Hello wynngunn . I’d like to say that it is good to see Witnesses posting on this forum. Before I begin, in the interest of honesty I should tell you; I have had some involvement with the Witnesses in the past.That’s all I’ll say, for reasons of anonymity. I would understand , although it would sadden me, if you chose not to respond to me.
I would like to respond to some of the things you said about the NWT.
You said - “I can tell you that Catholics had nothing to do with the New World Translation” . - I would like to discuss this, in terms of “directly”, or “indirectly”.
Directly - The fact is, that neither you nor I know who was directly responsible for translating the New World Translation, because the WT Society has chosen to keep the names of the translators secret. We can take an educated guess as to who it was, but in the end that’s all it is - an educated guess. Now, I agree with 99.9999 % certainty that no Catholic was on the commitee that translated the NWT - but the fact remains, that if someone absolutely insisted that a Catholic was on that commitee, we would be hard pressed to prove that it wasn’t true. That’s the shortcoming of not releasing the names of the translators. There has been all kind of speculation about who was on that commitee, and what their qualifications were or were not. Just to make a point, I would good-naturedly suggest to you to provide a quote from WT literature that even says that the translators were Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Indirectly - While we can reasonably agree that no Catholic directly translated the NWT, I would suggest to you that Catholics were very much responsible for it, in an indirect way. The manuscripts of the Bible that we now have come from the Catholic Church. I invite you, if you haven’t already, to further research the history of the existing manuscripts of the New Testament, and by whom, and under what circumstances, they were produced and preserved. Here’s a quote from the WT publication, “All Scripture is Inspired of God and Beneficial”, p. 317, para 16, 1990 ed. “The New Bible Dictionary reports 274 uncial manuscripts of the Christian Greek Scriptures, and these date from the fourth century C.E. to the tenth century C.E. … Because of their early date and general accuracy, the uncial manuscripts were extensively used by the New World Translation Commitee in making careful renderings of the Greek text.” Again, I would invite you to look into who produced and preserved those manuscripts.
For example, looking at the list of sources for the footnotes in the 1984 New World Translation Reference Edition, on page 9, I see “B - Vatican ms. 1200. Gr., fourth cent C.E., Vatican City, Rome, H.S., G.S.” A quick glance shows that it is referenced, for example, in the NWT Reference Edition in the footnotes at John 1:18 and John 4:9. This is the well known and highly valuable Vatican manuscript that is used in such standard reference works as the United Bible Society’s “Greek New Testament”. How is it that God would use the entity that the Witnesses consider to be “the man of lawlessness… the son of destruction” (2 Thess 2:3) to produce, protect, and make available to others, the manuscripts of the Bible?
Along these lines, I highly recommend to you the book “Where We Got The Bible - Our Debt to the Catholic Church” by Henry G. Graham.
Again, I would like to say that it is good to see Witnesses who are willing to discuss and defend their faith posting on this forum, and I hope to see more of you here.
