aqwsed12345

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  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  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 .

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  aqwsed12345

  @Earnest

  The appearance of four “equally valid” English renderings in Comfort’s handbook reflects four ways a modern translator might paraphrase a single Greek clause, not four independent Greek archetypes that have equal textual standing. The concrete data from the documentary tradition are stubbornly simple: the entire extant Greek transmission of Acts 20:28 presents only two points of variation. One concerns a single consonant in the genitive qualifier of ἐκκλησία (“God” or “Lord”); the other concerns word-order within the double genitive. No manuscript, papyrus, version, patristic citation or indirect witness supplies the noun υἱοῦ, and no independent line of descent hints that it was ever present. Comfort is therefore describing exegetical possibilities that arise once the critic accepts the fixed wording διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου; he is not conferring equal textual votes upon four distinct readings. The conflation of exegetical paraphrase with textual attestation is the root of the misconception that the NWT merely chooses one among many equally grounded Greek alternatives. It does not. It supplements the text with a term found nowhere in the manuscript tradition.

  The attempt to justify that supplementation by appeal to “dynamic equivalence” confuses two distinct canons of translation. Dynamic equivalence merely releases the translator from mirroring Greek syntax where that syntax would mislead a modern reader; it does not license supplementation of the semantic content when the original is perfectly transparent. A first-century reader needed no added word to grasp Luke’s possessive genitive: τοῦ ἰδίου, in the marked post-posed position, qualifies the immediately preceding noun αἵματος and can only mean “his own blood.” If a modern reader requires help, the historically responsible method is to supply that help in a marginal gloss rather than to move the gloss into the running text and allow it to masquerade as the wording of Luke. The RSV, NRSV and NIV follow precisely that discipline by placing “Son” in an explanatory foot-note. The NWT, by contrast, printed the word in its main line from 1950 onward and only in 2013 removed the brackets that once at least acknowledged its conjectural status. That move does not emulate dynamic equivalence; it crosses the line between interpretation and substitution.

  The grammatical plea that τοῦ ἰδίου may function substantivally is equally fragile. The vocative papyrus formulae in which ὁ ἴδιος operates as a term for a dear relative are syntactically remote from Luke’s second-attributive construction. Not only does Luke never elsewhere coin a christological title from ἴδιος, but no Jewish or Christian author of the first three centuries employs ὁ ἴδιος as an independent designation for Jesus. When early readers misunderstood the phrase, they tended to invert the genitives (producing τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος) or to swap θεοῦ for κυρίου; had they believed υἱοῦ belonged to the text they would have restored it, as Byzantine scribes habitually did with other perceived omissions. Their silence is negative testimony that the noun was never there.

  The charge that the appeal to Ignatius rests on corrupted fourth-century redactions has been overstated. The middle recension of the Ignatian letters is externally attested by Polycarp’s contemporary collection notice in the early 130s and by the embedding of lengthy verbatim quotations in Irenaeus, Origen and Eusebius—centuries before the alleged fourth-century mutilation. Those early writers already cite the phrase ἐν αἵματι θεοῦ. Even if one invoked maximal scepticism about Ignatian authenticity, the presence of the formula in Irenaeus (Against Heresies, V.1.2) pushes the usage back to the late second century and into a writer whose text is multiply witnessed in Greek and Latin. That early attestation demonstrates that Christians steeped in the sub-apostolic generation found no theological impropriety in coupling a divine title with the shedding of blood. The accusation of patripassianism is therefore misplaced. The fathers who most vigorously repudiated modalism—Athanasius, Hilary, the Cappadocians—happily cited Acts 20:28 in anti-Arian polemic, because they presupposed the Chalcedonian principle of communicatio idiomatum: whatever is said of either nature may be predicated of the one person. To speak of “God’s blood” no more implies that the Father suffered than Paul’s phrase “they crucified the Lord of glory” implies that the divine nature was extinguished on Calvary. It is the incarnate person who bleeds, and that person is truly God.

  Nor can one evade the force of Luke’s diction by pointing to the reading ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ κυρίου. Even were the committee’s more difficult reading criterion mistaken and κυρίου original, the result would still be the assertion that the Lord himself shed “his own blood,” not “the blood of his own Son.” The textual issue therefore leaves the genitive string untouched and does not aid the Watchtower’s interpolation.

  Behind the repeated claim that fourth-century corruption obliterated earlier testimony lies a methodological sleight of hand: accusations of later tampering are asserted where the evidence contradicts a theological preference, then withdrawn when the same evidence can be marshalled against Trinitarian readings. Consistency requires an even-handed treatment of the data. Extant manuscripts, versions and citations form a coherent stemma that leaves no room for an early loss of υἱοῦ across every branch of the tradition; the charge of global corruption collapses under its own weight.

  In sum, the essence of the apologia for the NWT reduces to theological discomfort with attributing redemptive blood to a subject called “God.” That discomfort is understandable for a community that denies the full deity of Christ, but it cannot be converted into a textual argument. The Greek says what it says; the grammar yields one natural construction; the patristic record confirms that early Christians accepted the wording in that natural sense; and the charge of patripassianism dissolves once the incarnational framework of the NT is taken seriously. The purchase of the church by “the blood of his own” is, in Luke’s narrative logic, the purchase accomplished by the incarnate Son who is himself fully and eternally God. Every attempt to excise that confession from the verse has required inserting a word the evangelist did not write. Textual fidelity and historical theology therefore converge: the clause is best rendered, as virtually every critical edition and most standard versions still render it, “the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood.”
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  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  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 .

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  aqwsed12345

  @Earnest

  Comfort’s brief note has often been pressed far beyond what it will bear. By setting out four conceivable English renderings he does not claim that four distinct Greek texts lie behind them. His first and third lines simply register the well–known variation θεοῦ / κυρίου; his second and fourth explain how an English translator might attempt to convey, by paraphrase, what he or she supposes to be the sense of the fixed words διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου. Nothing in Comfort’s apparatus suggests that the Greek ever read “διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου υἱοῦ,” still less that such a form enjoys equal textual standing with the transmitted wording. The choice, therefore, is not between four Greek readings but between two: ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ and ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ κυρίου. The rest is interpretation.

  That point is decisive for the appeal to J. H. Moulton’s discussion of ὁ ἴδιος in the papyri. Moulton observes that in familiar letters the noun may function vocatively (“to his own, greetings”), an idiom of affection for one’s family circle. The vocative, however, is the very feature that marks the usage: the adjective is treated as a substantive in place of the addressee’s name. Luke’s clause stands in a wholly different syntactic environment. Here τοῦ ἰδίου is post–posed to αἵματος in the second attributive position, the standard means of expressing possession. Where the New Testament does wish to employ ἴδιος as a substantive, the form appears with the article in nominative or accusative position and is contextually obvious (John 1:11; 13:1; Acts 4:23). Luke never elsewhere builds a christological title out of the adjective, and no extant Jewish or Christian writer calls Jesus simply ὁ ἴδιος. The papyrological analogy therefore fails; the idiom behind “his own child” is grammatically remote from “his own blood.”

  The further claim that Byzantine witnesses shifted the word order to repair a lost sense cannot be sustained. Westcott and Hort already explained that transposition as a stylistic correction: scribes familiar with the more fluent genitive sequence τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος simply inverted Luke’s marked order. What those copyists did not do—though it would have resolved the supposed ambiguity at a stroke—was add υἱοῦ. The absence of any such expansion in the Byzantine tradition, whose scribes were extraordinarily willing to harmonise and clarify, is powerful negative evidence: they read the phrase as possessive and saw no theological peril in confessing that God purchased the church with “his own blood.”

  Nor does Metzger’s comment alter the picture. He notes that some later readers, after the specific sense of ὁ ἴδιος had faded, misunderstood τοῦ ἰδίου as an adjective and therefore inverted the genitives; yet Metzger preserves the earlier text precisely because the mistaken reversal is so transparent. If anything, his judgement underlines the point that the original construction speaks of blood that is God’s own, not of “the blood of God’s own Son.”

  Because no manuscript supplies υἱοῦ, translations that insert “Son” are not rendering a different Greek reading but offering an explanatory gloss. That is why the Revised Standard Version, New Jerusalem Bible and others mark the word as conjectural in their marginal notes. An explanatory gloss may be pastorally defensible, but it remains a gloss. To treat it as a co-equal textual option is to confuse commentary with evidence.

  Finally, theological scruple cannot overturn linguistic fact. The New Testament is perfectly willing to predicate human sufferings of the divine person of Christ: Paul writes of “the crucifixion of the Lord of glory,” Peter speaks of “the Author of life” killed by men, and Ignatius of Antioch urges the Ephesian believers to abide “in the blood of God.” Such language is not patripassian; it is the practical outworking of the communicatio idiomatum. To deny that God can be said to have blood is implicitly to deny that “the Word became flesh.”

  Acts 20:28 therefore remains what the earliest and best witnesses declare it to be: a confession that the flock is so precious to God that he acquired it at the cost of his own blood. Every attempt to dilute that wording by the interpolation of “Son” is exegetically unnecessary, text-critically unanchored, and historically out of tune with the church’s earliest reception of Luke’s narrative.
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  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  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 .

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  aqwsed12345

  The contention surrounding the rendering of Acts 20:28 in the New World Translation (NWT) hinges on its insertion of the word "Son" in the phrase "to shepherd the congregation of God, which he purchased with the blood of his own [Son]." Apologists of the NWT assert that this interpolation is justified, claiming that the original Greek text and its theological implications support their translation. The apologists who defend the New World Translation’s paraphrase of Acts 20:28 proceed from an understandable instinct: a wish to shield the text from the formula “the blood of God,” lest the verse imperil a non-Trinitarian theology. Yet none of the considerations they advance—text-critical, grammatical, historical, or theological—can overturn the overwhelming evidence that Luke has Paul tell the Ephesian elders that “God purchased the Church with his own blood.”

  First, the textual data. Manuscript variation is confined to the word θεοῦ / κυρίου: some witnesses read “the Church of God,” others “the Church of the Lord,” and a few compound the two. The genitive phrase διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου is immovably fixed; no Greek copy, uncial or minuscule, inserts υἱοῦ. The Sahidic, Bohairic, and Peshitta versions likewise attest the shorter reading. Westcott and Hort’s conjecture that huiou “may have dropped out” was acknowledged by Hort himself to be no more than a rescue-hypothesis, offered because—if accepted—“the whole passage is free from difficulty.” Textual criticism, however, does not emend clear unanimity on the strength of theological discomfort. Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorf, Bover, B M Metzger, the fourth and fifth editions of the UBS, and the Nestle–Aland tradition all declined to adopt Hort’s conjecture because no stemmatic logic justifies it: one cannot postulate a universal early error without a single surviving trace of the longer form.

  While such variants exist—notably in Codex Bezae and some Old Latin texts—they affect only the antecedent ("God" or "Lord"), not the phrase "τοῦ ἰδίου." Both readings still result in "his own blood," and the majority of textual critics favor "church of God" as the original, given its stronger attestation in earlier and more reliable manuscripts. This variant, therefore, does not justify inserting "Son" but rather underscores the consistency of the blood reference across textual traditions.

  Because the text is stable, the dispute moves to syntax. The construction τοῦ ἰδίου follows αἵματος in the second‐attributive position; throughout the New Testament that position marks a simple possessive relationship (“his own blood”), not a hidden substantive. Hebrews 13:12 (διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος) is grammatically identical and universally translated without supplying “Son.” The papyrological examples often cited by NWT defenders, where ὁ ἴδιος functions as a term of endearment, occur either in the nominative or in a vocative formulary and never in Luke’s attributive pattern; no extant Christian or Jewish text uses ὁ ἴδιος as an independent christological title. Consequently the most unforced reading is the traditional one: God acquired the church “through his own blood.”

  In the Greek text, “τοῦ ἰδίου” follows “αἵματος” (haimatos, “blood”) in the second attributive position, a syntactic structure that typically denotes a possessive relationship—“his own blood”—rather than a standalone substantive. This pattern is evident in Hebrews 13:12, where “διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος” (dia tou idiou haimatos) is universally rendered “with his own blood” without necessitating “Son.” The papyri examples, while illustrative of “ὁ ἴδιος” as a term of endearment in nominative or vocative contexts, do not align with Luke’s attributive usage here, where the adjective modifies the preceding noun directly. Moreover, the New Testament employs explicit Christological titles like “the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:6) or “the Righteous One” (Acts 3:14), yet nowhere uses “ὁ ἴδιος” independently to designate Christ. The appeal to implied referents in other verses, such as John 19:27 or 1 Timothy 5:8, is contextually distinct, as those passages rely on immediate narrative cues absent in Acts 20:28. The most natural and grammatically consistent reading, therefore, is adjectival—“with his own blood”—a conclusion reinforced by the NWT Reference Bible’s own acknowledgment of this possibility in its notes.

  The grammatical appeal to a supposed “absolute” substantive ὁ ἴδιος is equally fragile. The papyrological parallels adduced—where ho idios stands as a term of endearment—occur in vocative or epistolary formulae and always with explicit pronominal reference earlier in the sentence. In Acts 20:28 the article and adjective follow, they do not precede, the noun; placed in the second attributive position, τοῦ ἰδίου most naturally qualifies the immediately prior head-noun αἵματος. Luke elsewhere uses the possessive pronoun αὐτοῦ when a simple genitive of ownership is intended; his choice of idios here is stylistically marked, but not obscure. Hebrews 13:12 employs an identical construction—διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος—without provoking the least controversy, and no one has felt compelled to supply “Son” in that verse. The same idiom surfaces in the LXX at Leviticus 17:11 and Isaiah 63:3. To treat τοῦ ἰδίου as a christological title (“His Own One”) is linguistically possible but historically unattested: in no extant Christian or Jewish Greek document is Jesus ever called simply ὁ ἴδιος. By contrast, attributive uses of ἴδιος modifying a preceding noun are ubiquitous.

  The primary assertion is that the Greek phrase "διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου" (dia tou haimatos tou idiou), translated literally as "through the blood of his own," is ambiguous and that the NWT’s addition of "Son" clarifies its meaning. Apologists argue that since "the church of God" (τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ) typically refers to God the Father, and God the Father cannot have blood, the reference must be to the Son’s blood. This reasoning, however, rests on a theological presupposition rather than textual evidence. The Greek text, as preserved in all extant manuscripts—such as the Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, and Codex Alexandrinus—lacks any explicit mention of "Son" (υἱοῦ, huiou). The phrase "τοῦ ἰδίου" is an adjectival construction modifying "blood" (αἵματος), yielding the straightforward rendering "his own blood." Early translations, including the Sahidic Coptic and the Peshitta, consistently reflect this reading, offering no support for the insertion of "Son." The claim that "Son" may have been present in earlier manuscripts and accidentally omitted, as speculated by some like F. J. A. Hort, lacks substantiation, as no manuscript evidence corroborates this hypothesis. Scholarly consensus, reflected in critical editions like the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, upholds the adjectival interpretation, affirming that the text states God purchased the church "with his own blood."

  Apologists further contend that the phrase "church of God" appearing with the articular form "τοῦ θεοῦ" (tou theou, "the God") exclusively denotes God the Father, thus necessitating the NWT’s clarification. This argument overlooks the flexibility of New Testament usage. While "the church of God" often refers to the Father, the context of Acts 20:28, with its reference to blood, aligns with Christological themes elsewhere in the New Testament, such as Hebrews 9:12-14, where Christ’s blood is central to redemption. The suggestion that rendering it as "God’s blood" implies patripassianism—a heresy asserting that the Father suffered—is a mischaracterization. The doctrine of communicatio idiomatum, affirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE, posits that Christ’s divine and human natures are united in one person, allowing attributes of either nature to be ascribed to his person. Thus, the statement "God purchased the church with his own blood" is theologically coherent when understood as referring to Christ, the incarnate Word, who is both fully God and fully man. Early Christian writers, such as Ignatius of Antioch in his Epistle to the Romans (ca. 107 CE), employed phrases like "the blood of God," indicating that this interpretation was not only acceptable but prevalent in the early church.

  Another claim is that the grammatical possibility of construing "τοῦ ἰδίου" substantivally as "of his own [one]"—implying the Son—supports the NWT’s rendering. Scholars like J. H. Moulton have noted that in Greek papyri, "ὁ ἴδιος" (ho idios) can function as a term of endearment for a close relation, suggesting it could refer to Christ. However, this interpretation is less probable in Acts 20:28. New Testament Christological titles, such as "the Beloved" (Ephesians 1:6) or "the Righteous One" (Acts 3:14), are explicitly attested, whereas "his own" as a standalone title for Christ is not. The simpler, adjectival reading—"his own blood"—is grammatically natural and contextually consistent, as even the NWT Reference Bible acknowledges in its notes. The appeal to papyri usage, while intriguing, does not override the manuscript evidence or the broader syntactic patterns of the New Testament.

  The appeal to modern versions that paraphrase the clause “blood of his own Son” cannot decide the question, because those translations openly acknowledge that they are interpretive. They stand alongside, not against, a much larger bloc—KJV, ASV, NASB, ESV, NIV, CSB, NET, the Vulgate’s ecclesiam Dei… proprio sanguine—whose translators judged that fidelity to the Greek forbade supplementation. Rendering decisions driven by dynamic equivalence testify to translators’ judgments about meaning, not to the state of the Greek evidence. Translations incorporating “Son” or “Lord” often do so as interpretive paraphrases, explicitly noting in footnotes that “Son” is absent from the Greek text, as seen in the Revised Standard Version or New Jerusalem Bible. The majority of critical editions—Nestle-Aland, UBS, SBLGNT—and standard translations like the King James Version, New American Standard Bible, and English Standard Version retain “church of God” and “his own blood,” aligning with the manuscript evidence and resisting unnecessary supplementation. The preference for “church of the Lord” in some versions stems from weaker manuscript support (e.g., Codex Bezae) and does not alter the phrase “τοῦ ἰδίου,” which remains consistent across variants. Commentators like A. W. Wainwright or Murray J. Harris, cited by apologists, express caution about “God’s blood” but do not deny the textual integrity of the traditional reading; rather, they explore interpretive options without endorsing the NWT’s interpolation as normative. The reliance on a minority of dynamic equivalence translations reveals a theological bias—specifically, the Watchtower Society’s rejection of Christ’s deity—rather than a textually grounded necessity.

  These renderings reflect interpretative choices rather than fidelity to the Greek text. The majority of standard translations—such as the King James Version, New International Version, English Standard Version, and New American Standard Bible—opt for "his own blood," aligning with the manuscript evidence and scholarly consensus. The NWT’s reliance on a minority of translations does not bolster its case; rather, it highlights a departure from the textual norm driven by theological bias. The Watchtower Society’s denial of Christ’s full deity, evident in their handling of passages like John 1:1, suggests that the insertion of "Son" in Acts 20:28 is motivated by a desire to avoid affirming Christ’s deity, rather than by linguistic or historical necessity. Every translation that prints “his own Son” acknowledges in a footnote that the word is absent from the Greek text; the decision is an interpretive paraphrase, not a textual alternative. By contrast, the majority of critical translations—NA/UBS, Nestle‐Aland, SBLGNT, and the main English, German, French, Spanish and Italian standard versions—retain the literal wording precisely because it reflects the unanimous manuscript tradition.

  The interpolation of "Son" lacks textual grounding, contradicts the unanimous witness of extant manuscripts, and introduces a clarification not demanded by the Greek. The traditional rendering not only preserves the original text but also coheres with the New Testament’s portrayal of Christ as the divine-human redeemer. The NWT’s rendering, far from standing the test of time, reflects an interpretative overlay that prioritizes doctrinal commitments over textual integrity.

  Theologically, NWT apologists assert that rendering the phrase as “God’s own blood” is untenable, arguing that it conflicts with the biblical depiction of God as a spirit without blood (John 4:24; Luke 24:39) and risks implying patripassianism, the notion that the Father suffered. They maintain that the blood must be Christ’s, not God’s, citing passages like 1 John 1:7 (“the blood of Jesus his Son”) and Revelation 1:5 (“washed us from our sins in his own blood”) to argue that Acts 20:28 should be harmonized accordingly. This position, however, rests on a misunderstanding of early Christian theology and the doctrine of the incarnation. The phrase “church of God” (τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ), while often referring to the Father, does not preclude a Christological interpretation in this context, where the reference to blood evokes the redemptive act of Christ, as seen in Hebrews 9:12-14. The doctrine of communicatio idiomatum, formalized at Chalcedon in 451 CE but implicit in apostolic teaching, holds that Christ’s divine and human natures are united in one person, allowing attributes of either nature to be predicated of him. Thus, “God purchased the church with his own blood” is coherent when understood as referring to Christ, the incarnate Word, who is fully divine and fully human. Early Christian writers like Ignatius of Antioch, in his Epistle to the Ephesians (ca. 107 CE), unabashedly spoke of “the blood of God,” reflecting a second-century understanding that embraced this unity without lapsing into patripassianism. Paul’s own language in 1 Corinthians 2:8 (“they crucified the Lord of glory”) similarly juxtaposes divine and human attributes, underscoring that such expressions were not foreign to the apostolic mind. The objection that God cannot bleed dismisses the incarnational reality affirmed in John 1:14 and Philippians 2:6-8, where the divine Word takes on flesh and experiences human death.

  That wording, hencethe apologists claim, would be “incredible” for Paul and would entail patripassianism. The early church, however, heard it without embarrassment. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the same Ephesian community to which the elders belonged, exhorts them to “rekindle yourselves in the blood of God,” echoing Acts 20:28 and demonstrating that second‐century believers grasped the statement as a christological, not patripassian, affirmation. Paul himself elsewhere juxtaposes a divine title with a human act (“they crucified the Lord of glory,” 1 Cor 2:8), showing that the communicatio idiomatum was already implicit in apostolic teaching. To object that “God is spirit and cannot bleed” is therefore to object to the incarnation itself.

  Historically, the phrase “blood of God” is neither novel nor scandalous in early Christianity. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the very community whose elders Paul addresses in Acts, exhorts the Ephesians to “rekindle yourselves in the blood of God” (Eph 1.1). Ignatius is no patripassian; he distinguishes the Father and the Son as sharply as later Nicene theology. His diction shows that second-century readers—Greeks steeped in Luke’s idiom—did not stumble over Acts 20:28, because they understood the communicatio idiomatum long before Chalcedon gave the principle its name. The person who bleeds is the identical person who is eternally God; what belongs to either nature may be predicated of the one prosōpon.

  The charge of patripassianism, therefore, misfires. Acts 20:28 does not say that the Father, qua Father, bleeds; it says that God, understood christologically after the pattern of Acts 2:36 (“God has made him both Lord and Christ”) and Acts 3:15 (“you killed the Author of life”), redeems the Church through the incarnate economy. Luke, like Paul in 1 Cor 2:8 (“the Lord of glory was crucified”), is perfectly willing to place a divine title and a human action in the same clause, because he thinks of Christ as a single subject in whom divine and human predicates converge.

  A related argument posits that the broader biblical narrative, emphasizing Christ’s blood as the means of redemption (e.g., Matthew 26:28, Hebrews 9:14, 1 Peter 1:19), demands that Acts 20:28 be adjusted to avoid attributing blood to God. This harmonization, however, imposes an external theological framework onto the text rather than allowing it to stand on its own terms. The New Testament consistently presents Christ as the divine-human mediator whose blood redeems, a role compatible with Acts 20:28’s assertion that God, through the person of Christ, purchased the church. Passages like John 3:16 and 1 John 4:9 highlight God’s act of sending his Son, but they do not negate the unity of Christ’s person, through whom God acts redemptively. The traditional rendering enhances, rather than contradicts, this theology by underscoring the infinite value of the church as purchased by God himself in the incarnate Son.

  Finally, the “difficulty” that motivates the bracketed Son exists only for those committed a priori to a theology in which the Word is not fully God. The very patristic writers whom NWT defenders cite against a “strange and startling phrase” read the same Greek we read and nevertheless invoked Acts 20:28 when defending the full deity of Christ. The Watchtower’s rendering is therefore not a neutral clarifying gloss; it is a doctrinal correction imposed upon a recalcitrant text. Remove the doctrinal pressure and the Greek stands clear: the flock belongs to God because God himself, in the person of the incarnate Son, has paid for it with his own blood.

  The claim that Acts 20:28 cannot bear theological weight because “critics torture the passage” ignores the role the verse played in pre‐Nicene exegesis. Long before Trinitarian controversies crystallised, early Christians cited it as a witness to the infinite worth of the redemption purchased in Christ’s blood. The NWT’s interpolation does not clarify the text; it neutralises it in order to avoid a doctrinal implication that the Witnesses’ theology cannot sustain. When the conjecture is removed, the passage resumes its original force: the flock is supremely precious because God himself, in the person of the incarnate Son, has ransomed it with his own blood.

  Hence, the suggestion that no definitive conclusion can be drawn about Acts 20:28 due to its complexities, and that dogmatism should be avoided, sidesteps the overwhelming evidence favoring the traditional text. While apologists frame their position as a balanced consideration of variant readings and scholarly opinions, their interpolation of “Son” introduces an alteration unsupported by the Greek, driven by a desire to align the verse with a non-Trinitarian theology. The early church, as evidenced by Ignatius and pre-Nicene exegesis, found no difficulty in the phrase “blood of God,” interpreting it as a profound affirmation of Christ’s deity and the unity of his redemptive act. The NWT’s rendering, by contrast, dilutes this significance, prioritizing doctrinal presuppositions over textual fidelity.

  The NWT’s translation of Acts 20:28 is neither textually justified nor theologically necessary. The Greek text, supported by all available evidence, declares that God purchased the church with his own blood—a statement that, through the lens of Christ’s dual nature, affirms his deity and underscores the unity of his person. The apologists’ arguments, while citing selective scholarly opinions and alternative translations, fail to overturn the clear weight of the evidence, rendering their defense of the NWT’s interpolation unpersuasive in the face of rigorous academic scrutiny.

  In conclusion, the NWT’s translation of Acts 20:28 lacks textual, grammatical, and historical justification. The Greek phrase “διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου,” supported by all manuscript evidence, declares that God purchased the church with his own blood—a statement that, through the lens of Christ’s dual nature, affirms his deity and the unity of his person. The apologists’ arguments, while appealing to selective translations, early testimonials, and theological concerns, fail to overturn the clear weight of the evidence. The traditional rendering not only preserves the integrity of the text but also resonates with the New Testament’s portrayal of Christ as the divine-human redeemer, rendering the NWT’s interpolation an unpersuasive departure from both linguistic accuracy and theological coherence.
• 
  57

  How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

  that's how they sold it.

  the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  aqwsed12345

  @Touchofgrey

  First, in physics, “nothing” almost never means “absolute nothingness.” Rather, as the article you referenced and virtually all physicists admit, the so-called “quantum vacuum” or “vacuum state” is not truly nothing at all. Instead, it is the lowest possible energy state of a quantum field—a sea of fluctuating potentialities governed by the mathematical structure of the field equations. It has laws, properties, dimensionality, and, crucially, the potential to give rise to particles and energy under certain conditions. Even Lawrence Krauss, who famously popularized the phrase “a universe from nothing,” was compelled to admit that his “nothing” was a quantum vacuum—an entity with rich structure and properties, not the absence of all being.

  If we examine the article you shared, it openly admits this: the “nothing” at the start of the Big Bang is a quantum gravitational field or, in some approaches, a pre-existing quantum vacuum. In other models, it might be a “state of no classical space and time,” but still a mathematically describable possibility within some theoretical framework. This is already a something, not nothing in the strict sense. Physics, by its very nature, can never operate with or describe absolute nothingness, since the only things amenable to scientific investigation are those with some potential for observable or theoretical manifestation.

  Now, to your challenge regarding metaphysics: The classical philosophical definition of “nothing”—as in “non-being,” the total absence of any entity, property, law, or potential—is utterly different from the “nothing” of physics. Metaphysical nothingness is not a field, not a state, not an energy condition, not a substrate, and not even a logical possibility. It is the absence of all being and the absence of the possibility of anything whatsoever. In this sense, no law of physics, no quantum field, and no model of “pre-Big Bang” cosmology is ever describing true nothingness.

  This is why the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”—first posed in Western philosophy at least as far back as Leibniz, and addressed systematically by Aquinas—is not resolved or even addressed by cosmological models that describe transitions from “quantum nothing” to something. Such models presuppose the existence of a field, a set of laws, or a mathematical structure—their explanatory power is always conditional on something already existing. At best, physics can ask, “Why did our universe come from this quantum state rather than another?” or “What are the mathematical properties of the vacuum that give rise to universes?” But it can never answer, “Why is there anything at all?”

  You might respond that perhaps the “laws of physics just are,” or that “existence is brute,” as some contemporary atheists suggest. But this is merely to restate the problem, not to solve it. To say that “the quantum field just exists” is to beg the question. The metaphysical demand for an ultimate explanation is not satisfied by infinite regression or by arbitrarily positing a “brute fact” at some stage. Unless one is content with an irrational and arbitrary universe, reason requires an ultimate ground—a being whose essence is existence, that is, a necessary being. This is what classical theism, especially in the Thomistic tradition, means by God: ipsum esse subsistens, Pure Act, the unconditioned ground of all contingent being.

  Moreover, even apart from the metaphysical necessity of a first cause, physics itself cannot justify the intelligibility or law-likeness of reality. The fact that the universe is structured by intelligible laws and that mathematical models can even describe a “quantum vacuum” is itself an enormous metaphysical puzzle. Why is there an ordered, law-like, rational structure at all, rather than chaos or sheer nothingness? Here again, the classical answer is that intelligibility, order, and being are rooted in the very nature of God, the ultimate source of all order and existence.

  In conclusion, the “nothing” of physics is always a kind of something—a quantum vacuum, a potential, a set of laws—never the absolute nothingness of metaphysics. As long as there is anything at all, however “minimal,” the question of why there is something rather than nothing, and what grounds the possibility of any existence, remains untouched by physics. To address this question is to step into the domain of metaphysics, where the only non-arbitrary answer is to posit a necessary being, Pure Act, whose existence explains the existence of all contingent realities. Any “scientific” answer that tries to evade this simply substitutes one contingent state for another and never reaches the root of the matter. That is why the classical theistic argument stands untouched by appeals to quantum cosmology, and why “nothing” in physics cannot play the explanatory role that metaphysics requires.
• 
  84

  Zechariah 12:10 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  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: .

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• 

  aqwsed12345

  @Earnest

  In the exchange you have reduced a complex, three-stage trajectory—Hebrew oracle → Jewish Greek revision → Johannine citation—to a single step and then concluded that the NWT is exonerated because its English wording resembles John’s Greek. The similarity is superficial, and it does not touch the fundamental point: the NWT alters the Hebrew it claims to translate, whereas John does not.

  1. What the Hebrew says.
  All extant Hebrew witnesses, whether medieval codices (e.g., Aleppo, Leningrad) or the fragmentary proto-Masoretic texts from the Judean Desert, read the same consonantal sequence in Zech 12:10:
  

  וְהִבִּ֣יטוּ אֵלַי אֵ֥ת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָ֖רוּ
  “they shall look unto me, ‹’ēt› whom they pierced.”

  The first-person pronominal suffix -ay (“unto me”) is not disputed; no Qumran fragment or medieval margin offers אֵלָיו (“unto him”). The difficulty is rhetorical, not textual: YHWH, the speaker, declares himself to be the one pierced.

  2. How the late Second-Temple translators handled that line.
  The so-called kaige–Theodotionic revisers, whose work is preserved in 8 ḤevXII gr (1 st c. BCE/CE) and, centuries later, in Codex L (8 th c.), did not suppress the first person. They rendered literally—εἰς ἐμὲ ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν—while adding the relative pronoun ὃν required by Greek syntax. The result mirrors the Hebrew meaning (“unto me whom they pierced”) yet is stylistically smoother than the Old Greek of Vaticanus, which had diverted the thought by changing the verb (“they insulted me”). Nothing in the kaige revision implies a different Hebrew Vorlage; it is a conscientious accommodation of Greek to the same consonantal text we still read.

  3. What John does with that Greek.
  John 19:37 cites Zechariah in virtually that kaige form, with one synonymic substitution (ὄψονται for ἐπιβλέψονται) and the omission of ἐμὲ—an omission that neither erases nor contradicts the first-person implication, because the antecedent can be supplied from context. John has just narrated the lance thrust (19:34); he then affirms that this fulfils the Scripture that says “they will look εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν.” Because the pierced one in Zechariah is YHWH, John’s christological inference is that the crucified Jesus shares YHWH’s identity. The citation is interpretive, but it is not a textual alteration of Zechariah: it rests transparently upon the Jewish Greek then in circulation.

  4. What the NWT does instead.
  When the NWT comes to translate Zech 12:10 from Hebrew, it replaces אֵלַי with a third-person construction: “they will look to the one whom they pierced.” That English is indeed congruent with John’s Greek surface form—but only because the translators have first excised the inconvenient first-person pronoun from the Hebrew clause. No Hebrew manuscript supports their move; no critical apparatus lists such a variant; it is an emendation introduced solely so that the Hebrew verse will no longer equate the speaker (YHWH) with the pierced figure whom John identifies as Jesus. In other words, the NWT has harmonised the source text to its own reading of the citation in order to avoid the divinity-claim that the citation, in its original literary setting, makes inevitable.

  5. Why the analogy with John fails.
  

  You begin by suggesting that I claim John does not alter the Hebrew of Zechariah 12:10 because he presupposes that ὃν (“whom”) refers back to the first-person speaker, while the NWT’s similar rendering somehow corrupts the Hebrew. This mischaracterizes my position slightly, so let me clarify. John is acting within the normal bounds of Second-Temple Jewish exegesis: he quotes an accepted Greek revision and draws a theological conclusion from the conjunction of that text with the events he has witnessed. The NWT, conversely, presents itself as a translation of the Hebrew Bible but silently rewrites the clause to protect an Arian christology. The former is legitimate interpretation; the latter is textual manipulation.

  My argument is not that John’s use of ὃν inherently refers back to the first-person speaker in a grammatical sense divorced from context, but that John cites a Greek tradition—aligned with kaige-Theodotion as seen in 8ḤevXIIgr—that interprets the Hebrew text faithfully, and he applies it theologically to identify Jesus, the pierced one, with the divine speaker, YHWH. The NWT, by contrast, does not merely adopt this Greek rendering; it rewrites the Hebrew text itself, changing the Masoretic Text’s (MT) וְהִבִּיטוּ אֵלַי אֵת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָרוּ (“they shall look unto me, [namely] the one whom they pierced”) into “they will look to the one whom they pierced,” thereby eliminating the first-person suffix אֵלַי (“unto me”) and breaking the link between the speaker and the pierced one. This is not a matter of following an alternative textual tradition, as no Hebrew manuscript supports such a reading, but a deliberate emendation driven by the NWT’s theological presupposition that Jesus cannot be YHWH.

  You assert that John is not altering the Hebrew, and neither is the NWT, because John likely had access to a Greek text like 8ḤevXIIgr or a similar recension, which you argue was widely used in his time. You further suggest that this Greek text reflects a Hebrew Vorlage different from the MT, one that aligns with John 19:37’s ὄψονται εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν (“they will look to the one whom they pierced”). Let’s examine this claim closely. The Hebrew text of Zechariah 12:10 in the MT is unambiguous in its consonants: אֵלַי is a first-person pronominal suffix, meaning “unto me,” and the relative clause אֵת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָרוּ identifies this “me” as the one pierced. No extant Hebrew manuscript, including those predating the medieval codices like Aleppo and Leningrad, reads אֵלָיו (“unto him”) instead. The Dead Sea Scrolls, while fragmentary for Zechariah, offer no evidence of such a variant, and the proto-MT tradition, which 8ḤevXIIgr’s translators worked from, consistently preserves אֵלַי. Your suggestion that the Hebrew text available to the kaige translators reflected John 19:37 rather than the MT lacks textual support. The kaige-Theodotion tradition, as evidenced by 8ḤevXIIgr, renders the verse as εἰς ἐμὲ ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν (“unto me whom they pierced”), retaining the first-person reference of the Hebrew and introducing a relative pronoun ὃν to clarify the syntax for Greek readers. This is not a departure from the MT but an interpretative rendering of it, wrestling with the awkward Hebrew construction while preserving its meaning.

  6. On the alleged “different Hebrew” behind the kaige revision.
  No evidence whatever points to a Hebrew reading with a third-person object. The kaige revisers are famous precisely because they laboured to make the Greek line up more closely with proto-Masoretic Hebrew; their work forms the bridge between the Old Greek and the later strictly literal versions (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion). That bridge presupposes, and everywhere witnesses to, the same first-person אדני/אלי forms. The fragmentary state of 8 ḤevXII gr at this verse does not weaken the point: enough letters are extant to establish εἰς — ὃν ἐξε[κέντησαν, and the pattern of the revision elsewhere requires εἰς ἐμὲ before the lacuna.

  You cite Bynum’s argument that John’s citation is “accurate and historically reliable” and reflects “the prominent Hebrew text of his day,” implying that this Hebrew text differed from the MT. However, Bynum’s point, as articulated in his article (The Fourth Gospel and the Scriptures, Brill, 2012), is that John’s fidelity lies in his use of a Greek text from the kaige recension, which sought to align the Septuagint more closely with the proto-MT, not that the Hebrew itself varied. The kaige translators were not working from a Hebrew text that read אֵלָיו; they were translating the same אֵלַי found in the MT, as confirmed by scholars like Dominique Barthélemy (Les Devanciers d’Aquila, 1963) and Emanuel Tov (The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever, 1990). The fragmentary state of 8ḤevXIIgr at Zechariah 12:10 prevents a complete reading, but reconstructions based on spacing and context support εἰς ἐμὲ, consistent with the MT. John’s adaptation, replacing εἰς ἐμὲ ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν with εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν, simplifies the phrasing but does not negate the underlying Hebrew; it reflects a Greek interpretive choice that still allows his theological identification of the pierced one with YHWH, especially given the context of John 19:34–37 and his broader Christology (e.g., John 1:1, 20:28). The NWT, however, does not translate this Greek tradition back into Hebrew accurately; it alters the Hebrew אֵלַי to a third-person construction without manuscript evidence, a move that cannot be justified as fidelity to either the MT or the Greek.

  Your logistical point about John’s access to 8ḤevXIIgr—suggesting it’s unlikely he had a scroll that ended up in a Judean cave while writing in Ephesus—misses the mark. I’m not claiming John used that specific scroll; rather, he likely drew from a Greek text of the same kaige-Theodotion type, which was part of a broader Jewish revisionist movement in the late Second Temple period. These texts circulated widely enough to influence Origen’s Hexapla centuries later, and their use by semi-bilingual Jews, as you note, supports their prominence. But prominence does not mean they reflect a different Hebrew text; it means they were Greek translations of the proto-MT, designed to hew closely to the Hebrew while making it accessible in Greek. John’s citation aligns with this tradition, but his theological application goes beyond mere translation, identifying Jesus as the divine figure pierced, a conclusion reinforced by Revelation 1:7’s apocalyptic echo of the same verse.

  7. On the tetragrammaton in Greek scrolls.
  The appearance of יהוה written in palaeo-Hebrew letters inside some Greek biblical manuscripts is a Jewish scribal convention; it left no trace in the NT textual tradition. Every papyrus and uncial of John reads κύριος or ὁ θεός in OT quotations, never the divine Name. Consequently the NWT’s retrojection of “Jehovah” into the NT is another conjectural emendation, unsupported by documentary evidence and unrelated to the question of Zech 12:10’s pronominal switch.
  

  The presence of the Tetragrammaton in some Greek manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible reflects a Jewish scribal practice to preserve YHWH’s sanctity, seen in texts like 8ḤevXIIgr and certain Qumran fragments (e.g., 4Q120). However, NT manuscripts, including those of John (e.g., 𝔓66, 𝔓75), uniformly use κύριος (“Lord”) or θεός (“God”) when quoting the OT, following the Septuagintal convention of substituting κύριος for YHWH. There is no evidence that John’s autograph included the Tetragrammaton; the earliest Christian witnesses, such as Papias or Justin Martyr, show no trace of it in NT citations. The NWT’s restoration of “Jehovah” in John 19:37 and elsewhere is a modern conjecture, unsupported by Greek manuscript evidence, as even Jason BeDuhn notes in Truth in Translation (2003), critiquing it as a “conjectural emendation” lacking textual basis.

  8. Conclusion.
  John and the kaige translators transmit the same underlying message: Israel’s God speaks in the first person and declares himself to be the One who will be pierced. John identifies that divine speaker with the crucified and risen Christ. The NWT, finding such a claim incompatible with its doctrine, edits the Hebrew sentence so that “me” becomes “the one,” thereby severing the clause that John exploits. That, and not John’s legitimate use of Jewish Greek, is the corruption that textual scholarship detects and that a Trinitarian reading exposes. the core issue remains: the NWT’s rendering of Zechariah 12:10 as “they will look to the one whom they pierced” is not a translation of the Hebrew אֵלַי but a substitution drawn from the Greek tradition, adjusted to avoid John’s Christological implication. John’s ὃν presupposes a connection to the divine speaker when read in context, whereas the NWT severs that link by reworking the Hebrew into a third-person construction, unsupported by any textual witness. This is corruption—not because it differs from John’s Greek, but because it claims to translate the Hebrew while inventing a reading to fit an Arian Christology. John, by contrast, uses a legitimate Greek rendering to affirm that the pierced one is God incarnate, a truth the NWT explicitly rejects.

  In short, your defense of the NWT conflates John’s use of an interpretative Greek tradition with the NWT’s alteration of the Hebrew text itself. The evidence—from the MT, 8ḤevXIIgr, and John’s Gospel—shows that the Hebrew says “me,” John interprets it as fulfilled in Jesus as YHWH, and the NWT changes it to protect a sub-divine Christology. The charge of corruption stands firm.
• 
  57

  How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

  that's how they sold it.

  the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

  1. 
  2. 
  3. 
• 

  aqwsed12345

  @Touchofgrey

  Your attempted deconstruction of the “minimal facts” approach is a textbook illustration of modern internet atheism: it relies not on sustained argument, but on rhetorical gestures, appeals to authority without substance, and a selective, historically illiterate skepticism that evaporates the moment you are asked to apply it outside the New Testament. Let’s dissect the carcass of this response, and see what remains once the handwaving and bluff is swept away.

  1. The “Too Minimal” Objection: A Category Mistake

  Your chief objection, endlessly repeated, is that the “minimal facts” approach fails because non-believing scholars who accept the facts remain unconvinced of the resurrection. This is not a refutation of the facts, but a comment on the interpretative frameworks scholars bring to the evidence. The entire point of the approach is to isolate a core set of historical data so widely accepted (even by critical scholars) that any adequate explanatory model must account for them. The question then becomes: What best explains these facts? That some scholars reject the resurrection despite the data is entirely predictable, given a methodological naturalism that excludes miracles a priori. You are confusing the fact of scholarly disagreement (a constant in every discipline) with the bankruptcy of the evidence itself. The same “method” would dissolve all of ancient history: Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon is accepted by most, but revisionists remain. So what?

  Further, your claim that “if a non-believing scholar accepts the facts and doesn’t convert, the argument fails” is embarrassingly naïve about the function of evidence in rational persuasion. Scholars do not operate in a worldview vacuum. That one can refuse the resurrection for philosophical reasons while accepting the facts does not refute the evidential weight of those facts. It exposes, rather, the presuppositional blinkers of contemporary secularism.

  2. The Myth of “No Evidence Outside the Bible”: Double Standard and Ignorance

  The repeated claim that the minimal facts “all come from the Bible, so they don’t count” is the height of methodological hypocrisy. First, the New Testament is not “one book” but a collection of multiple, independent sources (Paul’s letters, Synoptics, John, Acts, and more) written by different authors, to different audiences, in different genres, all within a generation or two of the events. To dismiss these as “not evidence” because they are “in the Bible” is as silly as dismissing Tacitus’s Annals because they are “in a Roman book.” The Gospels are ancient biographies and epistolary literature written in the genre and conventions of their age—precisely how we know of any figure in the ancient world.

  Moreover, external corroboration exists: Josephus and Tacitus (despite atheist efforts to dismiss or minimize), Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and even the hostile Talmudic references collectively affirm the core elements: Jesus existed, was crucified, his followers proclaimed his resurrection, and this movement exploded in the immediate aftermath. If you dismissed every ancient historical fact that is as well-attested as Jesus’ death by crucifixion, you would be left in a sea of agnosticism so deep you’d drown before breakfast.

  3. “Appeal to Authority” and Scholarly Consensus

  The complaint that “scholarly consensus is irrelevant” is a game you would never play with evolutionary biology, the historicity of Alexander the Great, or any consensus you personally accept. When Habermas and others report that the vast majority of relevant scholars—regardless of theological commitment—accept certain facts (e.g., Jesus’ death by crucifixion, the empty tomb, post-mortem appearances), this is a report of mainstream academic judgment, not a naked “appeal to authority.” You then engage in a bait-and-switch: you demand a unanimity that no field in the humanities ever achieves, then fault Christian apologists for not meeting your ad hoc standard. This is intellectual bad faith, not argument.

  4. “The Gospels Are Not Independent Accounts”

  You parade the old canard that the Gospels are just “four versions of the same story,” not independent witnesses. This betrays a total unfamiliarity with the literature on ancient historiography. Multiple attestation (independent sources or traditions affirming the same core events) is a bedrock criterion in all ancient historical research. Matthew, Luke, and John draw on independent traditions; Paul’s letters are indisputably independent and predate the Gospels; early creeds embedded in the Pauline epistles (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:3-8) are recognized by skeptical scholars like Gerd Lüdemann and Bart Ehrman as pre-Pauline, i.e., within a few years of the crucifixion. To compare this level of attestation unfavorably to, say, the death of Socrates or the campaigns of Hannibal is an act of selective skepticism bordering on farce.

  Your “testimony about testimony isn’t evidence” move would vaporize the entire discipline of ancient history. We have no contemporaneous, “firsthand” written accounts of Caesar crossing the Rubicon; we have what later historians wrote, based on earlier (now lost) sources, oral tradition, and public knowledge. To dismiss the Gospel accounts as “not evidence” because they reflect the memory of the early Christian community is to erase all of history prior to the modern era.

  5. The Empty Tomb and Resurrection Appearances

  You claim there is no evidence for the empty tomb or resurrection appearances outside the New Testament, and that even within, it’s just “what people believed.” But this is how all ancient history is reconstructed: by testimony, corroboration, and the explanatory power of hypotheses. What makes the resurrection appearances unique is not that people believed in a resurrection—Jewish and pagan parallels do not resemble the explosive and world-altering character of the Christian claim—but that skeptical, even hostile witnesses (e.g., James, Paul) are themselves convinced and transformed. The “legendary accretion” hypothesis is utterly unable to account for the speed, geographical breadth, and social cost of the resurrection proclamation.

  6. Paul’s Testimony and Apostolic Witness

  You object that Paul was “not one of the twelve,” and that his testimony is suspect. This, again, misses the point. Paul’s independence from the original circle is what gives his testimony added weight: a persecutor, turned convert, with direct contact with Peter and James within a few years of the events (cf. Galatians 1-2). His letters contain creedal formulas recognized as earliest of all, far predating the Gospels. The claim that “none of the apostles left written testimony” is simply false: Peter and John’s authorship of epistles is far better attested than most classical authorship traditions. Moreover, the primitive Christian kerygma is demonstrably early, pre-literary, and built around resurrection conviction—not legendary aggrandizement. To dismiss all apostolic tradition as “fraudulent” or “forgery” is convenient for your skepticism, but requires you to level the same charge at every document of antiquity whose direct provenance is unclear.

  7. The “Believers Only” Gambit and the Smokescreen of Superstition

  You dismiss the evidential force of resurrection belief on the grounds that “ancient people were superstitious, so their beliefs don’t matter.” This is cultural chauvinism disguised as argument. The early Christians were not credulous; Second Temple Judaism had no category for an individual rising from the dead before the general resurrection. The resurrection claim was as scandalous, counterintuitive, and disruptive then as now. That they believed—and died for—the claim is not an argument for the truth of any miracle claim, but evidence of the distinctive and catalytic impact of a specific event they regarded as fact.

  8. Epistemic Circularity? A Failure to Grasp Historical Method

  You charge “circularity” because Christians use the biblical texts as evidence. This is false. The “minimal facts” approach makes no assumption of inspiration or inerrancy; it treats the New Testament as what it manifestly is: a diverse collection of ancient documents, evaluated by the same critical criteria as Josephus or Tacitus. Only a mind determined to disbelieve could find “circularity” in treating ancient texts as evidence for the events they purport to describe.

  9. Your Standard: Radical Skepticism for the New Testament, Gullibility for Everything Else

  You repeatedly demand standards for Christian claims you would never apply to your own beliefs about ancient or even modern history. You demand “external corroboration,” “firsthand testimony,” “unanimous scholarly agreement,” and a total absence of textual transmission or interpretive dispute. Yet you have no parallel skepticism about your knowledge of Caesar, Alexander, Socrates, or your own family genealogy. Your methodology, in short, is not a recipe for rationality, but for nihilism.

  10. Miracles and the Philosophical Bankruptcy of Methodological Naturalism

  You close by insisting “atheists don’t believe in miracles,” as if this were an argument. But that is precisely the point at issue: if God exists, miracles are possible, and if a miracle is the best explanation of the historical evidence, a worldview that rejects it out of hand is simply dogmatic naturalism masquerading as rationality. The question is not what your metaphysical prejudices allow, but what the evidence, honestly weighed, actually points to.

  Conclusion

  The minimal facts argument is not “minimal results for minimal minds,” but a deliberate effort to bracket confession and test the core of Christian claims by the strictest standards available—your own standards, in fact. If you want to retreat into solipsism, denying that any historical event can be known, so be it; but if you grant that ancient history is accessible to rational inquiry, you are forced to reckon with the resurrection claim as one of the best-attested, most transformative, and rationally explicable events in the historical record.

  Your entire response, stripped of bluster, is an exercise in strategic skepticism, not critical thought. Until you can apply your “method” consistently, or offer an alternative that actually explains the data without ad hoc recourse to skepticism, the intellectual foundations of Christianity—and the unique explanatory power of the resurrection—stand unshaken.
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  66

  Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

  by BoogerMan in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  (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.".

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  aqwsed12345

  @slimboyfat

  The antithesis you propose rests on two passages—John 13 and John 14 —read in isolation, lifted from their literary and theological setting, and treated as though the Fourth Gospel were a string of pro-Trinitarian and anti-Trinitarian slogans. Proper exegesis cannot proceed by extracting a single clause (“the messenger is not greater than the one who sent him,” “the Father is greater than I”) and allowing that clause, abstracted from both context and Christology, to overrule the evangelist’s own overarching depiction of Jesus. It is precisely because the early Church took the total Johannine witness with absolute seriousness that it repudiated Arianism and eventually employed Chalcedonian language to articulate who the incarnate Son is. To grasp why your reading fails, one must attend to (i) literary context, (ii) semantic nuance, and (iii) Johannine theology as a whole.

  John 13 is an enacted parable: the incarnate Lord kneels to wash the disciples’ feet, then explains that his gesture is paradigmatic for their own life of humble service. He therefore frames the lesson in proverbial form: “A slave is not greater than his master, nor a messenger (apostolos) greater than the one who sent him.” The point is hortatory, not metaphysical. Jesus does not here undertake an ontological taxonomy of masters versus slaves or senders versus agents; he reinforces the moral inversion he has just dramatized. To wrench the proverb out of its parenetic setting and make it a metaphysical proof that every “sent one” is by nature inferior to the sender is to miss the rhetorical genre entirely. The same Gospel has already declared of the Son, “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (5:23)—an impossible formulation if “sending” entailed ontological inferiority. Indeed, the evangelist insists in the same chapter that the Son does “whatever the Father does” (5:19); such unrestricted sharing of the divine prerogative cannot be squared with creaturely status.

  John 14 is uttered the night before the cross, in the very discourse where Jesus promises the Paraclete and foretells his own glorification. “The Father is greater than I” is thus spoken at the climax of the Son’s self-emptying mission, moments before Gethsemane. Patristic writers from Athanasius through Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria recognized the obvious: one must distinguish the eternal Son “in the μορφή of God” (Phil 2:6) from the same Son who, “having taken the form of a servant,” now stands poised to suffer. It is the condescended, incarnate economy—his visible, kenotic state—that is decidedly less “great” than the ineffable glory in which he subsists ab aeterno with the Father. Two chapters later Jesus will pray, “Glorify me, Father, with the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (17:5), explicitly locating that pre-temporal glory on the same side of the Creator–creature divide as the Father’s own majesty. The evangelist gives no hint that Jesus was ever a mere creature subsequently “promoted”; rather, the Son voluntarily “came forth from the Father and has come into the world” (16:28). The Church Fathers therefore read “greater” (meízōn) as a relational predicate applicable to the condition of the incarnate Son, not a denial of the one divine essence (ousia) that Father and Son hold indivisibly.

  Your appeal to “common sense” is simply an appeal to an unexamined anthropological model of mission. In human affairs, yes, the sender often outranks the envoy; but Scripture itself furnishes counter-examples in which the envoy’s status equals or even exceeds that of the sender (Joseph sent by Pharaoh with plenipotentiary power; the Davidic king sent as Yahweh’s vice-regent). More to the point, intra-Trinitarian sending cannot be mapped one-to-one onto creaturely analogies, because the divine processions differ categorically: the Son’s being-from-the-Father is an eternal, indivisible communication of the divine nature. The temporal mission simply manifests that eternal relation within history. Hence Augustine’s dictum in De Trinitate: missio sequitur originem—mission follows upon, but does not diminish, eternal generation.

  Finally, if one actually follows John’s narrative arc, the cumulative Christological data insist on equality of essence: the Word was God (1:1); the Son gives life as the Father does (5:21); the Son, like the Father, is to be “honored” with the honor due to God alone (5:23); Isaiah’s vision of Yahweh’s glory is said to be the Son’s glory (12:41); Thomas confesses the risen Christ as ho Theós (20:28) and the author ratifies that confession. Any interpretation of 13:16 or 14:28 that reverses those affirmations places the reader, not the evangelist, in the seat of judgment.

  Therefore, the “greater than” proof-text, rehearsed ad nauseam since the days of Arius, fails to trouble Chalcedonian Christology for the simple reason that it misconstrues genre, ignores context, and truncates the wider theological horizon of John’s Gospel. The Church reads Scripture neither by suppressing “common sense” nor by clinging to one-line slogans, but by listening to the full symphony of revelation—a symphony in which the incarnate humility of the Son never negates, but precisely reveals, the eternal glory he shares with the Father.
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  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  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 .

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  aqwsed12345

  @slimboyfat

  The assertion that the phrase “his own” (tou idiou) in Acts 20:28 is merely an idiomatic expression for “his own Son” and not a direct ascription of divinity to the crucified Christ is not supported by the primary philological, textual, and early patristic evidence. While it is true that languages often use possessive pronouns in an idiomatic way, a rigorous examination of the Greek text, its syntactical structure, and its context within both the Lukan corpus and the broader NT canon strongly favors the traditional reading: that it is the Son—who is called “God” in this passage—who sheds “his own blood.”

  First, it is essential to address the Greek grammar directly. The phrase tou idiou (“his own”) functions here as an adjective modifying “blood” (haimatos), not as a substantival noun for “Son.” If Luke had intended to specify “Son,” the expected Greek would be tou idiou huiou (“of his own Son”), which we do not find in any extant manuscript tradition. The theory that huiou (“Son”) dropped out by accident due to homoioteleuton (similar endings causing a copyist’s error) is not only speculative but contradicted by the remarkable textual stability of this verse. In fact, every Greek manuscript we possess, as well as the earliest Sahidic Coptic and Peshitta Syriac versions, omits “Son.” To suggest otherwise is to substitute conjecture for hard textual evidence.

  The analogy proposed, that “his own” is akin to the idiom “we look after our own,” misses the particularity of the Lukan construction. The phrase “with his own blood” (dia tou haimatos tou idiou) does not occur in a vacuum; similar constructions in the NT—such as dia tou idiou haimatos (“through his own blood,” Hebrews 13:12)—unambiguously attribute the blood to the subject of the clause, not to an unexpressed relative. Furthermore, the attempt to read “his own” as a substantive (i.e., “his own one,” meaning “Son”) lacks corroborating parallels in the NT. Nowhere is Christ called ho idios (“the own one”) as a title, whereas terms like “the Beloved” or “the Righteous One” have multiple, uncontested occurrences. The attempt to make idios serve as a substantive title for Christ is a modern invention, unsupported by early Christian usage.

  Moreover, the historical context and the reception of this verse in the patristic era further strengthen the traditional reading. Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the early second century, famously refers to “the blood of God” (tou haimatos tou theou) in his Letter to the Ephesians (1:1), a phrase that would have been scandalous if not grounded in apostolic tradition. Ignatius was writing to the very community to which Paul addresses the elders in Acts 20:28, indicating a theological and linguistic continuity. Early Christian writers were acutely aware of the metaphysical distinction between the Father and the Son (contra patripassianism), yet they consistently used language attributing divinity to the suffering Christ without confusion of persons. The doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, articulated explicitly at the Council of Chalcedon (451), maintains that what is predicated of Christ’s humanity may be predicated of the single person of the Word. Thus, while the divine nature itself does not bleed or die, the person who is the Son of God (and therefore God by nature) can be said to have shed blood—God’s blood—by virtue of the hypostatic union.

  It is also crucial to recognize that the argument does not rest on a supposed confusion of persons within the Trinity. Trinitarian orthodoxy explicitly denies that the Father suffered on the Cross (a heresy called patripassianism or modalism). Rather, it is the Son who, being consubstantial with the Father (“God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”), took on human nature and in that nature suffered and died. The apostolic and patristic tradition does not hesitate to speak of the crucified as “God,” for it is the person of the Word, not the essence of divinity, who endures the Passion. Therefore, Acts 20:28 is a forceful testimony, not to the death of the Father, but to the divinity of the Son: the Church is purchased with “the blood of his own”—namely, God’s own blood, shed by the incarnate Word.

  From the standpoint of systematic theology and exegesis, the anti-Trinitarian interpretation relies not on a close reading of the Greek but on an a priori theological commitment to denying the full deity of Christ. This is precisely why the NWT inserts “Son” into the text, despite its absence from all Greek manuscripts—revealing more about the translators’ ideology than about the biblical text itself.

  To sum up, the phrase “his own blood” in Acts 20:28, read in light of its grammatical construction, manuscript evidence, patristic reception, and Chalcedonian Christology, unambiguously refers to the blood of Christ, who is here called “God.” The passage does not confound the Father and the Son but rather reveals the high Christology of the apostolic Church. The idiomatic explanation is both grammatically unsustainable and historically anachronistic, and it cannot withstand the combined witness of the Greek text and the faith of the early Church. Thus, this verse stands as a powerful declaration of the deity of Christ and the unity of the Trinity in the work of redemption.
• 
  10

  The Deficient Theism of the Watchtower

  by aqwsed12345 in

  1. watchtower
  2. beliefs

  "for my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the lord.

  for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

  " (isaiah 55:8-9).

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  aqwsed12345

  @slimboyfat

  Classical Christian theism does not posit the crude “dodgy-referee” caricature you reject, nor does it elevate a selectively ignorant deity to “greater” status. Rather, it holds that God’s intellect is the very act by which every possible creaturely reality—actual or merely possible—receives intelligibility. Consequently, the contrast you propose between a “predestinarian God” who sees only one future and “Jehovah” who surveys a field of options is a false dilemma; in fact, both fall short of what reason and revelation jointly require.

  Because God is pure act, His knowledge is identical with His being. He sees all possibles in the single, timeless intuition of His own essence. Within that eternal “now” He knows unerringly which possibilities He freely wills to actualize and which He leaves in mere potency. From the creature’s temporal vantage, the future remains open until a free choice is made; from God’s atemporal vantage, that very choice—including the liberty with which it is made—stands luminously present. Thus, divine omniscience embraces every counterfactual permutation you imagine while simultaneously grasping, with infallible certitude, the one history that creatures will in fact enact. To know both the entire modal order of “might-be” and the single line of “will-be” is a perfection, not a deficiency.

  Your claim that a God who foreknows only the actual future is “less” than one who knows an encyclopedia of hypothetical futures confuses the metaphysics of knowledge with the drama of suspense. Human cognition gains more by adding new data; the divine intellect does not. For God, to know Himself is already to comprehend, in causa, every determinate and indeterminate feature of any possible creation. That is why Aquinas can say that God knows future contingents “not because they are, but because He is” (ST I, q. 14, a. 13). A being that peeks selectively into the fog of tomorrow, learning as events unfold, would be ontologically smaller, not larger—subject to something outside itself that first determines what there is to be learned.

  Nor does foreknowledge entail “fixing the match.” Knowledge is not causation. If I watch a recorded game, my perfect certainty about each pass does not impose necessity on the original players. The Divine vision is analogous: it transcends time altogether, embracing in one act what we experience successively. Human and angelic freedom unfold within the order of secondary causes; God’s predetermining concursus elevates and sustains their very ability to choose without coercing the choice. If this sounds paradoxical, it is only because we are trying to map an eternal mode of knowing onto temporal categories. But there is no logical contradiction: necessity in the order of knowing (for God) is compatible with contingency in the order of being (for creatures). Deny that, and you must also deny every biblical prophecy whose fulfilment remains genuinely free—yet Scripture never treats prophecy as a threat to freedom.

  Finally, the alleged superiority of a deity who “lets reality surprise Him” collapses when we confront evil and suffering. A God “surprised” by Auschwitz or a child’s leukemia is either impotent or careless. The classical doctrine of providence, by contrast, allows us to say both that God sovereignly wills only good as first cause and that rational creatures tragically introduce evil as deficient causes. Because He foreknows every sin, He already holds within His universal decree the redemptive wisdom by which He can draw a greater good from it—above all, the Cross. The open-theist alternative, which the Watchtower echoes, leaves us with a deity scrambling in real time to improvise remedies to horrors He did not see coming.

  In sum, the Thomistic God is not a game-fixer who rigs outcomes, nor a limited referee who merely prognosticates. He is ipsum esse subsistens: the subsistent Act-of-to-be whose single, all-embracing glance grounds both the realm of genuine possibilities and the concrete history that free agents enact. Such a God is maximally perfect, truly omniscient, and unfailingly provident—precisely the God whom both reason and the Catholic faith confess.
• 
  65

  Acts 20: 28 Corruption in the NWT

  by Sea Breeze in

  1. watchtower
  2. bible

  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 .

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  aqwsed12345

  The New World Translation (NWT), utilized by Jehovah’s Witnesses, has been subject to scrutiny for its rendering of certain biblical passages, particularly those with implications for the deity of Jesus Christ. One prominent example is Acts 20:28, where the NWT inserts the word "Son" into the phrase "the blood of his own," altering the verse’s meaning to align with the Watchtower Society’s theological framework. This article examines the textual and grammatical basis of the verse, the theological motivations behind the NWT’s rendering, and addresses common defenses raised by Jehovah’s Witnesses’ apologists, demonstrating that the traditional translation is both textually accurate and theologically coherent.

  Textual and Grammatical Analysis

  The King James Version (KJV) renders Acts 20:28 as: "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." The original Greek text reads: "ποιμαίνειν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ, ἣν περιεποιήσατο διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου." The phrase "διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου" translates literally to "through the blood of his own," where "τοῦ ἰδίου" (tou idiou) is an adjectival phrase modifying "blood" (αἵματος, haimatos), indicating "his own blood." The subject of the clause, "he," refers to God, suggesting that God purchased the church with his own blood.

  In contrast, the NWT renders the verse as: "to shepherd the congregation of God, which he purchased with the blood of his own Son." The insertion of "Son" (υἱοῦ, huiou) is not supported by any extant Greek manuscript. Textual criticism confirms that the phrase "διὰ τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου" is consistent across all known manuscripts, with no evidence for the inclusion of "Son." Variants exist for the phrase "the church of God" (τοῦ θεοῦ) versus "the church of the Lord" (τοῦ κυρίου), as noted in the Nestle-Aland critical apparatus, but these do not affect the phrase in question. Early translations, such as the Sahidic Coptic and the Peshitta, further corroborate the reading "his own blood," reinforcing the textual integrity of the traditional rendering (Stack Exchange: Acts 20:28 variants).

  Some scholars, such as F. J. A. Hort, have speculated that the original text might have included "Son" (υἱοῦ), which was accidentally omitted due to its similarity to "τοῦ ἰδίου." However, this hypothesis lacks manuscript support and is widely rejected by contemporary scholars. Others have proposed construing "τοῦ ἰδίου" substantivally, meaning "of his own [one]," implying the Son. This interpretation is grammatically possible but unlikely for several reasons. First, other Christological titles in the New Testament, such as "the Beloved" or "the Righteous One," have multiple attestations and were recognized by the early church, whereas "his own" as a title for Christ is unattested elsewhere. Second, the adjectival reading, "his own blood," is the simplest and most natural interpretation, as acknowledged even by the NWT Reference Bible, which notes that this is "the usual translation" ([NWT Reference Bible, p. 1580]). Third, the substantival reading appears driven by theological prejudice against the notion of "God’s blood," rather than by textual evidence. Fourth, early copyists who were uncomfortable with the phrase altered "God" to "Lord" rather than reinterpreting "τοῦ ἰδίου," indicating that they understood it adjectivally. Fifth, early Christian writers, such as Ignatius of Antioch, used phrases like "the blood of God," suggesting that the adjectival reading was accepted in the early church. Sixth, similar New Testament passages, such as Ephesians 1:7 ("through his blood") and Hebrews 13:12 ("through his own blood"), use comparable language, supporting the adjectival interpretation.

  Theological Motivations for the NWT’s Rendering

  The Watchtower Society’s insertion of "Son" into Acts 20:28 reflects their theological stance that denies the full deity of Jesus Christ, viewing him as a created being subordinate to God the Father. By rendering the verse as "the blood of his own Son," the NWT avoids the implication that God has blood, which would affirm Christ’s divinity within the framework of the incarnation. This alteration aligns with Jehovah’s Witnesses’ broader pattern of modifying passages that suggest Christ’s deity, such as John 1:1, where "the Word was God" is rendered "the Word was a god." In Acts 20:28, the addition of "Son" separates the act of shedding blood from God, reinforcing the Watchtower’s non-Trinitarian theology.

  Theological Significance of the Traditional Rendering

  The traditional translation of Acts 20:28, "the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood," has profound theological implications, affirming the deity of Christ through the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum. This Christological concept, formalized at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, posits that the divine and human natures of Christ are united in one person without confusion, change, division, or separation. Consequently, attributes of either nature can be ascribed to the person of Christ. Thus, while God in His divine essence is immortal and impassible, Christ, as God incarnate, assumed a human nature capable of shedding blood. The communicatio idiomatum allows the statement "God purchased the church with his own blood" to be theologically coherent, as the person who shed blood is both fully God and fully man.

  This interpretation is consistent with other New Testament passages that attribute human experiences to the divine Christ. For example, Acts 3:15 refers to Jesus as "the Author of life" whom the Jews killed, and 1 Corinthians 2:8 speaks of "the Lord of glory" being crucified. These passages rely on the same Christological framework, where the divine person of Christ undergoes human experiences through his incarnate nature. The traditional rendering of Acts 20:28 thus underscores the infinite value of Christ’s sacrifice, as only the God-man could achieve redemption for humanity.

  Addressing Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Apologetic Defenses

  Jehovah’s Witnesses’ apologists commonly raise two objections to the traditional translation of Acts 20:28. The first is that "God cannot have blood," as God is a spirit and thus incapable of physical attributes like blood. This objection misunderstands the doctrine of the Incarnation and the communicatio idiomatum. In Christian theology, Jesus Christ is one person with two natures, divine and human. While God in His divine essence does not have blood, the divine Son, through the incarnation, assumed a human nature capable of shedding blood. Thus, the person of Christ, who is fully God, can be said to have shed "God’s blood" without compromising divine immutability. This understanding resolves the apparent paradox and aligns with the New Testament’s portrayal of Christ’s dual nature, as seen in passages like John 1:14 ("the Word became flesh") and Colossians 2:9 ("in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily").

  The second objection is that other translations render Acts 20:28 similarly to the NWT, suggesting that their interpretation is not unique. While some translations, such as the New Jerusalem Bible and the New Revised Standard Version, interpret "his own" as referring to the Son, these are in the minority. The majority of translations, including the KJV, NIV, ESV, and NASB, render the phrase as "his own blood," reflecting the Greek text’s clear meaning. Moreover, the scholarly consensus, as evidenced by critical editions like the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, supports the adjectival reading of "τοῦ ἰδίου" as "his own blood." Even translations that interpret "his own" as referring to the Son are making an interpretive choice, not a direct translation, as the Greek text does not include "Son." The NWT’s rendering is particularly problematic because it is driven by a theological agenda to deny Christ’s deity, rather than by fidelity to the text.

  Supporting Evidence from Early Christian Writings

  Early Christian writers provide further evidence for the traditional interpretation of Acts 20:28. Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the early second century, refers to "the blood of God" in his Letter to the Ephesians: "Being imitators of God and rekindling yourselves in the blood of God, you have perfectly accomplished the work that was connatural to you.". This phrase, likely influenced by Paul’s words to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:28, reflects the early church’s understanding that the divine Christ shed his blood for the church. Ignatius’s use of "the blood of God" indicates that the adjectival reading of "τοῦ ἰδίου" was accepted in early Christianity, further undermining the substantival interpretation favored by the NWT.

  Conclusion

  The NWT’s insertion of "Son" into Acts 20:28 is textually unjustified and theologically motivated by the Watchtower Society’s denial of Christ’s deity. The original Greek text, supported by all extant manuscripts and early translations, clearly states that God purchased the church "with his own blood." This rendering affirms the deity of Christ through the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, which allows human attributes like shedding blood to be ascribed to the divine person of Christ. The traditional interpretation is consistent with other New Testament passages and early Christian writings, such as those of Ignatius of Antioch. Jehovah’s Witnesses’ defenses, such as the claim that "God cannot have blood" or that other translations support their rendering, fail to withstand scrutiny when examined against the textual evidence and theological framework of historic Christianity. Acts 20:28, when properly translated, stands as a powerful testament to the deity of Christ and the infinite value of his redemptive sacrifice.