Jehovah's Witnesses Release New Bible Version at Annual Meeting

[Nicea325]

It’s tough to post on this subect when Catholicism has such a dark history of banning bible use, bible burning and ardent fighting against having the bible translated into common languages.

A sucker punch with no means to justify it. Wrong! Read some history instead of repeating garbage.

 

[DelsonJacobs]

It’s tough to post on this subect when Catholicism has such a dark history of banning bible use, bible burning and ardent fighting against having the bible translated into common languages.

Between 1537 and 1540, the Protestant king of England, Henry VIII, destroyed over 300 Catholic convents and monasteries including rare Catholic Bibles in Greek and Latin that had been copied by hand. Henry VIII also made the possession of a Bible by Irish Catholics illegal under the pain of death. He also lit a bonfire of books he deemed “heretical” which included the Catholic Vulgate.

Later Queen Elizabeth would follow in his footsteps by torturing any Catholic priest found in possession of a Catholic Bible translation. All copies of the Catholic Rheims New Testament was ordered to be collected and destroyed under her reign.

And it was not only the Church of England that burned Catholic Bibles and forbade Catholics from reading it. History shows us that the Calvinists and Anabaptists also did the same thing.

It is true that the Catholic Church destroyed Bibles that, after investigation of their contents, deemed improperly translated. But it never stopped producing copies of Scripture for use. In fact the first Bible to come off a printing press, the famous Gutenberg Bible, was a Catholic translation.

If the Catholic Church was really against Bible reading, why is its history filled with monks working as copyists to preserve it? Why did the Catholic Douay version come out to the public one year before the King James Version was released? Why was it the Catholic Church took steps to build the necessary bridges to produce ecumenical versions in association with Protestants and Jewish scholars? If the Church was really against people reading the Bible, why did it preserve it so well through the ages?

And why did you leave out the part about Protestants burning Bibles and persecuting Catholics? Why not talk about their dark history of killing Catholics and trying to keep vernacular translations by Catholics out of the hands of Catholics?

It was a dark part in history for all Christianity that people were killing one another and burning Bibles produced by members of another’s faith. Catholics and Protestants were guilty of the same shameful conduct in that era.

Now Jehovah’s Witnesses have spent the past 50 years claiming how the translations of Catholics and Protestants were dishonest for their renditions of John 17:3, their use of contextual terms where the original NWT used only “soul,” and other things that now the Witnesses have adopted in their new revised version.

The Witnesses are now copying the people they demonized and claimed were blinded by the Devil to produce “inferior Bible versions.” I was a full-time pioneer minister and served as a congregation elder–we were taught to tell others that they were using badly rendered Bibles. So I know this was the official stand of the religion taught in many Pioneer Schools and via their publications and conventions.

And now the Witnesses have adopted the very things they once condemned. While I would normally applaud this turn to mainstream Bible translation, because the Witnesses called the translators of Protestant and Catholic versions “worshipers of the god of this system of things,” namely Satan the Devil, I am calling them out for it. They now are doing what they negatively judged others for doing with their Bible translations.

If the Witnesses are not blinded by Satan for adopting these new renditions that Catholics and Protestants have been using all along, then the Witnesses need to admit they have acted wrongly and against the Word of God since the release of the original New World Translation in 1950. But they continue to claim that when Catholics and Protestants pray to God, their prayers and worship go only to Satan.

But if you walk like a duck, and quack like a duck, and revise your Bible to read like the ducks you condemn, are you not also a condemned duck?

Either that or the ducks you’ve been condemning all this time are not worthy of condemnation after all.