New World Translation

New World Translation

As you can see in this photo of the Jehovah's Witnesses' New World Translation, the words "New World Translation of the" are barely visible; what stands out are the words, "Holy Scriptures." This is by design and reflects the Jehovah's Witnesses' desire to promote their New World Translation as a legitimate translation of the Bible. In reality and as shown below, it is anything but that.

Tired of having the King James Version (KJV), which they had been using, contradict their heresies, the Governing Body of the Jehovah's Witnesses' Watch Tower Society introduced their New World Translation of the New Testament in 1950, and of the Old Testament in 1960. Their official reason for the translation and switching to it was that the English in the KJV is too old. The names of the translators were kept a secret, and the reason given for the secrecy was to not receive glory for their translation work.

It later became exposed that the "translation" had been done by five Jehovah's Witnesses: Fredrick Franz, George Gangas, Milton Henschel, Nathan Knorr, and Albert Schroeder. Not only did all five men have no knowledge of the Bible's original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek; none of them even had college degrees. Four of them had never set foot on a college campus, while the fifth, Fredrick Franz, had dropped out after two years.

Their ignorance of the languages they claimed to have translated isn't baffling since what they intended to do and did do was not translate them but simply change the English Bible in the place (eg. John 1:1, Colossians 1:16, Hebrews 1:8, Proverbs 1:20) that contradict their heresies.

Jehovah's Witnesses have been taught and most of them sincerely believe that their New World Translation is the only accurate translation of the original text of the Bible. They are wrong but at least sincere.

The same cannot be said about the five men named above who dared to and intentionally did change the word of God. They knew that God had closed His Bible with a stern warning to add nothing to it and delete nothing from it:

"For I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the Book of Life, from the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book" (Revelation 22:18-19).

Genesis 2:16-17 records God commanding man:

"Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, ..."

Genesis 3:1 records Satan, in the form of a serpent, twisting God's words:

"Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?"

Twisting the word of God to confuse and mislead people is literally the oldest trick of Satan. The question that arises is, were the aforementioned five "translators" of the New World Translation and everyone else at the Watch Tower Society who knew how they had twisted the word of God, yet still continued to distribute and champion the New World Translation to millions of Jehovah's Witnesses doing the work of God or of Satan?