by Perry 17 Replies latest watchtower bible
When I was presented with an NWT by my newly-converted JW grandmother, I was actually impressed with the thing.
It was after all a “bible” that was written in modern English. Back in 1964, the mainstream churches still used the King James Version, with its Archaic English. Translations in Modern English were around, but certainly not in common usage.
Here was a bible written in Modern English. Little did I know!
Hi Bobcat. I visited those web pages but they didn't help me. The ones which claimed to have a link for PDFs of the Greber NT were ones in which the links don't work any more. Anyway, I once owned a copy of the Greber NT and thus I know how spiritualistic sounding its wording is. What I am looking for is the part of his book which includes his "Explanation". Every online source I have found which is selling his NT in English lacks his "Explanation" section, even in those copies in which the words "and Explanation" are included in the title of the book. I now wonder if maybe all of the English translations of his German translation of his NT exclude the "Explanation" section. Unfortunately I don't know German so obtaining a German edition with his "Explanation" section (if I can find one) won't help me.
Rivergang, the modern language nature of the NWT is also what I like about that Bible. It is what I like most about it. I also appreciate that it uses a personal name in the OT in place of the expression "the LORD". Furthermore I appreciate that its NT is based upon a critical Greek text compiled primarily form the oldest extant Greek NT manuscripts.
Though there were some English Bibles in 1964 which were in modern language (for the most part), such as the RSV, they still included thee, thou, and thine in some verses. I read that the English Bible was slow to abandon archaic language due to the use of quotes from the KJV (and probably the Douay) including the archaic language in liturgical books (including prayer books) and in pronouncements in church settings.
This thread was/is sad on so many levels
Marked
I understand criticism of the NWT. It's definitely quirky and there are a number of scholars who have expressed various degrees of dissatisfaction with it.
It's another thing altogether to launch an attack on the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus codices themselves because then your own academic qualifications and proficiency in Ancient Greek become every bit as much fair game as Franz.
If you have no formal education or worse, can't even read the source language, let alone compose a simple in it, then you are no better off than Franz was.
Actually, given the fact that Franz could at least read Ancient Greek, you would be more on par with adolescent American males arguing over the meaning of Rammstein lyrics. (Sie sollten nicht auf Englisch darüber streiten) It's a downhill slope, because the more they speak, the more obvious it becomes that they have no idea what they're talking about.
Perry was told point blank on Part I of this series by a professional translator and PhD in linguistics that his massive cut and paste contained serious errors, but that neither dampened his enthusiasm nor prevented him from posting parts II, III IV V & VI, which were equally bad.
I even understand the personal criticism of Franz up to a point. I prefer the word "eccentric" to "nut," but wouldn't argue if someone preferred the latter term.
Nutty or not, it's ridiculous to pretend that his skill with languages in general was restricted to courses he did or did not take in his early 20's. Language proficiencies can take a lifetime to acquire and Franz definitely had the time and resources.
I read online (I think it was somewhere on jehovahs-witness.com) that a non-JW critic of the NWT said the NWT was made as a revision of Rotherham's Emphasized Bible into smoother flowing contemporary English. If that is primarily the way the NWT was made, then I think that the NWT rests on a sound foundation and in a sense can be called a literal translation. That is because Rotherham's Emphasized Bible is a very literal translation of the Bible from critical texts. It even says Yahweh in the OT text instead of "the LORD" and it uses typography to distinguish when God/god is translated from Elohim, Eloah, and El. Thus using Rotherham's Emphasized Bible as a base, along with comparison with other translations and with various critical texts and with Hebrew-Aramaic-Greek lexicons, to make the NWT, could result in an excellent Bible that is worthy of being called a translation from ancient manuscripts of the Bible. Rotherham's Emphasized Bible also uses the word "presence" as a translation of "parousia" instead of "coming" and in one of the appendices of the Bible he states his reasons for doing such. Rotherham read Russell's "The Divine Plan of the Ages" and wrote a review on it. See http://www.biblestudentarchives.com/documents/RotherhamAppendix.pdf . Wikipedia says Rotherham was a "scholar and minister of the Churches of Christ".
I compared a number of verses of the OT of the NWT with that of the OT of Rotherham's Emphasized Bible and noticed that in those verses the NWT rendering does look much like an updating of the rendering of the Rotherham's Emphasized Bible into smoother flowing contemporary English. In those OT verses I examined the NWT wording was closer to that of Rotherham's Emphasized Bible than to that of the American Standard Version Bible.
It is also case that the NWT NT used some renderings from the Emphatic Diaglott's interlinear literal translation and it 'modern' English translation.
There is no reason to believe the NWT was plagiarized and not a translation in its on right.
The ability to read Ancient Greek is actually not that unusual. It's not as popular a hobby as gardening, but there are still enough people who are into it to justify the translation of the Harry Potter books, for example, into Classical Greek:
One of the problems with this and similar threads is the treatment of Ancient Greek as a fantastically esoteric and obscure subject, when in reality there is a very robust and enthusiastic following among people with a knack for languages.
Franz lack of qualifications as a translator would more likely have been in other areas like history, theology, sociology and literature which are all very important in conveying the thoughts of a very different people in a very different time.
I've heard the idea that the NWT was borrowed from Rotherham before, but I'm not seeing it myself. One of the more legitimate criticisms I think you can make about it, especially in its earlier revisions, was the ugly Madison Avenue English.
There is a literary beauty to Rotherham's "Thou hast anointed, with oil, my head" that is completely lost in the NWT's "With oil you have greased my head" which conjures up an image of some poor schlub working under a car. (To be fair, the JW's eventually fixed this.)
