by The Searcher 36 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
More and more about elders. Have a look - what they print about the cover image.
I think (don't know exactly), this is the first time - they write the status of the JW into the text for the cover image.
FOG: Your are only a good elder, if you go to fieldservice after the meeting - and be always a good example for the other JWs (including your wife).
Before I started my "fade" from the JW religion, I was annoyed at how they were increasingly elevating the elders. They were even trying to say they were appointed by Holy Spirit like in the first century AD. Yeah, like they had tongues of fire over their heads too!
There was NO way I was going to see these men the way they wanted to be seen...They could dream on as far as I was concerned.
When I first came into the JW religion, they said their bible was more correct than anybody else's translation!...Imagine??
They may as well take their latest "silver sword" translation and burn it if you ask me.
LHG: " latest "silver sword" translation
Even the songbooks are now silver daggers, going right to the heart, strings of emotions. The silver harps of god, the gob? in a mirror, the b is a d. The gob. is the mirror image of god in the grey eyes of jws.
I was just thinking, maybe all this new fluff about the elders being "all that and a bag of chips" plays into the GB saying they are "not inspired". Meaning the GB is not responsible for any of the bad stuff the org is being sued over?
I dunno, just a thought.
NikL - "...Meaning the GB is not responsible for any of the bad stuff the Org is being sued over?"
Oh yeah, they'd f**king love that.
No court in the developed world is stupid enough to buy it, these days, though.
Why else do you think the WT Legal Dept bends over backwards to keep GB members off the stand?
New World Translation = Not Worded Truthfully
I have access to other sites that have a comparison listing of many translations, but none with the RNWT. Does anybody know of one.
Thank you, Searcher, for this post. Knowing that Fred Franz loved to take an oddball position with some frequency, I checked some of the lesser known translations since others have stated in their replies that they checked the major ones. The only ones I could find without "to" were a small group (Stevens, Way, Schonfield) who rendered the verb as "bestowed" and therefore used "on" or "upon" for the English preposition instead of "to," but that rendering means the same as "gave ... to." I can only wonder what was going through FF's mind back in the late 1940s, long before the WTS had the "elder arrangement," when he came up with this translation. The natural way to take the dative case here is as an indirect object with a verb of giving, "to...". Chalk up another mystery of the ever eccentric FF...
It is of interest that the revisers of the NWT let his rendering stand.
As for your statement,
These couldn't be the gifts which Paul spoke about at 1 Corinthians chapter 12, could they?
don't you think the following verse (11) in Eph. 4 is germane? "He gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelizers, other as shepherds and teachers." That is, of course, the same concept as at 1 Cor. 12:28, right?
At one time the NWT reference the difference in a footnote.
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/fn/r1/lp-e/1001060052/33
Or, “consisting of men,” in agreement with M (Ps 68:18) and LXX (Ps 67:19). Lit., “to the men.”
I too looked up some minor translations for clues, such as Rotherham and Goodspeed, but nothing doing.
Except that the rendering of Rotherham in Psalm 68:18 uses the "consisting of men" phrase.
Thou hast ascended on high, Thou hast led in procession a body of captives, Thou hast received gifts consisting of men, Yea even the rebellious, That, Yah, Elohim, might settle down to rest.
And we know Rotherham was a very influential translation for early Bible Students and for Franz when translating the NWT. The Catholic Douay version has similar.
Franz was fond interpreting the Greek in light of his understanding of the Hebrew in quotations. His attitude seems to be that his reading of the Hebrew original should be determinative of the meaning of the Greek as much as the grammar and context of the Greek itself. He argued for his translation of Heb 1:8 partly on the basis of the Hebrew construction in the Psalm. And of course, most famously, Franz argued that the presence of the divine name in the Hebrew of verses quoted in the NT warranted the inclusion of the divine name in the NT translation.
The best place to look for clues why Franz chose this peculiar translation for Ephesians 4:8 would probably be a close examination of how the verse is discussed in the Watchotwer and Awake! articles of the 1940s and 50s. Franz elaborated many of his ideas about translation in this period in study articles, questions from readers and other pieces.
