I’ve been getting into a debate with a co-worker who is a JW over the accuracy of their translation. How are the original Greek texts available for scholars to translate? How did the writers of the NWT get access to them? Any help with this would be great.
Jeff
Of course the original papyrus and parchment written on by such Bible writers as Moses and Matthew have long since disintegrated. The best we have is fragments of copies of copies.
Even the most careful copiest will make mistakes, and once translation into other languages, plus the evolving of languages gets put into the mix, it is hard to be certain exactly what was originally written in places. Hence we have many translations of God’s word.
However, with the discovery of more and more ancient manuscripts (the dead sea scrolls in the 1950’s for example) and modern scholars finding it easier to compare other existing copies from around the world - many mistakes have been identified. (All copiests will make mistakes, but they will not all make the same ones.)
So modern scholars have been able to assemble “master texts” which are as close as possible to what the original writings would have been. By comparing the many copies and fragments to each other.
The New World Translation (the one JW’s prefer and publish) used Kittel’s “Biblia Hebraica” for it’s Hebrew text, and Westcott and Horts text for the Greek. These are respected master texts which formed the foundation, but many other available texts were consulted. Wikipedia lists them all.
The ever increasing field of Biblical scholarship continues to be used to make amendments when necessary.
I was rather sceptical of the whole “we’ve produced our own translation” thing. I don’t know much about Greek, but comparing the English of John 1:1 with the Greek showed even me the NWT is often more accurate than many other translations.
And a few years ago I devoured a book by a proffesor named Jason Beduhn called “truth in translation” in which he compared texts in 9 major Bible translations with the original Greek to see if they were bias. BeDuhn reported that the New World Translation was “not bias free”, but emerged “as the most accurate of the translations compared”, and thus a “remarkably good translation”, adding that “most of the differences are due to the greater accuracy of the NW as a literal, conservative translation”
Thomas Winter, an instructor of Greek at the University of Nebraska, considered the Interlinear Translation of the Greek to be a “highly useful aid toward the mastery of koine (and classical) Greek,” adding that the translation “is thoroughly up-to-date and consistently accurate.”
Wikipedia quotes several other scholars on the accuracy of the translation.
