for which not a single Greek, Latin, Coptic, or Syriac witness offers evidence.

Your larger insinuation—that any synthesis which reaches a different conclusion must be “AI nonsense hiding the facts”—would be more persuasive if you actually engaged the textual and syntactic data that Brown, Metzger, Harris, Fitzmyer, Dunn, Keener, Schnabel, Witherington, and the editors of NA 28 sift in detail. Those data remain unchanged:

θεοῦ is the earlier and harder reading, supported by the oldest Alexandrian manuscripts and the earliest Coptic versions, whereas κυρίου appears first in the Western text and in the later Byzantine tradition.
τοῦ ἰδίου in the second attributive position naturally qualifies αἵματος (“his own blood”); the few NT instances where ἴδιος functions substantivally stand in the first position.
No extant document supplies υἱοῦ. Its insertion is therefore an interpretive paraphrase motivated by theology, not a rendering of the transmitted text.

Scholars who, like Brown, keep the text but hesitate over its theological force do so because they are exegetical minimalists, not because the grammar obliges them. Exegetical restraint is admirable; it does not license adding words to solve a doctrinal unease. When one resists that temptation and translates exactly what Luke wrote, the result remains: “the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood.”

23

Hebrews 1: 8 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

the watchtower translates this verse like this: .

but about the son, he says: “god is your throne forever and ever, and the scepter of your kingdom is the scepter of uprightness.

- hebrews 1: 8 nwt.

aqwsed12345

@slimboyfat

Your note accuses me of two specific faults: first, of having denied the existence of textual variation in Acts 20:28 and only later “back-tracking,” and second, of resting a doctrinal case on a passage that even Trinitarian scholars such as Raymond E. Brown regard as insecure. Both charges misrepresent the record and the state of the evidence.

I never asserted that Acts 20:28 is transmitted without variants atall; I said—precisely as the critical apparatuses state—that the only significant variant concerns whether Luke wrote ἐκκλησία τοῦ θεοῦ (“church of God”) or ἐκκλησία τοῦ κυρίου (“church of the Lord”), with a secondary expansion “of the Lord and God.” No Greek manuscript, version, or patristic citation inserts υἱοῦ (“Son”) into the phrase διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου. That portion of the verse is textually unanimous, and my point was that the NWT’s “Son” is therefore not a translation of any extant text but an explanatory gloss motivated by theology, not by manuscript evidence. Acknowledging a variant at one point of the sentence and insisting on textual unanimity at another is not “back-tracking”; it is the ordinary practice of textual criticism.

Your second contention—that Raymond Brown thought Acts 20:28 unusable for Christological reflection—rests on a selective reading. In his 1965 article “Does the New Testament Call Jesus God?” Brown cautions that the word θεός is applied to Christ explicitly only in a handful of places and that some of those places are text-critical or semantic cruxes. Acts 20:28, he says, “perhaps” may distinguish between ὁ θεός (the Father) and ὁ ἴδιος (the Son). Brown’s “perhaps” signals uncertainty about which of two high-Christological readings is correct; it does not amount to a judgment that neither is possible. When he revisited the question in the Anchor Bible commentary on the Johannine Epistles (1982) he reiterated that Acts 20:28, depending on the vocalization of τοῦ ἰδίου, can be read as an attribution of redemptive blood either to “God” understood Christologically or to “His own [Son].” Brown never claims that the text cannot sustain a high Christology; he merely cautions that one should not build the entire dogma of Christ’s deity on a single verse. On that point every responsible theologian agrees: the doctrine rests on the cumulative witness of the NT, not on a proof-text. But cumulative arguments presuppose the individual texts retain their force, and Brown never suggests excising Acts 20:28 from that larger pattern.

The scholarly discussion since Brown has only strengthened the case that Luke wrote “church of God.” P75 (third century) is no longer extant at this verse, but the Alexandrian uncials א B C* Ψ 33 81 1739 align with the earliest Sahidic and Bohairic Coptic versions in supporting θεοῦ. “Church of the Lord” is the reading of D (Codex Bezae) and the later Byzantine tradition—precisely the witnesses that habitually replace θεός with κύριος to avoid difficult expressions (e.g., 1 Cor 10:9 and Jude 5). Externally, the weight plainly favours θεοῦ; internally, θεοῦ is the lectio difficilior. That is why every critical edition from Westcott–Hort to NA 28 prints θεοῦ, and why the UBS textual committee, after canvassing exactly the same objections you raise, rated that decision {B}—virtually certain.

Once θεοῦ is accepted, the remaining question is grammatical: does τοῦ ἰδίου qualify αἵματος or does it act as an absolute substantive? When Luke and the rest of the NT writers use ἴδιος in the absolute they place it in the first attributive position (e.g., John 1:11, 13:1; Acts 4:23). Acts 20:28 has it in the second position, the normal slot for an adjective that continues to describe the just-mentioned noun. Exactly the same construction in Hebrews 13:12 (διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος) is rendered by all translators “with his own blood”; no scholar has proposed supplying “Son” there. Luke is a stylist who likes variety, but he is not idiosyncratic: when he means “his Son” he writes υἱοῦ, when he means “his own” he uses the adjective possessively. The papyrological examples sometimes invoked (Moulton–Milligan s.v. ἴδιος) involve invitations or wills in which ὁ ἴδιος stands in apposition to a preceding explicit name; they are irrelevant to Luke’s syntax here.

Finally, the charge that “no doctrine should be based on it” ignores how the Church has in fact handled the verse. Acts 20:28 was cited unhesitatingly by Ignatius (Eph. 1:1), Tertullian (Adv. Prax. 29), Hippolytus (Noet. 18), Origen (Philoc. 24), and Athanasius (Ep. Serap. 1.14) because they found in it an early and apostolic witness that the One who shed his blood is truly God. That is not a post-Nicene invention; it is second-century exegesis. Nor did the verse stand alone: it had already been written that the rulers “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor 2:8) and that God had purchased the church “with his own blood.” The doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, given full dogmatic articulation only at Chalcedon, is implicit in Luke’s diction long before the creeds.

In sum: there is one textual variant, not none; it only concerns θεοῦ/κυρίου, not the blood clause. The manuscript evidence and the principle of lectio difficilior favour θεοῦ. The Greek syntax, by parallel and position, favors the possessive reading “his own blood.” Thus, the traditional translation is not a theological imposition but the most straightforward rendering of the text that Luke left us. To acknowledge that some modern scholars prefer a less demanding paraphrase is fair; to imply that the traditional reading is “complete nonsense” or that conscientious scholarship must treat it as “extremely unlikely” is to misrepresent both the textual evidence and the history of interpretation.

43

Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

here's how this verse should read: .

take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the holy ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of god, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

- kjvhere's how it reads in the nwt: pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the holy spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the congregation of god, which he purchased with the blood of his own son.. here is how it reads in the kjv with the greek keyed to strong's: take heedg4337 thereforeg3767 unto yourselves,g1438 andg2532 to allg3956 theg3588 flock,g4168 overg1722 the whichg3739 theg3588 holyg40 ghostg4151 hath madeg5087 youg5209 overseers,g1985 to feedg4165 theg3588 churchg1577 of god,g2316 whichg3739 he hath purchasedg4046 withg1223 his owng2398 blood.g129 .

aqwsed12345

@peacefulpete

Your message reflects a careful reading of the spectrum of English translations and recognizes both the enduring complexity and the theological stakes of Acts 20:28. However, the claim that “the grammar is somewhat ambiguous” and that “translators have read the phrase through the theological lens they subscribe to” deserves a more nuanced assessment. While it is true that doctrinal commitments have influenced certain translation decisions, the evidence of Greek grammar, manuscript tradition, and early patristic usage collectively favors the traditional rendering, “the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood,” as both the most natural and the most contextually responsible reading.

The grammatical ambiguity in Acts 20:28, specifically the phrase διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου, is sometimes overstated. Greek’s use of the second attributive position (genitive article + noun + genitive article + adjective) is unambiguously possessive, yielding “his own blood,” with τοῦ ἰδίου naturally referring back to τοῦ θεοῦ, the immediately preceding genitive. This pattern is regularly observed throughout the New Testament (cf. Hebrews 13:12 διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος) and in the papyri, where “his own” modifies the previously stated noun rather than supplying an implicit noun such as “Son.” The much-cited examples of ἴδιος used absolutely (as in John 1:11, 13:1, Acts 4:23, 24:23) always occur in contexts where the referent is both clear and plural (“his own [people]”). Acts 20:28, by contrast, presents a singular noun, and the phrase structure directly attaches “blood” to “God.”

Those who favor reading τοῦ ἰδίου as “his own [Son]” often do so not for grammatical but for doctrinal reasons, as even Max Zerwick and Mary Grosvenor’s Grammatical Analysis concedes (“for doctrinal reasons some would translate of one who was his own” [p. 423]). This is not a neutral observation: the normal force of the Greek is possessive, and deviation from this reading is motivated not by the demands of syntax, but by discomfort with the implication that Paul could write of “God’s own blood.” However, the earliest patristic evidence—including Ignatius of Antioch (Eph. 1.1), Tertullian, and Jerome—shows that second-century and third-century Christians understood the phrase as an affirmation of Christ’s full divinity, in keeping with their confession that the crucified Lord is “God in the flesh.”

The proliferation of modern translations you cite, with their variety of renderings and footnotes, is not evidence of a grammatical ambiguity at the core of the Greek text, but rather of a modern ecumenical caution to avoid theological offense. The majority of critical Greek editions (NA28, UBS5, SBLGNT) and the majority of standard translations (KJV, NASB, ESV, CSB, etc.) still maintain the possessive reading, and where dynamic equivalents (such as “his own Son”) appear, they are universally acknowledged as interpretive glosses. Not a single Greek manuscript supplies υἱοῦ (“Son”); every insertion of “Son” is thus an explanatory paraphrase, not a translation of the text itself.

On the theological dimension, the claim that Acts 20:28 only demonstrates “divine agency” or “Second Power theology” misunderstands both the literary context and the theological currents of early Christianity. The passage, indeed, features the Holy Spirit appointing overseers, but this is precisely because the Spirit is integral to the church’s life—a point entirely consonant with classical Trinitarian doctrine, not a denial of it. The text’s doxological shape, assigning redemptive action and possession to “God” in the context of Christ’s sacrificial death, does not merely posit “multiple powerful figures,” but presupposes the unity of divine action in the economy of salvation, which the doctrine of the Trinity later formalizes.

The so-called “surprise” about the Holy Spirit’s active role in the appointment of overseers is only a problem for rigidly subordinationist frameworks. In fact, Acts and the Pauline epistles consistently attribute the activities of sanctification, guidance, and church governance to the Spirit as fully divine and personal (cf. Acts 5:3–4; 13:2), never as a mere extension of a “second power.” The triadic structure of Acts 20:28 is not an accidental byproduct, but a reflection of the apostolic faith in Father, Son, and Spirit.

In summary, while theological lens can color translation choices, the overwhelming grammatical, textual, and historical evidence supports “the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood” as the most accurate and faithful rendering. Early Christians accepted and preached this phrase as a profound statement of the unity of Christ’s divinity and humanity, and the unity of God’s saving act. The “ambiguity” is therefore not a defect of the text, but a revelation of the mystery that Christianity proclaims: that God himself, in the person of his incarnate Son, shed his blood for the church, and that the Spirit’s role in the church is not an outlier, but a confirmation of God’s Trinitarian life.

The variations among English versions and the presence of interpretive footnotes do not undermine this reading, but rather witness to its continued theological potency. The NWT’s paraphrase, and the tendency of some modern versions to render the phrase “his own Son,” reflect not the logic of the Greek but the anxieties of later dogmatic positions—positions that, in their attempt to avoid the text’s force, inadvertently confirm just how high a Christology the passage in fact articulates.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

@MeanMrMustard

In Aristotelian-Thomistic hylomorphism the language of “essence,” “form,” and “soul” can easily appear slippery if the distinct intentions of each term are not kept steadily in view. The essence (quidditas) of a material being answers the question what is it?; it embraces both the specifying form and the individuating matter, because this man and that oak are alike human or arboreal precisely in virtue of the same definable content even while they differ numerically by the diversity of their portions of matter. When one then asks through what intrinsic principle is that essence actuated so as to be alive? the reply, for living beings, is “the soul.” The soul therefore is not the whole essence but the essence’s formal constituent, considered precisely as a source of vital operations. In plants and brute animals, we speak of vegetative or sensitive souls; in man of a rational soul. Hence to say that a human being “possesses a soul” is a convenient shorthand, yet strictly the soul is not an added property that a prior subject could lack or acquire; it is the very formal principle by which the composite is a subject at all. The human individual is a rational animal in virtue of the informing soul.

The rational or intellectual soul is the form of the human body of itself and essentially
[Substantia animae rationalis seu intellectiva sit forma corporis humani per se et essentialiter.]
“... we reprove as erroneous and inimical to the Catholic faith every doctrine or position rashly asserting or turning to doubt that the substance of the rational or intellective soul truly and in itself is not a form of the human body, defining, so that the truth of sincere faith may be known to all, and the approach to all errors may be cut off, lest they steal in upon us, that whoever shall obstinately presume in turn to assert, define, or hold that the rational or intellective soul is not the form of the human body in itself and essentially must be regarded as a heretic.” — Council of Vienne (1312)

From this it follows that the intellectual acts which most reveal our specific difference—abstract judgment, universal reasoning, free self-determination—are not caused by brain chemistry in the way an electric spark causes ignition; rather, the rational soul elicits these acts through bodily organs as through instruments proportioned to the task of presenting phantasms and concepts for higher consideration. Remove the body, and the soul’s natural field of operation is truncated (hence the need for resurrection); remove the soul, and no ensemble of electro-chemical events can rise on its own to the level of intentional universality. Consciousness, then, “resides” in the essence only insofar as the form is the seat of all immanent acts; but it is expressed as a psychosomatic event, the whole composite thinking and willing through the mediation of neuro-physiological processes. One need not imagine a spatial location where consciousness sits—any more than the form of triangularity “sits” in the three-sided diagram—but rather a metaphysical root from which the life-activities spring.

When you speak of the formal cause “pushing” a being toward its nature you are touching the Thomistic axiom that operation follows being (operatio sequitur esse). Because the form specifies what-ness, it also specifies the range of characteristic acts; because man is rational, he tends by intrinsic inclination toward intelligible truth and deliberate good. To observe those acts in the concrete is therefore to recognize the presence of a proportionate principle: where there is deliberative choice, there must be an intellectual appetite capable of universal ends; where there is true intellection, there must be an immaterial power elevated above merely sensory images. Thus, we infer the soul, not as a deus ex machina to mask our ignorance, but as the adequate explanatory ground of manifest effects that outstrip the powers of matter as matter.

It is indeed through the phenomena of a being’s operations that we discern its nature—yet the Thomist cautions that these operations are not merely epiphenomenal “expressions” of an occult substrate. They are the actuality of the form in act. Consequently, to diagnose a human essence is to encounter a unified substance whose visible behaviors stand to its invisible principle not as symptoms to a hidden cause, but as the very unfolding of what it is to be human. A crippled will or impaired intellect may hinder that unfolding, but even then, the radical aptitude persists, for the form remains the same: a damaged violin does not cease to be a violin, nor does a comatose man cease to be rational.

In sum, the soul is neither an abstract label nor an ethereal passenger. It is the intrinsic actuality that makes this body a living, thinking someone rather than a cleverly arranged something. Because nothing can put forth what it does not first possess at least virtually, the presence of genuinely rational acts authorizes the inference to a rational form. That inference, though philosophical, has immediate existential resonance, for it grounds both the inviolable dignity of every human life and our ordered openness to the transcendent source of intellect and will.

43

Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

here's how this verse should read: .

take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the holy ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of god, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

- kjvhere's how it reads in the nwt: pay attention to yourselves and to all the flock, among which the holy spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the congregation of god, which he purchased with the blood of his own son.. here is how it reads in the kjv with the greek keyed to strong's: take heedg4337 thereforeg3767 unto yourselves,g1438 andg2532 to allg3956 theg3588 flock,g4168 overg1722 the whichg3739 theg3588 holyg40 ghostg4151 hath madeg5087 youg5209 overseers,g1985 to feedg4165 theg3588 churchg1577 of god,g2316 whichg3739 he hath purchasedg4046 withg1223 his owng2398 blood.g129 .

aqwsed12345

@scholar

The phrasing τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ ἣν περιεποιήσατο διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου in Acts 20:28 is best rendered “the church of God, which He acquired with His own blood.” A strictly grammatical reading treats τοῦ ἰδίου as an adjectival genitive whose default reference is the possessor already present in the construction—namely τοῦ Θεοῦ. Greek regularly employs ἴδιος in this intensive sense (“one’s very own”) after a noun that already carries a genitive article; the phrase therefore means “the blood that is God’s very own.” The NT itself furnishes exact structural parallels: cf. 2 Peter 2:16 τῇ ἰδίᾳ παρανομίᾳ and Hebrews 9:12 διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος, none of which invite us to supply an unexpressed noun. Where a clarifying noun is required, the writers state it explicitly, as in Romans 8:32 τοῦ ἰδίου Υἱοῦ. Luke, however, omits υἱοῦ here, and the absence is decisive; the author had just written αἵματος, so the most economical—and syntactically expected—way to say “His own Son’s blood” would have been διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου υἱοῦ. His failure to do so shows that a supplementary noun was not in his mind.

In English we omit the article before “blood,” not because it is absent in Greek, but because English normally suppresses the article with abstract nouns (“by blood,” “with courage,” “in hope”) and therefore a literal “the blood” would mis-portray the Greek sense. The Greek article here functions to mark the genitive phrase τοῦ αἵματος as a single semantic unit, not to signal contrast or identification; retaining it in English would create a false emphasis. The claim that three genitival articles (“of God,” “of the blood,” “of the own”) make the phrase so ambiguous that “theology alone is decisive” misunderstands Koine usage. Luke writes three genitives because each element belongs in that case for independent syntactic reasons: τοῦ θεοῦ depends on ἐκκλησία; τοῦ αἵματος follows the preposition διά; τοῦ ἰδίου completes an idiomatic possessive construction. Their co-occurrence is accidental, not hermeneutically charged. Greek readers met such strings daily; they did not stop to puzzle over Christological puzzles.

The suggestion that τοῦ ἰδίου is a substantive standing for “His Own (Son)” derives not from linguistic necessity but from theological discomfort with the idea that Paul could speak, even rhetorically, of “God’s blood.” Max Zerwick’s standard reference grammar recognizes this when it observes on the passage that “for doctrinal reasons some would translate ‘of one who was his own’”. In other words, the alternative rendering rests on dogmatic preference, not on grammatical compulsion. Bruce Metzger, while conceding that some readers might recoil from ascribing blood to God, still judged θεοῦ to be “undeniably the more difficult reading”—and therefore on the principles of textual criticism the more likely to be original—precisely because a scribe would more readily substitute κυρίου to avoid what he thought a theological problem than introduce θεοῦ and create it.

Appeal is sometimes made to papyrological instances where ὁ ἴδιος stands substantively as a term of endearment for family members. Those examples, however, are plural and arise in vocative or colloquial settings; they do not replicate Luke’s formal genitival sequence τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου. Nor do the four NT occurrences of absolute ἴδιος (John 1:11; 13:1; Acts 4:23; 24:23) help your case, because in each of them the context itself supplies a plural referent (“his own [people]”), whereas Acts 20:28 is singular and already has a perfectly serviceable head noun, αἵματος, to which ἴδιου naturally attaches.

Textually, the external evidence for τοῦ Θεοῦ is at least as strong as, and probably stronger than, that for τοῦ Κυρίου. 𝔓74, ‫א, A, B, C*, 33, and the Vulgate stand together for θεοῦ, whereas κυρίου first appears distinctly in D and later Byzantine witnesses. The maxim “the harder reading is to be preferred” applies: θεοῦ would invite alteration on theological grounds; κυρίου would confer theological harmlessness. Internally, Paul’s noun phrase “church of God” is idiomatic for him (1 Cor 1:2; 10:32; 15:9; 2 Cor 1:1; Gal 1:13; 1 Tim 3:5), whereas “church of the Lord” never elsewhere occurs in his letters or anywhere else in the NT. That perceived Pauline usage would have induced a copyist unconsciously to normalise κυρίου, not the reverse.

Because τὴν ἐκκλησίαν … διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου is a single syntactic unit, the logic of the sentence is unforced only when τοῦ ἰδίου refers back to τοῦ Θεοῦ: “God purchased the church with His own blood.” Far from being alien to primitive Christian thought, that wording resonates with the confessional idiom of early writers who spoke of “the blood of God” (Ignatius, Eph. 1.1; Smyrn. 6.1). Their witness shows that believers who read Greek natively could apprehend the paradox without paling at its Christological force: the crucifixion is the act of the incarnate Son, yet because the Son is the definitive self-revelation of the Father, Paul can, in a doxological idiom, predicate the shed blood of God.

Consequently, the attempt to safeguard monotheism by interpolating “Son” into the English text masks the literary artistry of Luke and obscures an early high-Christological confession. Grammar, textual evidence, and the history of interpretation all converge on the traditional rendering, whereas the “Son” of the NWT—and of any version that follows it—rests finally on theological expediency rather than on the data of the Greek text itself.

84

Zechariah 12:10 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

here's a question for those who still support watchtower on this forum.

why did watchtower leave out the word "me" in zech.

zechariah 12:10 reads like this: .

aqwsed12345

It is best to begin where all text–critical discussion must begin: with the surviving Hebrew. Every complete Masoretic witness and every extant Judean-Desert fragment that preserves Zechariah 12:10 gives exactly the same consonantal sequence,

וְהִבִּיטוּ אֵלַי אֵת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָרוּ
“they shall look unto me, ‹’ēt› whom they pierced.”

Nothing in the Hebrew tradition, early or late, replaces אֵלַי (“unto me”) with אֵלָיו/עָלָיו (“unto him”). The so-called waw/yōd interchange raised by Burney is well known; yet all presently collated DSS or medieval manuscripts continue to read the first-person suffix. Even the two medieval codices that register a keri-note of עָלָיו retain אֵלַי in the ketiv; scribes flagged the verse as theologically disquieting; they did not supply a demonstrably ancient alternative reading. Consequently, modern critical editions (BHS, BHQ) reproduce אֵלַי without siglummed variants.

Because the MT yields the striking claim that YHWH himself is “pierced,” most scholars—whether or not they are persuaded by Christian dogma—take the line as a textbook illustration of the lectio difficilior. Scribes amend what shocks them; they do not invent it. That is why the locus classicus in Gesenius–Kautzsch–Cowley is headed, not “probable text,” but “we should probably read,” i.e., an editorial emendation, not a reading with external support. To treat that conjecture as though it were an attested Hebrew variant is to confuse scribal evidence with modern editorial suggestion. Men who translate for the pew cannot legitimately substitute an un-attested conjecture for the universally attested text.

Turning from Hebrew to Greek, the Old Alexandrian translator of the Minor Prophets did transform the clause: “they shall look to me because they have mocked” (ἐπιβλέψονται πρὸς με ἀνθ’ ὧν κατωρχήσαντο). Why? Probably to defuse the anthropopathic shock. In the late second-temple period another cadre of Jewish scholars—the circle today called kaige–Theodotion—produced a counter-revision meant to restore formal fidelity to the Hebrew. Their work is preserved (i) in the Naḥal Ḥever scroll 8ḤevXII gr (late 1st BCE/early 1st CE) and (ii) in the eighth-century Codex L (Rahlfs 309). At Zech 12:10 the kaige text reads, as one would expect, “καὶ ἐπιβλέψονται εἰς ἐμὲ ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν”—a literal rendering of אֵלַי plus a relative pronoun demanded by Greek syntax. This is the Jewish-Greek form which the Fourth Evangelist knew. His citation in John 19:37 is verbally identical except that he replaces ἐπιβλέψονται with the synonymous ὄψονται and, in a typical compression, omits the explicit ἐμὲ. Nothing in that omission effaces the first-person sense, because the reader who knows Zechariah will supply it; indeed Revelation 1:7 makes the identification between the pierced One and the eschatological Lord explicit.

Greg Stafford’s defense of the NWT ignores that textual trail. He insists that because John 19:37 no longer contains ἐμὲ, modern translators are free to remove אֵלַי from the Hebrew and to write “they will look to the one.” That is a non sequitur. John is not translating Hebrew; he is quoting a current Jewish Greek recension whose own fidelity to אֵלַי is beyond dispute. To erase the first person from the Hebrew base text is therefore not to “follow John,” it is to alter the only Hebrew that John and every other ancient witness had in front of them.

Nor does the appeal to other modern versions rescue the move. Most modern English Bibles that read “him/the one” put “me” in the margin and explain in a foot-note that the Hebrew is first person; their editorial committees judged the stylistic roughness intolerable but made no claim of manuscript authority. The NWT alone presents the conjecture as the Hebrew original, without alerting the reader that no Hebrew witness supports it—a procedure the United Bible Societies’ Principles and Procedures for Translation (§1.4) labels “unacceptable.”

Finally, the theological tail is unmistakably wagging the textual dog. A strict Arian Christology cannot permit a verse in which YHWH speaks and yet is the One whom Israel has pierced, for that is precisely the identification John exploits to say that the crucified Jesus shares YHWH’s identity. The NWT therefore suppresses the first-person suffix, harmonizes Zechariah to its own reading of John, and then turns round to claim that John vindicates the alteration. Circularity could scarcely be clearer.

The objection from 1 John 4:12 (“No one has ever seen God”) rests on a category mistake. John’s Gospel does not claim that the crowd saw the divine nature; it claims they pierced the enfleshed Logos, the One in whom “all the fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). Classical Christology calls that the communicatio idiomatum: what is done to the incarnate Son is predicated of the person, and therefore—because the person is divine—of God. That is why John can say in the same breath that “no one has seen God” (1:18) and still insist, quoting Zechariah, that the soldiers looked upon him whom they pierced.

In sum, Stafford’s defense collapses at every textual checkpoint. The Hebrew says “unto me”; the earliest and best Jewish Greek says “unto me”; John writes in conscientious dependence on that Greek; the NWT alone rewrites the Hebrew, unbacked by any manuscript, in order to silence a verse that otherwise discloses what orthodox Christianity has always confessed: the crucified Jesus is none other than Israel’s God in human flesh, the Lord who was pierced and who yet promises, “they shall look upon me.”