It is commonly alleged that the NWT's translators did not know the original biblical languages, and that the NWT is really just a revision of the Authorized Version, the American Standard Version, or Rotherham's Emphasized Bible. The "source" of the NWT varies depending on the person forwarding the argument, but it is usually one of those three.
History of the Argument
The argument in its various manifestations probably stem from a criticism by Dr. Julius Mantey. He frequently attacked the NWT because of his bias against Jehovah's Witnesses. Although some use Mantey's testimonies against the NWT because of his credentials, this is an appeal to an unqualified authority (Argumentum ad Verecumdiam) because of his obvious bias and prejudice against Jehovah's Witnesses. Speaking of the Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures - an Interlinear of the Greek text of the New Testament and the NWT - the original Mantey argument is this:
Where did Mantey get the idea that the NWT wasn't a translation at all, but a revision of Rotherham's Emphasized Bible? Did he ever have evidence to back this up? He never presented any. Without evidence, it is a baseless assertion. Is he not letting his own personal bias against Jehovah's Witnesses affect his objectivity as a scholar? This appears to be the case. His bias against Jehovah's Witnesses and the NWT is evident, which is why he may be dismissed as an unqualified authority against the NWT.
Mantey's original comments which was confined only to the New Testament portion of the NWT has since grown to embrace the entire NWT, including the Old Testament portion. And it is in the Old Testament portion that positive evidence that the NWT's translators knew Hebrew that is here presented. This is of interest because it is commonly alleged that the NWT's translators may have had training in basic Greek, but were completely untrained in Hebrew.
Evidence that the NWT's Translations Worked Directly with the Hebrew Text
In 1953, The first volume of the NWT of the Hebrew Scriptures was published. Originally Leviticus 23:21 read:
In fact, it is not their translation at all. Rather, it is a distortion of the New Testament. The translators used what J. B. Rotherham had translated in 1893, in modern speech, and changed the readings in scores of passages to state what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe and teach. That is distortion, not translation." -- Julius Mantey, Depth Exploration in the New Testament (NY: Vantage Press, 1980), pp. 136-37.
Where did Mantey get the idea that the NWT wasn't a translation at all, but a revision of Rotherham's Emphasized Bible? Did he ever have evidence to back this up? He never presented any. Without evidence, it is a baseless assertion. Is he not letting his own personal bias against Jehovah's Witnesses affect his objectivity as a scholar? This appears to be the case. His bias against Jehovah's Witnesses and the NWT is evident, which is why he may be dismissed as an unqualified authority against the NWT.
Mantey's original comments which was confined only to the New Testament portion of the NWT has since grown to embrace the entire NWT, including the Old Testament portion. And it is in the Old Testament portion that positive evidence that the NWT's translators knew Hebrew that is here presented. This is of interest because it is commonly alleged that the NWT's translators may have had training in basic Greek, but were completely untrained in Hebrew.
Evidence that the NWT's Translations Worked Directly with the Hebrew Text
In 1953, The first volume of the NWT of the Hebrew Scriptures was published. Originally Leviticus 23:21 read:
"And you must proclaim on this very day Jehovah's holy convention for yourselves."
Here is a picture of Leviticus 23:21 in the original versions of the NWT:
This stood for 26 years. Then the verse was changed to read:
Why the change? The NWT's translators had misread the Hebrew word יהיה (YHYH, it will be) as the similar looking word יהוה (YHWH, Jehovah). Misreading a Yod as a Vav, and vice versa, is common for readers working with the blocky Hebrew alphabet. This only would have happened if the translators were translating directly from the Hebrew text, and not comparing with other translations. For no other translation has "Jehovah" in this verse.
It may be claimed that perhaps the NWT's translators were restoring the Divine Name in Leviticus 23:21. Sometimes the NWT has "Jehovah" in places were the Hebrew Masoretic Text - the source of the Hebrew portion of the NWT - does not have the tetragrammaton. However, the NWT's translators were not restoring the Divine Name in Lev 23:21 in this instance. This is because they explicitly mention all restorations in the footnotes, yet they don't mention it at Leviticus 23:21. When restoring the Divine Name in the Hebrew Scriptures, they only followed Hebrew scholar C. D. Ginsburg's list of 134 places as published in The Massorah. Ginsburg doesn't restore the Divine Name anywhere in Leviticus.
The Divine Name doesn't appear in the textual apparatus of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia for Leviticus 23:21, or in the Septuagint, which was based on an early Hebrew text that oftentimes matches Ginsburg's list. Therefore, in no way could it be said that the NWT's translators were restoring the Divine Name in Leviticus 23:21.
We are left with positive evidence that the NWT's translators were working directly with the Hebrew text, translating Hebrew into English, producing an original translation. They were not "revising" an already existing English translation.
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* There is a distinction between "traditional Christianity" and "scriptural Christianity" - the two are not necessarily the same thing!
This stood for 26 years. Then the verse was changed to read:
"And you must make a proclamation on this very day; there will be a holy convention for yourselves."
Why the change? The NWT's translators had misread the Hebrew word יהיה (YHYH, it will be) as the similar looking word יהוה (YHWH, Jehovah). Misreading a Yod as a Vav, and vice versa, is common for readers working with the blocky Hebrew alphabet. This only would have happened if the translators were translating directly from the Hebrew text, and not comparing with other translations. For no other translation has "Jehovah" in this verse.
It may be claimed that perhaps the NWT's translators were restoring the Divine Name in Leviticus 23:21. Sometimes the NWT has "Jehovah" in places were the Hebrew Masoretic Text - the source of the Hebrew portion of the NWT - does not have the tetragrammaton. However, the NWT's translators were not restoring the Divine Name in Lev 23:21 in this instance. This is because they explicitly mention all restorations in the footnotes, yet they don't mention it at Leviticus 23:21. When restoring the Divine Name in the Hebrew Scriptures, they only followed Hebrew scholar C. D. Ginsburg's list of 134 places as published in The Massorah. Ginsburg doesn't restore the Divine Name anywhere in Leviticus.
The Divine Name doesn't appear in the textual apparatus of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia for Leviticus 23:21, or in the Septuagint, which was based on an early Hebrew text that oftentimes matches Ginsburg's list. Therefore, in no way could it be said that the NWT's translators were restoring the Divine Name in Leviticus 23:21.
We are left with positive evidence that the NWT's translators were working directly with the Hebrew text, translating Hebrew into English, producing an original translation. They were not "revising" an already existing English translation.
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* There is a distinction between "traditional Christianity" and "scriptural Christianity" - the two are not necessarily the same thing!
The claim you’ve presented tries to do two things at once: discredit well–known criticisms of the NWT by calling them “biased,” and rehabilitate the NWT’s reputation by offering a single anecdote from Leviticus 23:21 as “positive evidence” that its translators worked directly from Hebrew. Neither move succeeds. Setting rhetoric aside, the question is not whether a translator once looked at a Hebrew page but whether the translation as a whole reflects demonstrable competence in the biblical languages, sound textual method, and freedom from doctrinal steering. On those criteria the argument collapses.
ReplyDeleteBegin with the attempt to neutralize Julius Mantey by labeling him “biased.” In scholarship, bias is not refuted by name-calling; it is refuted by showing that the arguments are wrong. Mantey’s criticisms (and those of many others across traditions) were not “because he disliked Jehovah’s Witnesses,” but because of concrete, checkable issues of grammar, syntax, and textual criticism—John 1:1, Hebrews 1:8, John 8:58, the NT’s use of κύριος, and so on. Even if one were to bracket Mantey entirely, the same objections have been made independently by numerous grammarians and textual critics over decades. An ad hominem does not answer a syntactic point, and an “appeal to authority” is not fallacious when the authority is precisely qualified in the relevant field and gives reasons that can be tested. The way to vindicate the NWT is to meet those reasons on the merits, not to impugn motives.
Now to the centerpiece of your case: Leviticus 23:21. The verse’s Hebrew reads, in part, מִקְרָא־קֹדֶשׁ יִהְיֶה לָכֶם—“a holy convocation it shall be for you.” Early NWT editions allegedly printed “Jehovah’s holy convention for yourselves” and later corrected it to “there will be a holy convention for yourselves,” concluding that the translators must have misread יִהְיֶה (yihyeh, “it shall be”) as יהוה (YHWH), and therefore must have been working directly from the Hebrew. But this proves far less than you think, and it exposes more serious problems than it solves.
First, confusing יִהְיֶה with יהוה is not the kind of mistake competent Hebraists make and let stand for a quarter of a century. יִהְיֶה is among the most common verbs in the Bible; any first-year student learns to recognize it in Qal imperfect 3ms. If a translation committee “working in Hebrew” can mistake a basic verbal form for the Tetragrammaton, print the error, and then leave it uncorrected through multiple printings, that does not showcase capacity in Hebrew so much as the absence of ordinary controls (second readers, comparison to standard editions, consultation of the ancient versions) that every responsible Bible project employs. That every mainstream version—Jewish and Christian—renders “it shall be a holy convocation to you” is not a conspiracy of “traditional Christianity”; it is what the Hebrew says.
Second, even on your own telling, the initial rendering betrays elementary syntactic confusion. “Jehovah’s holy convention for yourselves” treats מִקְרָא־קֹדֶשׁ as a construct (“holy convocation of X”), which it is not, and forces לָכֶם (“for you”) to behave as a possessive (“your”) while inventing a proper-name genitive (“of Jehovah”) that simply isn’t there. The later correction to an impersonal “there will be a holy convention for yourselves” moves back toward idiomatic Hebrew-to-English, but that only underscores that the first attempt was not merely an eyesight slip; it reflected thin feel for Hebrew clause structure. A single blunder, then, does not prove live engagement with the Hebrew text; it proves that when the committee did look at the Hebrew, it could produce a howler that a competent reader would never write and a competent editorial process would never let through.
Third, the broader record of the NWT’s Hebrew handling points in the opposite direction of your conclusion. The pre-2013 NWT was notorious for its wooden, often unidiomatic treatment of the Hebrew “wayyiqtol” and imperfect—e.g., the repetitious “proceeded to” and “began to” circumlocutions—together with a dismissive stance toward waw-consecutive that virtually no standard Hebrew grammar shares. Those tics were not one-off misprints; they were programmatic. They reflect theory-driven English that regularly obscured how Biblical Hebrew actually works. When the 2013 revision quietly abandoned much of this, it tacitly conceded the point. That is not what consistent competence looks like.
DeleteFourth, your Leviticus anecdote does nothing to touch the most consequential charge of all: the NWT’s NT practice of replacing the Greek κύριος with “Jehovah” in hundreds of places without a shred of manuscript support. No Greek NT manuscript writes the Tetragrammaton in those verses. Calling this “restoration” or appealing to theories about second-century expungement does not change the textual facts. Translation is constrained by what the text says, not by what a modern committee thinks it ought to have said. If “evidence of working in the original” is your standard, then in the corpus where the evidence truly matters—the NT’s application of OT “Lord” texts to Jesus—the NWT repeatedly refuses to translate the originals as they stand. One cannot use a corrected typo in Leviticus to launder a consistent pattern of tendentious revision in Paul and the Gospels.
Finally, the assertion that the NWT is unfairly attacked because it opposes “traditional Christianity” mislocates the dispute. The gravest criticisms concern places where the NWT departs from ordinary, defensible renderings to evade the NT’s own Christology. When the NWT turns the clear vocative of Hebrews 1:8 (“Your throne, O God”) into “God is your throne,” when it flattens Jesus’ solemn ἐγώ εἰμι in John 8:58 into “I have been,” when it treats the qualitative predicate in John 1:1c as an indefinite “a god,” and when it inserts “Jehovah” in the NT hundreds of times against the manuscript tradition, those are not the marks of translators being braver or less “traditional.” They are the marks of translators protecting a doctrine. That is exactly the standard you set out to deny.
So, did the NWT translators “know Hebrew”? A committee that can misread יִהְיֶה as יהוה and publish it for decades has certainly looked at Hebrew letters. But competence is measured by consistent, idiomatic control of the language and by a method that respects the sources everywhere, not by a single corrected blunder. The episode in Leviticus 23:21, far from exonerating the NWT, highlights what critics have said all along: where the NWT is not leaning on earlier English, it too often mishandles basic Hebrew; and where theology is at stake—especially in the NT—it is willing to override the originals to secure a predetermined outcome.