Nice thought-terminating cliché, who cares?
Focus only on the content on its merits: refute it subtantially, if you can (I don't care how), or shut up.
If a claim is true, it is true, and if it is not, then it is not, nothing else matters.
Zechariah 12:10 Corruption in the NWT
by Sea Breeze 46 Replies latest watchtower bible
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no-zombie
The problems here aqwsed12345, is people like you try to support their arguments by getting louder and louder and now with ChatGPT, they can scream, in an attempt that by their many words it adds some kind of weight.
But it doesn't.
And when it doesn't work, people like you turn to insults.
You can be much better, than that.
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aqwsed12345
It's as if we're seeing two totally different films.
I gave substantive, essential arguments, on linguistic, textual and patristic grounds. These are specific claims and arguments that you can agree with, disagree with, and engage in a substantive debate with, that's what the forum would be about.
To which his response was, simply "but these translations render it this way, so then it's good that way". This is not engagement with my arguments, but his usual authority-based argument. He doesn't even know that as a Catholic, I have no obligation at all to accept as "legitimate" any specific rendering of a single Catholic Bible translation; my dogmatic obligation is solely with regard to the canonicity of the lemmas in the ancient Jerome Vulgate.
He doesn't even know that establishing the meaning of a text is not done by looking at how many people translated it this way, and then others that way, and then democratically, with the one with the most votes winning (if that were the case, the NWT would fail quite miserably). But by directly dealing with the text written in the original language.
You know, his magisterium is the Catholic-basher, sceptic "what revolutionary novelties have I invented" liberal academic elite, and since he is simply unable to engage with the given arguments himself, he always wants to talk about their names, names, and names. His holy names, they are trendy, modern, and they are many: so they must be right. He hides behind these "big names" and does not move from their shadow. He throws these names here and I have to argue with them, while he sits back. What disgusting debate ethics it is!
I didn't insult him, I don't know him personally, he could even be an nice person, for my part, I'm frustrated by his debating ethics and method.
How disgraceful and annoying that he can't give a simple yes/no answer to a simple question.
My question: Is there a first person singular object in the Hebrew text? Yes or no?
His answer: Alter, Alter, Alter. AI, AI, AI.Of course I'm frustrated by this. What can I answer to this? The best answer may be "F your Alter"?
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no-zombie
Again I'd like to remind you (aqwsed12345) that this site is not a debating forum. Nor is it a place for people who have never been a Jehovah's Witness to post topics or comments, that inflame others who maybe in some way be recovering.
However if a person does have something theological or encouraging to add, then the appropriate way to do so, would be to approach it academically, by providing your best evidence or reasoning in one post, and then leaving it for the reader to accept it or not.
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slimboyfat
I’m not saying that the fact that Catholic Bibles agree with the NWT on Zechariah 12:10 proves that their translation is correct. What I am saying is that it renders your argument that the NWT is an illegitimate translation motivated by Arian bias invalid. Because if that were the case why do so many scholars, including Catholic scholars come to the same conclusion as the NWT? Are they motivated by Arian bias?
My own opinion on Zechariah 12:10 is that either translation seems plausible, and that neither translation offers any support for the later Trinity doctrine anyway.
You seem very attached to the Hebrew of Zechariah 12:10 but my understanding is that the Catholic Church is not so big on inerrancy of the Hebrew over say the LXX, as Protestants may be. Catholics are much more comfortable than Protestants with the idea that the trinity developed in the church after the Bible was completed. They don’t face the same challenge as Protestants in trying to squeeze the trinity into the Bible text to the same extent.
It’s noticeable that it is stridently protestant versions of the Bible that tend to translate Zechariah 12:10 in what they perceive to be a Trinitarian manner. That makes sense because they view the Hebrew as inerrant and they try to rely on scripture alone to uphold their doctrine.
Even if the text of Zechariah 12:10 should read “to me”, I think the Watchtower from the 50s already presented a knock out argument about what that phrase would mean if that is the correct reading.
As far as literal piercing is concerned, this occurred in the case of Christ Jesus, and at John 19:37 the prophecy of Zechariah 12:10 is quoted and applied to Jesus: “They will look upon the one whom they pierced.” (NW) They did not literally pierce God, who was in heaven and to whom Jesus spoke when he was on the torture stake. (Matt. 27:46; Luke 23:46) God could not die, and then resurrect himself. (Ps. 90:2) Yet inasmuch as Jesus Christ was Jehovah’s representative who became “the exact representation of his very being”, in piercing Jesus they could be said to be piercing Jehovah. (Heb. 1:3, NW) When sending out his followers to preach Jesus said: “He that receives you receives me also, and he that receives me receives him also that sent me forth.” (Matt. 10:40, NW) This shows that in receiving Jesus we receive Jehovah who sent him. In like manner, to pierce Jesus is to pierce Jehovah who sent him. It does not prove Jesus and Jehovah are one, any more than it proves Jesus and his followers are literally one. In another case Jehovah showed that to reject his representative is to reject Him. When Samuel was Jehovah’s appointed judge over Israel the people came requesting a king instead of a judge. Samuel was displeased when they said: “Give us a king to judge us.” But Jehovah told Samuel: “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me.” (1 Sam. 8:4-7, AS) In rejecting Jehovah’s representative they rejected Jehovah, in effect; but this did not make Samuel one with Jehovah in a trinity.
As for your reliance on AI, it’s just tedious and boring because it presents a lot of plausible looking text, but with significant errors and poor logic.
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aqwsed12345
The controversy that has gathered around Zechariah 12:10 during the past century is not, at bottom, a quarrel about the reputability of one modern translation or another; still less is it settled by registering how many twentieth- or twenty-first-century versions adopt one or another set of vowels for the problematic ’ĒLY ʾēt ʾăšer dāqārû. What is at stake is a complex of questions that touch textual criticism, historical reception, and—unavoidably—the way a canonical book about Israel’s God may legitimately be read within a Christian rule of faith that confesses Father, Son, and Spirit to be the one Lord. For that reason your attempt to dissolve the issue by an appeal to “how many Catholic Bibles” happen to side with the NWT is methodologically beside the point. A scholarly demonstration is never secured by the length of its bibliography; it is secured by the cogency with which it weighs the prima facie evidence, explains the secondary phenomena, and renders the total result more intelligible than do rival accounts.
The Masoretic pointing wĕhibbîṭû ʾĒLY —“they shall look to me whom they pierced”—is unanimously recognised as the lectio difficilior. Because scribes correct rather than invent anomalies, classic principles of criticism oblige us to give it priority unless overwhelming counter-evidence can be produced. Neither the fragmentary witness of 4QXII^e, whose damaged line can be read either ʾĒL(Y) or ʾĒLÂW, nor the secondary Greek recensions that paraphrase the clause so as to avoid divine suffering, furnish such counter-proof. Those Catholic scholars who prefer ʾēlâw would themselves concede that they do so conjecturally, precisely because the transmitted text is hard, not because the hard text is corrupt beyond repair. The decisive question therefore remains: Why is a first-person object pronominal suffix present at all? It is no rhetorical flourish; it defines the sentence.
You simply make no reference to the full spectrum of manuscript evidence. The Dead Sea Scrolls (4QXIIe) fragment is too damaged to overturn the MT, and, as the best scholarship recognizes (e.g., Paul Wegner, Emanuel Tov), the more difficult reading is to be preferred. The LXX, as is well known, often paraphrases and, in this case, probably reflects Jewish discomfort with the anthropomorphism of a suffering God. The emergence of the third-person reading is best explained as a reaction to the theological scandal of the original text—not its source.
The assertion that “many modern versions” read “him/the one” does nothing to remove the syntactic anomaly of ʾĒLY ʾēt ʾăšer. Had the prophet merely wanted to introduce a third-person referent distinct from the divine speaker he should have written ʿal ʾet-ʾăšer or, more naturally, ʿel-ʾēlâw ʾet ʾăšer. Instead we have a chain in which the preposition ʾel governs a first-person suffix, immediately followed by the nota accusativi and a relative clause. The most straightforward construal, as nearly every grammarian from Gesenius to Waltke–O’Connor remarks, is “they shall look to me—namely, the one whom they pierced.” To replace the first-person client with a third-person object is, again, to quiet a theological dissonance rather than to solve a grammatical riddle.
Because the Septuagint’s extant text sidesteps the piercing altogether, it cannot be invoked as an “original” alternative; it is patently a paraphrase crafted to disarm the shocking Hebrew. By contrast, the evangelist John cites a Greek form that reproduces the collision between divine speaker and pierced victim—opsontai eis hon exekentēsan—exactly where the MT places it, only replacing the pronoun with a substantivised relative (“look to the one whom they pierced,” John 19:37). That John translates rather than paraphrases here is hardly evidence of “Jewish discomfort”; it is evidence that first-century Christian readers possessed, and felt obliged to respect, a Hebrew Vorlage in which YHWH’s first-person voice identifies himself with the stricken figure. John’s entire passion narrative is built on the claim that Jesus is the embodiment of Israel’s Lord (cf. 12:41; 13:19; 20:28). The piercing text therefore fits, not forces, his Christology.
Your argument that the New World Translation (NWT) cannot be accused of Arian bias because many Catholic and mainstream Bibles also adopt “him/the one” in Zechariah 12:10 is, frankly, a red herring that fundamentally misunderstands both the text-critical landscape and the distinctive theological pressure at work in Watchtower exegesis. The fact that modern Catholic and Protestant Bibles sometimes prefer “him/the one” is not in dispute. However, these editorial decisions are openly based on stylistic or source-critical preferences (e.g., the influence of the LXX, or harmonization with the Greek of John 19:37), not confessional necessity. These translators do not make this choice because their theology is threatened by the Masoretic reading. In the case of the NWT, however, the matter is entirely different: the Watchtower must avoid “me” at all costs, because admitting YHWH as the pierced one would collapse their entire anti-Trinitarian and anti-incarnational system. It is not simply the translation outcome that matters, but why the translators insist upon it.
You ask: “Are Catholic scholars motivated by Arian bias?” No—but Catholic (and most Protestant) translators do not treat this text as a theological emergency. When Catholic or mainline editors choose “him/the one,” they routinely note the Masoretic “me” in the apparatus and admit it is more difficult. The NWT, in contrast, is notorious for not simply weighing manuscript evidence but systematically editing any passage that would support Christ’s deity or disrupt the Watchtower’s Christology. So, yes, motive is crucial, and the NWT is unique in that it is both text-critical and confessional in its aversion to the “me” reading.
You misunderstand the Catholic view of Scripture and tradition. While it is true that the Catholic Church does not dogmatize the inerrancy of the Masoretic Text per se, Catholic tradition has always insisted on the primacy of the original languages and the obligation to seek out the most authentic textual reading, whether in Hebrew, Greek, or otherwise. St. Jerome’s famous maxim remains: “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” It is simply false to claim that Catholics have no interest in what the original Hebrew says or that only Protestants value the textual data. Indeed, major Catholic exegetes (e.g., Raymond Brown, Joseph Fitzmyer) and the Pontifical Biblical Commission explicitly endorse the use of philology, textual criticism, and study of the original tongues. It is also false to suggest that Catholics are comfortable with a doctrine “developing” in contradiction to Scripture. Catholic theology insists that authentic doctrinal development must always remain rooted in, and consonant with, divine revelation as preserved in Scripture (see Dei Verbum §10).
The lectio difficilior (“more difficult reading”) principle is at the heart of textual criticism. As even secular scholars admit, the first-person “me” (ʾēlay) of the Masoretic Text is the best-attested and most challenging reading, which makes it the most likely to be original. Later scribes and versions (including some LXX recensions) smooth out the text by substituting “him/the one,” precisely because the notion of YHWH being “pierced” was shocking and theologically difficult for both Jews and, later, anti-Trinitarians.
The 1953 Watchtower article offers the familiar theory of shaliach—the idea that "an agent" is addressed as the sender because he bears the sender’s authority. Biblical agency is real, but it never eliminates the pronoun-level distinction between “I” and “him.” Samuel could be rejected without linguistic ambiguity: YHWH tells the prophet, “they have rejected you … not me” (1 Sam 8:7). Yet in Zechariah the Lord declares that he himself has been run through. If the intention were merely to say “when they pierce my representative, they pierce me,” ordinary Hebrew possessed all the resources to make that clear. Instead the prophet leaves us with a jarring conflation that is unparalleled in the Bible unless one presupposes a more complex identity within YHWH than classical unitarianism allows.
The same prophetic block goes on to speak of a fountain opened by YHWH “for sin and impurity” (13:1) and of a shepherd whom YHWH calls “my fellow” and yet strikes with the sword (13:7). The logic is consistent: the covenant God both suffers the violence of his people and provides the cleansing that follows. Only a reading that allows a distinction of persons within that one God resolves the tension without dissolving the text’s rhetoric.
The Watchtower’s attempted solution (agency/representation) is unconvincing both linguistically and theologically. The parallel with Samuel is a non sequitur: Samuel was never spoken of as “me” in the mouth of YHWH; when Israel rejects Samuel, God says “they have rejected me” in a separate, clarifying statement. In Zechariah, there is no such clarification; the speaker, YHWH, remains the “I” throughout. The only way this makes sense is if the “pierced” one is, in some real sense, YHWH Himself—i.e., in the Christian understanding, the Son, who is of one being with the Father, is the one incarnate and pierced for us. The argument from agency also fails to account for the internal logic of the Zechariah passage, where the act of piercing is not merely a slight against a representative, but a direct assault on God, which results in divine mourning, the outpouring of the Spirit, and national repentance—a constellation that only coheres in the Christological and Trinitarian reading.
Your analogy with the Watchtower’s 1950s explanation is revealing: the NWT and Watchtower Society are compelled by their theology to collapse the plain sense of the text into a theory of mere representation or agency (“piercing Jehovah’s representative = piercing Jehovah”). But this is not what the Hebrew says, nor does it account for the fact that in Zechariah 12:10 the speaker is explicitly YHWH (“I will pour out...”), and then without any change of speaker, says, “they will look upon me whom they have pierced.” The attempt to dissolve the force of this by analogy to rejecting Samuel is not only strained, but fails to account for the uniqueness of the prophetic context, where the one who is pierced is the very one pouring out the Spirit.
It is quite true that Catholic theology acknowledges post-biblical doctrinal development (cf. John Henry Newman); but Dei Verbum 11 also insists that everything asserted by the inspired authors is asserted by the Holy Spirit. If Zechariah’s grammar asserts that the divine speaker is pierced, that assertion cannot be dismissed as a quaint Hebraism. Nor has the Magisterium ever opposed the foundational principle—shared with the Reformers—that the New Testament writers interpret the Old as prophetic witness to Christ. John 19:37 therefore has a stronger claim on Catholic exegesis than does a modern conjectural emendation intentionally produced to avoid Trinitarian implications. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a post-biblical "invention" but the organic unfolding of the apostolic faith, grounded in the witness of Scripture and sealed by the experience of the risen Christ and the gift of the Spirit. The patristic and conciliar record is unanimous in receiving texts like Zechariah 12:10 as prophetic of the mystery of the Incarnation—God in Christ crucified and vindicated.
Your reply that “either translation is plausible and neither helps the Trinity” effectively concedes the exegetical debate while sidestepping its theological import. This claim ignores both the context and the principle of canonical reading. The Christian claim is not that this verse alone proves the Trinity in a vacuum, but that it becomes intelligible—indeed, luminous—within a Christological and Trinitarian horizon, in which God’s own self-giving in Christ is foreshadowed. If the MT is retained, we have a prophetic declaration that YHWH is the object of the nation’s lethal violence. If the emendation is preferred, we have a striking juxtaposition in which lament is addressed to YHWH while focused on a distinct figure who nevertheless bears the titles and eschatological functions elsewhere reserved for YHWH alone (cf. 14:3–9). In both cases the pattern accords with, rather than opposes, the confession that God is eternally one and yet not solitary. The task of scholarship is not to redact the scandal away, but to render an account of how such language became thinkable—and why the primitive church found in it the grammar for speaking of the crucified and risen Jesus as “my Lord and my God.”
It is simply not true that “the Hebrew offers no support for the Trinity.” The fact that John 19:37 explicitly cites Zechariah 12:10 in reference to Jesus’ crucifixion, and does so in the third person, is not evidence against the Trinitarian reading. Rather, it is evidence that the first Christians understood the prophecy to have its fulfillment in Christ, who is both distinct from the Father (the one who pours out the Spirit) and yet one with YHWH (the pierced one). This is precisely the logic of communicatio idiomatum—the communication of properties—which is central to orthodox Christology. The one who is pierced in his human nature is none other than the one in whom all the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9). Moreover, your argument ignores the explicit grammar and logic of prophecy: the shock of Zechariah’s oracle is that YHWH Himself declares that “they shall look on me whom they have pierced.” The text presents the suffering of the Messiah as the suffering of God Himself—something inconceivable in Unitarian, Arian, or strictly Jewish monotheist frameworks, but perfectly explicable in the Christian confession of the incarnate Son.
In sum: your argument, and the Watchtower position, is motivated not by pure textual evidence but by an antecedent theological commitment to deny the deity of Christ. The cumulative data—linguistic, textual, canonical, and theological—points to a reading in which YHWH is the pierced one, which only the doctrine of the Trinity makes fully intelligible. That many translators and editors are less invested in the details does not erase the force of the original text or the logic of its fulfillment. You may reject the Trinity; but you cannot claim that the text, read in its own terms and in the light of the Gospel, is neutral or “knockout” in favor of anti-Trinitarian dogma. If anything, Zechariah 12:10 stands as a prophetic scandal to the very Unitarianism you are defending, and a luminous witness to the Christian mystery: the God who was pierced for us.
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slimboyfat
You are wrong again, or I should say the AI you are relying upon has provided yet another faulty argument in the guise of scholarship. Watchtower does not need to avoid the reading “me” in Zechariah 12:10 “at all costs”. Either reading is perfectly compatible with the Bible as a whole. The Watchtower from the 1950s accepted it as a possible reading and the NWT gives it in a footnote.