Why is the Bible translated by Jehovah's Witnesses not the Bible?

We are publishing a commentary by Ksenia Sergazina, an expert at the SOVA Center and an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Religions at the Russian State University for the Humanities, dedicated to the recognition of the Bible in the translation of Jehovah's Witnesses as an extremist text.

On August 17, 2017, the Ministry of Justice included in the List of non-profit organizations recognized as extremist the Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia and 395 local organizations of Jehovah's Witnesses. From this moment on, Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia can be brought to criminal liability under Art. 282.2 of the Criminal Code for continuing the activities of an organization recognized as extremist.

The next day, the Vyborg City Court granted the claim of the Leningrad-Finland Transport Prosecutor to recognize the publications “Holy Scripture. New World Translation" 2014 edition, as well as brochures "The Bible and its main topic", "Science instead of the Bible?" and “How to improve your health. 5 simple rules,” thereby recognizing not only the brochures of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but also the biblical text in their translation as extremist materials.

The Russian public - especially in the regions - meanwhile protests mainly against the screening of "Matilda", tacitly approving the defeat of the active and annoying Jehovah's Witnesses.

The decision of the Vyborg court hits several sore points of modern religious politics at once: if you carefully look at the text of the examination that formed the basis of the court decision, it becomes clear that it is based on the “right of the strong” - whoever needs to be banned will be banned, but science - or rather, pseudoscientific formulations - only provide a beautiful screen for a “bad game”.

The experts were asked a direct question: “Are the materials provided for the study the Bible, Koran, Tanakh or Ganjur?” (because these texts, according to the law, cannot be recognized as extremist materials). Any student of religious studies and even a student of humanities who has taken a course in the History of Religion at the university will say that yes, this is the Bible in the translation of Jehovah’s Witnesses (“Old Testament” in an unconventional translation). Not everyone, however, will name the differences between this translation and the canonical synodal one. But the experts dealt with the differences: they listed in detail in which places the Lord was replaced by Jehovah, and where the Holy Spirit was written with a lowercase letter. At the same time, the answer to the question posed is unexpected: “The materials provided for research are not the Bible, Koran, Tanakh or Ganjur.”

Why? Because “The Koran in Islam is recognized as the text of the Koran in Arabic,” and “Ganjur is the name given to 108 volumes in Tibetan,” and this is actually a Russian translation of an English book. Well, definitely not the Koran or Ganjur.

“ As Jehovah's Witnesses report in their publications ,” the text of the examination says, “the New World Translation of the Holy Scripture was created in English. It is the translation into English made from Jewish sources. Jewish religious books are written in the so-called holy language, which is the basis of modern Hebrew. In such cases, translation into another language, in fact, turns out to be the creation of a new text that recreates the original on a fundamentally different basis. All other translations of the book “The Holy Scriptures - New World Translation” are secondary, since they were made from English .

If you think about this text, it turns out that experts, and after them judges, tell us, Christians, that the translation of the Old Testament is not a Holy text at all, because the Jewish tradition does not consider it such. And if we use the English translation of the New Testament, then this is completely a “secondary text”.

To be fair, it should be said that the authors of the examination write in black and white that “the texts included in the Orthodox Bible are translations from the Septuagint.” So they need to resort to one more trick. “ Key texts of the New Testament [as translated by Jehovah’s Witnesses – K.S.],” they write, “ have been changed so that they could be interpreted in the opposite meaning .”

According to the logic of experts, it turns out that this is not the Koran (because it is not an Arabic text), not a Buddhist text (because it is not in Tibetan), not the Hebrew Bible, because it is a translation, and not the Christian Bible, because “the texts are interpreted differently.” .

This logic can take us far: we may not consider Valentina Kuznetsova’s translation to be the New Testament (it is also called “Good News”, not the Gospel or the Bible), we may not recognize translations as Sacred texts, we may not pay attention to that culture at all , in which the text is created. All this becomes unimportant when there is an “order”. And in this case, obviously, not even an order from competitors - the Russian Orthodox Church - but a “state order”.