Posts by kepler

31

Nebuchadnezzar's accession year in 625 B.C.E

by biometrics in

does anyone have info on why the watchtower's view that nebuchadnezzar's accession year was in 625 b.c.e is incorrect.. from the cd rom:.

jerusalem came under final siege in zedekiahs 9th year (609 b.c.e.

), and the city fell in his 11th year (607 b.c.e.

kepler

Pterist,

Reading what you said 3 or 4 times, I don't think I understood a word of it.

Thank you for your reply as well.

31

Nebuchadnezzar's accession year in 625 B.C.E

by biometrics in

does anyone have info on why the watchtower's view that nebuchadnezzar's accession year was in 625 b.c.e is incorrect.. from the cd rom:.

jerusalem came under final siege in zedekiahs 9th year (609 b.c.e.

), and the city fell in his 11th year (607 b.c.e.

kepler

Pterist,

You shouldn't have stopped there at 25:12. There's another issue to address after the 70 years and 607 BC.

Babylon is NOT destroyed. It simply comes under new management and the temple priests like it. Very unhappy with that absentee King Nabonidus. Jeremiah 25:13 is a failed prophecy ( make it desolate forever). Persians were very active in Babylon, cuneiform tablets record continued activity; Herodotus describes it in detail, might have visited there, and fails to mention a "desolation"; Xenophon fought to seize it with a pretender to the Persian throne; and even Alexander made it his empire's capital, long as that lasted. He died there.

If the Elders don't accept this and say it's "non scriptural". Refer them to Ezra chapters 7 and 8. Ezra leaves Babylon with local inhabitants during the reign of Artaxerxes...(8:1).

They did not report wearing hazmat gear.

My inference is that history should not be turned upside down on account of Jeremiah. Especially, considering what he writes in chapter 8 verse 8, I would be more inclined to "trust, but verify".

231

Thinking of becoming a JW.

by Kate82 in

hi,.

i am new to here so please be bear with me.. i have always believed in god, but was never baptised, my parents wanted me to make up my own mind religon wise.. i am thinking of becoming a jw and am just needing some advice on how to do this, bible study and jw beliefs.

also do jw say grace and how.. i am greatful of any help.. thanks.

kepler

Kate82:

If you are still on line... I am not a JW and therefore I am not an apostate. However, I did experience the Bible home study with the pamphlet "What the Bible Really Teaches" and I had numerous reservations about what was said in it. I did research on what my instructors were saying and they often evaded my questions or pressed me to back off.

What was most telling, however, was what Ziddina described as the responsibilities of a JW. I did this study on behalf of someone who was very dear to me and it was one of my last efforts to tread water.

It was futile for all the reasons that Ziddina described. Any objection I raised was ignored. Our very history of meeting, what we shared was invalidated as something that was somehow promoted by demons. Any argument, any research I could offer, even study of Greek or Hebrew or comparing one verse of the Bible with another was treated as the same. This was one of the most horrible experiences of my adult life, like awaking into a no-exit horror story from what seems now like it was a pleasant dream. We spent eight years together and we communicate not at all now. It's forbidden.

And I watched that noose tighten from one month to the next while that person expressed continued anxiety that she was not doing enough.

You might not have reason to believe that something similar could happen to you now. But I hope you don't have to reflect back on a warning like this when you find yourself channeled into a very restricted community awaiting entry into an eternal paradise earth.

On the positive side, I think I should reiterate what others have said (I am pressed by an appointment coming up -so this part is hurried). Shop around. Find out how others have found spiritual uplift. Examine perhaps how that can be obtained without writing off 99.9% of humanity to fates envisioned by bitterest of Old Testament chroniclers. Read past chapter 24 of Matthew. And look at it like this. God and Jesus are merciful and love you - along with everyone else.

25

One Silly Little Comma = WT Idiocy

by Farkel in

one would think that the god of gods, the creator of everything who wanted to give we puny little humans a handbook for salvation(tm), would make sure that handbook remained authentic.. one who thinks that way would be wrong.. since punctuation is critical to convey exact meanings, i find it strange that the god of gods would pick a written language for his handbook that has no punctuation!

oh, wait!

he also picked another language for that book that had no written vowels!

kepler

Like several others I was involved in another topic regarding Luke 23:43 - and have been concerned about it for several years since I first noticed it. As a matter of fact, for noticing I got the full benefits of shunning without ever having joined the org. But when I did encounter it, I have to admit that it looked to me like something so patently designed in editing for support of a pre-supposed doctrine. Nothing was going to happen upstairs until Christ returned - and Christ was going to return when the organization said he was returning - based on a host of other passages with even slimmer historical basis for prophecy or even direct declaration.

When someone observed that there were about 70-80 similar constructions in the NT, I went and looked for them with a Greek text and Strong Numbers. A table of the results was provided. But as the discussion continued, the search for evidence of the pro or con comma adherents expanded into other examination of other passages.

Save for sojourns periodically in Greece during service decades back, my Greek is self taught and drawing from lessons in other languages where I spent more time and gained more intuition. Nonetheless, I think I found several other passages that beside the "70", gave me further support in my argument.

"Today" and "this day" in Biblical Greek are conveyed by two words that appear in the passages of Luke and Acts, which we presume were written by the same author: simeron & 'imera. It was Slimboyfat (RVIP?) who submitted this example from a speech by Paul making an attestation, i.e., what he was swearing that day.

Acts 20:26 “Therefore I declare to you this day that I am not responsible for the blood of any of you.” Dioti martiromai imin en ti simeron imera oti katharos eimi apo tou aimatos. Notice that “simeron” and “imera” appear side by side, strong numbers 4594 and 2250 respectively. They are “today” and “day”.

Elsewhere, another clue is in other "truly I say to you phrases": Luke 22:34: I say to you, Peter, the cock will not crow this day, before you deny me three times. Luke 22:61 Before the cock crows today, These are complex expressions to transliterate, but it is clear that the redundant “imera” is absent. The same is true for Christ's discussion on the cross with the so-called Good Thief. While the Gospel of Luke is considered one of the three synoptic Gospels ( Matthew, Mark, Luke) - and certainly does not diverge near as much as John's, the inclusion of such incidents as the one in question indicate that Luke had a distinct agenda for writing his version of events. Instead of Christ's lament of "why hast thou forsaken me?", we have "into thy hands I commend myself." Mark only records the other two thieves on the hill as berating Christ, not seeking any forgiveness. As someone in the previous topic noted, at the very least there was a message that it was never too late for redemption. And for me, where it was where I grew up, it was pointed out that the good thief was the only sinner we knew for sure who was forgiven and there in the paradise with Jesus. But the people who claim that they are the only ones with official authorization to bear glad tidings have circumscribed this message considerably. Perhaps someone can tell me - if this moment ever comes up in Sunday meetings - has the promise been delivered on yet, or does the good thief still have to walk down a ramp to a newly established paradise earth at some "times indefinite" after Christ's invisible return to earth?

52

Do You Ever Doubt Your Efforts Are Futile?

by Elephant in

...hello folks.... ...i've read countless of posts, ideas, opinions, etc here and i'm interested in your response.... ...there is a whole gamut of feelings here from individuals that are simply annoyed with the wt organization, to those that come off as hellbent on putting the org out of comission.... ...others yet seem to have made it their mission in life to eradicate the concept of god himself.... ...to any of these, what is your motivation?

and do you ever doubt that these efforts are futile?

do you feel that you posses the power/ability/means to change the convictions/faiths of the masses?

kepler

Now, “Do I ever doubt that my efforts are futile?”

Let me get around to that starting with what Londo111 writes in answer to the question posed by the topic’s originator:

"Why does it seem impossible for everyone here to disconnect from what is obviously a great source of frustration to (in extreme cases) anger bordering on hatred?"

ANS.

That's simple…in a normal religious denomination:

(1) One can leave and not lose friends and family.

(2) One can question or disagree with any or all beliefs and not lose friends and family.

However, in a high control group, like the Witnesses, one cannot leave without losing all loved ones inside. And there is no more vicious a person than a member of a high control group toward one who has decided to leave it.

---------------------

Very close to my own thinking; and yet…

Should sleeping dogs be left to lie? They could have been in the time it has taken to put this note together.

I much agree with Londo111. But the odd thing about it for me is that it wasn’t a question of leaving; I had never subscribed to the system of beliefs in the first place. Yet all the same, I found the implications of points 1 & 2 applied to me anyway after eight years with someone I loved, cared for in all ways. Whatever the perfect storm was that separated us, this was a big part of it. For not only is it a question of leaving, but failing to join.

I had no background in any of this, save a checkered upbringing which gave me some early Protestant background. JW pamphlets had never reached me; no one prior had brought me into this dialog. But with death of her adult son, this new persona sprang like the Manchurian Candidate from within.

For background, when my ex suddenly started asking me: "Don't you think you need someone to explain the Bible to you, a true expert?" …I did start studying Protestantism, puzzled by this strangely non-Protestant inquiry. And then when study seemed to lead nowhere with her increased insistence to return to the faith her mother brought her into at 5 years old specifically, I took lessons from local elders at our home, elders selected from another congregation - so that even though we had lived under the same roof, we would become immediately more and more divided.

Regarding home visits, I read the material carefully and concluded that I was lied to on every page.

I asked the elders questions about the text and they invariably were evasive or pressured me to back off.

She's gone; she's been had. And she will be knocking on doors under scrutiny until “times indefinite” trying to con other people into the same scam like so many other multi-level marketing schemes.

Now exactly what can I do about it?

Nobody else is interested in the fact that I can show that Babylon (repeat, Babylon) was not destroyed as described in my indoctrination classes; nor that Jerusalem was destroyed in a breech of the historical and celestial record in 607 BC (I've recalculated the related lunar eclipses myself); nor that I see numerous Biblical misquotes, quotes out of context and twisted translations.

Nor is there anyone interested whatever in the “scholastic” approach taken to the subject in linkage or origin on Biblical matters; it was always subordinated to a 19 th century apocalyptic view where all words were turned to prophecy even when false or after a contravening fact.

When you discover some of the things that I have when examining claims of the organization, knowledge of these matters becomes disturbing of itself. One sees that the Org follows in a long tradition in the use and generation of Holy Writ, the sort that might have caused one of Jeremiah’s laments: Chapter 8, verse 8.

Holy writ becomes a contract book which my visitors quoted without sequential pattern and seemed to think they held “all titles to which” in their vest pockets; and that the Principal Party in the matter was deaf, dumb and locked in a basement in Brooklyn with some self-appointed Robespierres acting as his direct agents and spokesmen; these were supported by anonymous grapho-maniacs clearing forests to write “commentary” more binding and studied than the original. And then there was a network of theocratic STASI (likeThe Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen ) securing the beach heads of paradise earth. I didn’t mention yet the two R’s.

Coming away from this and observing a relationship with MLMs. Where MLMs make their entrance is appealing to greed. Here, what’s the corrupting motive? Dangling Paradise Earth at the end of iron-clad prophetic verses that just have to force God’s hand?

Nobody I know is interested in these observations - save for the people that are responsible for selling this bill of goods to my ex. And the people who have discovered the same falsifications and are experiencing the same loss as I am.

Then there is the dissident literature which I should shelve beside Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Since the former is in first person, this is not all good news. Koestler's hero is a fictional version of Bukharin in Stalin's world, still true to the basic faith; Franz is the real thing.

After a while of this, I need a breath of fresh air.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my high school friends, who is not a practicing Catholic, sent out to a group of us a book recommendation, something that came out 2003:

The Life You Save May be Your Own - An American Pilgrimage - by Paul Elie, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

What it is is simply four biographies tied together into one: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy – 20 th century Amercian writers and converts to Catholicism who tried to make sense out of their lives. This is done to large degree via reading more closely Matthew 25 and the 8 beatitudes rather than speculating on when the clock might stop after reading Matthew 24. Mind that when I say Roman Catholic, I am not talking about bishops, monsignors or anyone of any rank in the hierarchy, save perhaps if we count what holy orders Merton eventually takes on. These are just people who thought, wrote and acted based on their perceptions about God and the notion that they were to imitate Christ, not necessarily to preach from door to door.

The four authors I am acquainted with to varying degree. From the top: Percy, Merton, O'Connor and Day. Percy has the dubious honor of being quoted on the JW homepage about 1914.

THE modern history of Jehovah’s Witnesses began more than a hundred years ago.

“... have been killed in this century than in all of history.”—Dr. Walker Percy ...

wol.jw.org/en/wol/pc/r1/lp-e/1200264464/ ? 5/0

That should be a reason for some to be curious about him. He certainly didn't need the JW website as a sounding board. The WT needed him and Percy needed it not at all as he indicates in "Message in the Bottle". Merton seemed to make more noise as a Trappist monk than a thousand Pioneers going door to door. Pacifist Dorothy Day founded a publication called the Catholic Worker on the Lower East Side, and had Martin Cruz-Smith not devoted some attention to her in his novel Gorky Park in 1980, I would never have known of her.

Of the first three, the author characterized them respectively as “searcher”, “rebel” and “reformer” for reasons the text makes known. Flannery Connor’s “title” is as yet unknown to me 100 pages in and she is the most difficult for me to give a capsule review: a southern Catholic short story writer with a Gothic touch? …Maybe someone can help me out.

But all these people were connected, as their biographer asserts - and to a lesser degree I am connected to them (e.g., via the Maple Street bookstore in New Orleans to Percy or another of my high school friends continually taking retreats at Merton's Gethsemane monastery in Kentucky). These four did not have all the answers, but they were searching for them. And their lives certainly were not all triumphs. They read the Bible, but they read other things as well. They started with English, French and Russian 19th and early 20th century writers as well as Americans, some of whom they associated with and came to join professionally. Their careers among these people place these writers ( as with Van Doren below) in new contexts. Safe to say, they themselves wrote plenty.

Now, "Do I ever doubt that my efforts are futile?"

As for my main objective, I don't know if they are or not. Before all this happened, by comparison I was happy as a clam. But this turn of events has had significant impact on me. I have learned much from the experience and I have influenced others in ways that those who set this ball rolling were not anticipating.

I'm not done yet either.

Nor am I done with the illustration I’ve pulled down. Let’s go back to one of those questions posed by our topic’s initiator:

"Why does it seem impossible for everyone here to disconnect from what is obviously a great source of frustration to (in extreme cases) anger bordering on hatred?"

I sense an assumption here of monopoly on religious experience and in knowledge of God. And this I would suggest is a point 3 to add to those two already noted. To my mind this books argues against this with nearly every page.

To examine this, let me quote an episode from the book with Thomas Merton commuting Columbia University student in the late 1930s.

“Thomas Merton wandered into Mark Van Doren’s class by accident…Through Van Doren, Merton found a new set of friends [ including Robert Giroux]. …To them all Van Doren was at once a friend and guide … soon to be famous as an expositor of Great Books – he is cast as the Virgil in The Seven Storey Mountain… He shows them how to tell good writing from bad, the genuine from the phony…Van Doren sponsored a way of reading grounded in the conviction that genuine literature is a kind of wisdom literature, in which readers would find the deepest account in the way life actually is. …

“More than that he introduced Merton to particular books or writers, Van Doren emboldened Merton to read the way he read already: with his whole self, his whole life. …He was taking literature classes of all kinds: English, Spanish, French. And yet the writers most formative to him, those who showed him a way or led him further on, he encountered on his own.

“He saw The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy in the window of the Scribner’s bookshop on 5 th Avenue while browsing after classes … On a whim he bought it. Though it was in English, the author Etienne Gilson, the dust jacket reported, was a professor of the Sorbonne.

“On the train back to Long Island, he opened the book and spied some odd text on an early page: black cross, a Latin inscription – Nihil Obstat. Imprimatur – and below it, a bishop’s name, printed like a signature.

“He knew what the Latin meant: Nothing stands in the way; officially stamped [let it be printed]. ‘I felt as if I had been cheated. They should have warned me it was a Catholic book! Then I never would have bought it. As it was, I was tempted to throw the thing out the window at the houses of Woodside – to get rid of it as dangerous and unclean.’

“The problem wasn’t that the book was about a Catholic subject. Merton hardly could have expected otherwise. The problem was that it was an official Catholic book; if it was official philosophy, he reasoned, it was not philosophy. One has no trouble imagining him – young, headstrong, anxious, violent in his passions – throwing the book out the window, and his life going in a different direction altogether. He didn’t throw The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy out the window, however. He started to read it. When the train reached his stop, he took the book with him.

“He read the book … in the next few weeks, and was changed by the experience. In that book, he found a conception of God that he thought plausible and appealing. This God was not a Jehovah or a divine lawgiver, nor a plague-sending potentate or a scourge of prophets, nor the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ or the stern Judge waiting just past the gate at the end of time, but the vital animating principle of reality – ‘pure act’ being itself or per se, existence in perfection, outside of space and time, transcending all human imagery, calmly, steadily, eternally being. ‘What a relief it was for me, now,’ he recalled, ‘to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of him.

“ ….The effect was no accident. It was by design. The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy collected Gilson’s Gifford lectures, the same lecture series that had produced William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience thirty years earlier.

“… Now he had come upon a conception of God that he could respect, and it was in this discovery, by his own account, that his religious life really began.”

Amid all this I have not noticed mention of Armageddon. … Nope, not in the index. If no mention of the elect or anointed, certainly no mention of 144,000s. Though there is a lot more taking of communion. And the hierarchy of the church thus far seems mainly tied to matters of what are known as sacraments. The connection to Christ seems more direct here though… Imitation of Christ and Thomas a Kempis is a recurring theme.

70

New Governing Body Member: Hugo Riemer - More WT Revisionist History

by 00DAD in

as part of the wt's recent push to get the r&f "to study and recount the history of the earthly part of jehovahs organization" there is a curious article in the from our archives featurette of the august 15th, 2012 watchtower.

it offers a highly sanitized version of early jw history.

but what is particularly strange is this revisionist history re-categorizing of an early bible student/jw, one hugo riemer.

kepler

I'm sure many are already aware, but I'll state it anyway.

In books "Crisis of Conscience" and "In Search of Christian Freedom", Ray Franz devotes chapters to the Governing Body and the Faithful and Discreet Slave, respectively in chapters 3 and 5. It would be difficult to summarize the two chapters point by point; and if I did, we would find that Franz's views and presentations on this subject would muddy the case further. For Ray Franz joins the governing body in 1971, right at the time that it expands beyond the board of directors. In introducing the matter in CoC, he states that "Jesus Christ... governs the 'faithful and discreet slave' class, ... now said to be composed of a remnant of 144,000 persons anointed as heirs of Christ's heavenly kingdom. But from among such class there is a small number of men who act as a Governing Body, and perform all administrative functions for the global congregation, not only for the present number of about 'anointed' out of whom these men are drawn, but also for the approximately 6.1 million other associated who are not considered to be among the heavenly heirs."

Much of this chapter really regards what the Governing Body has to say about sexual relations. But when Ray Franz points out that Nathan Knorr as president has administrative control, he adds that VP Fred Franz in a 15 December '71 Watchtower provides a more ambitious role for the GB. This came about only after January 1976.

In the book "In Search ofChristian Freedom", a fter quoting Matthew 24:45-47, Ray Franz began:

“In their calls for loyalty and submission , no other portion of Scripture is so frequently appealed to by the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses as that found in the verse quoted above.

“Their claims of organizational authority rest not only upon their interpretation of this parabolic statement of Jesus Christ, but more especially upon the way they make use of that interpretation. It is employed primarily to support the way they make use of that interpretation. It is employed primarily to support the claims of a centralized administrative authority, exercising extensive control over all members of the Christian congregation (understood by Witnesses as applying only to themselves).”

Franz notes that Rutherford early in his career supported the claims that Russell was the Wise and Faithful Servant because he was consolidating his own position as his successor. But then there was the matter of the FDS throughout history - and Ray Franz and the current new light seem to be on the same page.

"First we note that the WTS's teaching is that the "slave class" has had a continuous, uninterrupted existence (Italics from the text) from its beginning in 33 AD until the present time, the Watchtower of January 15, 1975, pages 46 and 47, emphasized this..."

Then Watchtower 15 July 1943 is cited for existence of an FDS from AD 1878 to 1918.

Ray Franz is sceptical.

"The Watchtower makes occasional references to groups in the Middle Ages, such as the Waldenses, the Lollards, and similar groups, with at least the implication that they have been among the genuine Christians of their time - which would make them part of the 'faithful and discrete slave class'. The fact that these religious fellowships often believed such doctrines as the trinity,the immortality of the soul, and similar doctrines is glossed over..."

What follows is a disassembly of the FDS concept through history.

So what is the FDS going to say now? That they read about this in the same source? Or that the only guy on the GB that had the current new liight was kicked out decades ago like the Lollards or Waldensers?

70

New Governing Body Member: Hugo Riemer - More WT Revisionist History

by 00DAD in

as part of the wt's recent push to get the r&f "to study and recount the history of the earthly part of jehovahs organization" there is a curious article in the from our archives featurette of the august 15th, 2012 watchtower.

it offers a highly sanitized version of early jw history.

but what is particularly strange is this revisionist history re-categorizing of an early bible student/jw, one hugo riemer.

kepler

King Solomon,

Not to split hairs on this forever,I'll just leave the Olin Moyle business as is.

But my intent is to call attention to issues, not to give the org alibis. If Ray Franz was not DF-ed for anything related to his conduct on the GB (i.e., explicit charges), then I would presume he was just as much the FDS as anyone else who was serving during that period - according to this idea. Since the concept has been corraled into the board members following 1919 - for the framers, here's an inconvenient consequence: Ray Franz was the FDS. CT Russell was not.

70

New Governing Body Member: Hugo Riemer - More WT Revisionist History

by 00DAD in

as part of the wt's recent push to get the r&f "to study and recount the history of the earthly part of jehovahs organization" there is a curious article in the from our archives featurette of the august 15th, 2012 watchtower.

it offers a highly sanitized version of early jw history.

but what is particularly strange is this revisionist history re-categorizing of an early bible student/jw, one hugo riemer.

kepler

00DAD:

Point taken. Right on! Hope 3rd parties get it too.

70

New Governing Body Member: Hugo Riemer - More WT Revisionist History

by 00DAD in

as part of the wt's recent push to get the r&f "to study and recount the history of the earthly part of jehovahs organization" there is a curious article in the from our archives featurette of the august 15th, 2012 watchtower.

it offers a highly sanitized version of early jw history.

but what is particularly strange is this revisionist history re-categorizing of an early bible student/jw, one hugo riemer.

kepler

King Solomon said:

However, the "collective" element of the GB DOES allow them to dismiss the actions of an individual apostate member of the GB (eg Ray Franz) as actions of an individual MEMBER of the GROUP, and thus does not effect the status or performance of the whole body, as long as they cut them off (think of a salamander regenerating a limb that was amputated).

------

There are still problems.

In the case of Olin Moyle, the dismissal was the result of a private letter sent by Moyle the legal counsel to his client Rutherford, objecting to his conduct and the atmosphere of drunkeness that he promoted at Bethel. The Faith and Discrete Slave, yet to be renamed so, conducted a very public banishment of Moyle. But other than writing a letter to Rutherford, what exactly had he done? Rutherford was not objecting to his conduct of official duties such as writing appeals to the Supreme Court.

In the case of Ray Franz, disfellowship never became an EXPLICIT matter of doctrine or his conduct while he was on the Governing Board. He resigned. But he was subsequently disfellowshipped for associating with someone who disassociated himself due to providing Ray Franz shelter in a rented trailer home. No GB or FDS misconduct was identified in that process (sic). In fact, I made inquiries on another topic devoted to exactly that question: Why specifically was he disfellowshipped? No formal doctrinal accusations were made.

So, in the case, at least, of Ray Franz, as far as I can tell, they are stuck with him. Just like the United States is stuck with the fact that Aaron Burr was once a vice president or Jefferson Davis was once the Secretary of War.

As a consequence, in either case no actions these two individuals had taken in the course of their service can be discredited now - since they were never discredited in the first place. I presume the propaganda ministry as sophisticated as it is can manufacture an elaborate incrementally revealed lore about these two individuals, but I see no reason why anyone should accept the fallacies of their arguments a priori.

With Ray Franz having written of the matters subsequently, since he was part of the GB, and therefore, by current argument the FDS, his accounts of GB and FDS have to be taken at face value until current members specifically deny any of the details. The only way they could do that is to be presented with what Ray Franz stated in the first place. Should they deny what Ray Franz says, however, they should be very careful indeed, lest they be detected in the course of duty of engaging in outright lies.

51

Truly I say to you, Amen I say to you, Inferences from a Gospel manner of speech

by kepler in

in another topic changes in the nwt, one of the correspondents posted that.

concerning the comma in luke 23:43, http://www.dtl.org/alt/comments/today.htmhas some interesting comments.. .

to summarize what was stated at this website, the translator selected a translation for luke 23:43. .

kepler

[Luke] 23:43 et dixit illi Iesus amen dico tibi hodie mecum eris in paradiso.

Acts 20:26, . . . quapropter contestor vos hodierna die quia mundus sum a sanguine omnium

How do these verses read when translated from the Latin into English? (If you don't mind me asking)

(If your Latin is rusty, mine is non-existent)

Bobcat,

The first one is easier than the second. Very literal:

"and he said that Jesus Amen I say to you today with me you will be in paradise."

The second one is tougher ( for me, at any rate), more idiomatic:

"Wherefore to call witness you today [this] day I am clean by blood of all..."

A rendering in English NJB:

"And so on this very day I swear that my conscience is clear..."

Though "conscience" and "blood" seem like an idiomatic transformation, there is also that double "today, this day" construction that was characteristic of the Greek oath as well. "Conscience", I suspect, is an evolved word of a millenium or so later. While the verb is of passive infinitive form, the pronoun "vos" is probably accusative. My situational awareness with inflected languages since high school has been mostly with Russian - and I don't think I ever had enough data from Latin homework decades back. Passive "deponent" verbs, yes; but acusative pronouns attached - does not compute.