by oompa 28 Replies latest jw friends
Most JW's these days know very little about the Bible and just accept the RNWT without question. I've heard brothers say it's the best translation in the world but when I once a brother to show me an example he took offense and stormed off.
BTW great to see a topic from old OOMPA. I was very sad when he died, as a fellow biker that could have me.
George
oompa - "...why did they stop blasting the NWT?"
Maybe in this particular instance, they clued in to not feed the trolls.
Speaking as a Brit Anglican l would say that most members of Christendom don't know any very much about the WT.
Certainly my fellow church members often think that l am being somewhat unChristian when l speak of a cult.
Most know that JWs don't celebrate Christmas and birthdays but know little about the level of control , shunning etc . They don't know that the WT has it's own Bible.
Jan
I think a lot of the impression we got about the churches attacking the JW were overblown stories or completely made up. Nobody ever cared about the JW Bible, yes scholars will ‘attack’ it because the translation itself is poorly done and created with an agenda in mind, but after the Watchtower blew its credibility in serious circles, these scholars aren’t going to be rehashing their critiques in some vendetta, the JW religion after all is relatively insignificant.
why did they stop blasting the NWT? It is sooooooo easy to show a dub there is a bunch of made up crap in it.
.if you need more info about the horrible fraud parts ?
I think it would be timely if someone did do this even after so many years, anyone ?
Any takers ?
Certainly my fellow church members often think that l am being somewhat unChristian when l speak of a cult.
I think this is a problem jhine when speaking to Christians about jWs. They think you're being unkind and unchristian and that they need "protecting".
What people don't understand is that the people being treated most unkindly and most unchristian is the Jehovah's witnesses themselves, by their own Church. That it's watchtower itself showing lack of Christian love toward its own members. You are merely observing that.
The answer to the question is fairly simple
The JW's have gradually fixed the truly problematic renderings, (Like John 17:3 for example.)
Most of the rest of the criticism is driven by doctrine and is therefore debatable.
Yeah, the NWT is definitely biased, but that's not unusual as Bibles go.
The NIV leans strongly towards American fundamentalist, trinitarianism and the NAB (In editions prior to 1970) leans heavily towards an orthodox Catholic male-centric viewpoint.
Religious people have a habit of translating in a manner most favorable to their own teachings and that's just human nature.
Yeah, the NWT has some quirky renderings, but they still fall within accepted boundaries of grammar and definition. They may not actually capture the "spirit" of what the writer was trying to say (Whatever that was) but that's a subjective argument that invariably carries a boatload of preconceived ideas about the Bible itself.
Nothing screams "I can't actually read the source language myself" louder than saying the NWT is full of "made up crap" (No disrespect to the late oompa intended)
It's on par with adolescent American males arguing over the meaning of Rammstein lyrics. (Wenn man auf Englisch darüber streiten, sollten sie überhaupt nicht streiten.)
Technically the NAB didn't exist prior to 1970, at least the name of "New American Bible' (NAB) did not exist until 1970. [But maybe the books of 1 Samuel to 2 Maccabees, copyright 1969, were of the NAB.] But the 1970 NAB was based upon (stemmed from) the editions of 1941 and 1969 by the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine and those editions are thus known as the Confraternity Bible and the "New Catholic Edition". [I used to those early editions (most of which were published as bound with books of the Bible in the Challoner-Douay-Rheims version translation in regards to books not yet translated by the Confraternity, in order to provide a complete Bible.] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confraternity_Bible and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_American_Bible . [I own the 1986 revision of the NAB, but I no longer own any other editions of the NAB nor any editions of the Confraternity Bible (New Catholic Edition).]
There is an extensive and detailed support of the NWT by A. Byatt and Hal Flemings: Your Word is Truth: Essays in Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the New World Translation. It is worth a read. My mom detested Byatt, seeing him as a self-important man. Flemings is a professor at UC Santa Barbara who teaches ancient languages, and is someone Uncle B knows.
I know nothing of Greek or Hebrew. So I do not know if any of the arguments are good. Mom, who had two years of Biblical Greek, saw it as a mixture of amateurish and really good essays.
I just never accepted the NWT translation of Cross as torture state. Its as if you use the word Cross in their presence and they cringe as if you are a pagan. Another word they mistranslate is Believe as Exercise Faith. Look it up in their copy of the Emphatic Diaglott and they pick and chose where to use believe and exercise faith, if only to support their interpretation. So many other examples, like when they added the word Other in several places, where the Diaglott had nothing. I just get tired of pointing this out to Uber JWs and now just ignore them, when I hear them parroting their talking points.
