The Watchtower, “The “New World Translation”—Scholarly and Honest”
“True, no early surviving Greek manuscript of the “New Testament” contains the personal name of God. But the name was included in the New World Translation for sound reasons, not merely on a whim.”
The article is the organisation’s fullest published answer to the charge that the New World Translation is falsified. It compares the criticism to sixteenth-century attacks on Luther’s Bible, defends the renderings at Luke 23:43 (“Truly I tell you today”), Matthew 26:26 (“This means my body”) and John 1:1 (“the Word was a god”), and answers the objection to the form “Jehovah” by saying that “scholars are by no means in agreement that the form ‘Yahweh’ represents the original pronunciation”. It offers this explanation of the criticism: “the New World Translation is criticized because it is published by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who outspokenly declare that many of Christendom’s doctrines are not found in the Bible.”
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Provenance and verification note for The Watchtower, The “New World Translation”—Scholarly and Honest
Confidence note. Opened on the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026 and read in full; the issue date was confirmed by locating the article in the Online Library’s listing for The Watchtower of 1 March 1991, and page numbers were taken from the document’s embedded page markers.
Corroborated by. src-nwto-it-jehovah-greek
Notes. This is the article the site should quote when stating the organisation’s case on the divine name in the Christian Greek Scriptures: it concedes the manuscript position and argues from inference.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-nwto-w-1991-0301-scholarly-honest