I think I've discovered one real contribution to human thought, specifically logic, that has been made by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in general and every single Jehovah's Witness who has ever debated about the NWT in particular.
They've invented a new logical fallacy.
I thought it could use a spiffy Latin tag, so I've called it the aliquis alicubi fallacy. That's Latin for "somebody somewhere". It's a species of positive ad hominem fallacy.
It goes like this: "You have challenged the NWT's rendering of II Hezekiah 7:13. You are apparently unaware that the 17th-century Perfunctory Obscurantist Translation (POT) done by the self-acclaimed scholar Dr. Thaddeus Ignatius Inbred, with the aid of a state-of-the-art polyglot Ouija board, renders it into the Urdu language in more or less much the same way the NWT does. Therefore, there is no concievable grounds for criticizing the NWT's rendering of this verse."
In short, somebody somewhere translated it the way the NWT did (or close to it), so nobody can criticize the NWT for translating it as somebody somewhere has. It's a ploy used in the KIT throughout to defend its "translations", and I have long suspected that this principle was the only thing driving the production of the NWT. For every objectionable (in the Society's eyes) verse in the Bible, a search was initiated to find somebody somewhere who rendered it in such a way that the Society could accept it. The NWT reading was then copied directly from the "somebody somewhere", and that was the extent of the "translating".
That this is usually the only defense given, and always the first defense given, lends some credibility to my hypothesis. But we'll never really know, will we?
What we do know is that this rhetorical dodge has no substance to it. When we are discussing the NWT, we ought to discuss that, and not every conceivable mistranslation of every verse in every obscure translation that has ever been done. When the JW's lay this on us, we should just say, "It's irrelevant what aliquis alicubi has done. What is the justification for what the NWT committee has done? From the grammar, the lexicons, the context, and other relevant facts only, please."
They use this as the primary or sole justification for most of their bizarre misinterpretations of the Bible and prophetic speculations as well.
Robert V Frazier
The Watchtower is not the instrument of any man or any set of men, nor is it published according to the whims of men. No man's opinion is expressed in The Watchtower. (WT 11/1/1931 p.327) Yeah, right!