Why doesn't The Berea include the New World Translation?
The New World Translation (NWT) is the Bible translation produced and published by Jehovah's Witnesses. The Berea offers fifteen translations for side-by-side comparison on every verse — formal, literal, and easy-reading, spanning four centuries — and the NWT is not one of them.
That is a decision worth explaining, not just stating. It is not because Jehovah's Witnesses produced it, and it is not because the translation is controversial — plenty of serious translations are debated. It is because of what specific, checkable renderings inside it actually do, at exact points where translation choice determines who readers understand Jesus Christ to be.
This page summarizes four of those points. Each has its own full examination elsewhere in this series, with the Greek or Hebrew text, the primary source for the Jehovah's Witness reading, and The Berea's response to it, laid out in full — this page only gives the shape of the pattern.
Four specific renderings, examined in depth elsewhere
- "The Word was a god" — John 1:1. The NWT translates the last clause of John 1:1 as "the Word was a god," leaning on a real Greek grammatical feature — but the same grammar, by the scholarship the NWT itself cites, is normally qualitative ("what the Word is like"), not indefinite ("a god").
- "Firstborn of all creation" — Colossians 1:15. The NWT's study notes read this as Jesus being God's first created being — but Colossians' own next sentence explains "firstborn" as a title tied to his role as Creator, the same way Scripture elsewhere calls David "firstborn" without meaning he was born first.
- "All other things" — Colossians 1:16-17. The NWT adds the word "other" four times in two verses — a word absent from the Greek text at every one of those four points, inserted to keep the passage consistent with reading "firstborn" as "first created."
- "Jehovah," 237 times, where no manuscript has it — the New Testament. The NWT inserts God's personal name into the New Testament 237 times. No surviving Greek New Testament manuscript — not one — contains it anywhere; every one reads "Lord" or "God." The case for the insertions rests on inference about lost originals, not on any manuscript evidence.
This is not a claim that the New World Translation is dishonest from cover to cover, or that every rendering in it serves a theological purpose — most of its text reads the way any careful translation would. The pattern is specific: at the exact points where a translation choice bears on the identity of Jesus Christ, the New World Translation consistently departs from what the underlying text and its own context support, in the same direction each time. And these four points are not the whole biblical case for who Jesus is, either — they are the four places where this particular translation's own wording is what is under examination.
Examine it for yourself
The evidence, the interpretations and the conclusion, separated so you can examine each step. Every passage is linked; read them in context.
Why a pattern, and not one verse
A single disputed rendering could be an honest translator's judgment call. What makes this worth a page of its own is that the same direction repeats across unrelated grammatical questions — an article missing in Greek, a word supplied that isn't there, a title's meaning, a name inserted into a text that never had it — each time landing on the reading that keeps Jesus from being identified as God. That pattern is the evidence, examined one piece at a time in the linked studies below, not asserted here.
What the evidence supports
The Berea does not include the New World Translation because its own distinctive renderings, examined individually against the Hebrew and Greek text, repeatedly depart from what that text supports — consistently in the same theological direction.
Four specific, checkable renderings — John 1:1's "a god," Colossians 1:15's "firstborn of all creation" read as first-created, Colossians 1:16-17's inserted "other," and 237 insertions of "Jehovah" into a New Testament no manuscript of which contains it — each depart from what the underlying text and its immediate context support, and each departure serves the same theological conclusion. That pattern, not the fact of Watch Tower authorship, is why The Berea does not treat the New World Translation as a reliable base text.
Examine further
- John 1:1
The first of the four renderings, examined in its own dedicated question.
- Colossians 1:15
"Firstborn of all creation" — examined in the dedicated Creator question and the Colossians question.
Discuss and study
- Does a pattern across four unrelated grammatical questions carry more weight than any one of them alone? Why or why not?
- What would change your mind about this pattern, if you set out to test it seriously?