The Founding Witness of Jehovah Flounders

The Jehovah’s Witnesses deserve commendation for the zeal with which they go about their business.  They are in a pitiable position though with reference to their doctrinal beliefs and their founder’s bogus claims for himself and his views on the Bible.

The very colourful and even bombastic pioneer of the group now called Jehovah’s Witnesses, was Charles Taze Russell. Russell, while only eighteen years old organized a Bible class in Pittsburgh in 1870 and in 1876 was elected as ‘Pastor’ of the group. After resigning his post as associate editor of a monthly magazine in Rochester, New York, Russell founded The Herald of the Morning which became The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom. Russell wrote a series of six books now called Studies in the Scriptures. A seventh book, an edited version of his writings after his death, prompted a split in the organization. The larger splinter group had J.F. Rutherford as its leader with the smaller group, faithful to Russell, remaining by itself. It was after the split that Rutherford’s grouping took for itself the now popular name Jehovah’s Witnesses and the corporate name The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society with international office in Brooklyn, New York.

Charles T. Russell seemed to have had more than his fair share of legal trials, including his not too pleasant divorce from his wife Maria Ackley in 1906 and his trial for fraud in connection with his alleged ‘Miracle Wheat’.

Of particular doctrinal interest is a libel suit which ‘Pastor’ Russell brought against a Baptist Pastor the Rev. J. J. Ross of Hamilton, Ontario who had denounced Russell’s theology and personal life in a no-holds-barred pamphlet. Ross castigated Russell’s teachings in Studies in the Scriptures as “the destructive doctrine of one man who is neither a scholar nor a theologian…who never attended the higher schools of learning…and is totally ignorant of the dead languages [presumably, Latin, Hebrew/Aramaic, Greek, etc.]”.

‘Pastor’ Russell’s simple burden in such a law suit was to prove that the charges in Ross’ pamphlet were not true. Russell lost the case as the court ruled that there was no ground for libel.

Under cross-examination Russell was forced to admit that he went only to public school and left at about age fourteen. Russell was charged for perjury arising from the proceedings and in this trial we encounter fun and games.

Ross’ attorney asked Russell if he knew the Greek alphabet. To which Russell readily said yes but when asked if he could identify the correct letters if he saw them he softened his stance by saying “Some of them; I might make a mistake on some of them.”  The lawyer then handed Russell a Greek New Testament and asked him to call the names of the letters of the particular book’s name at the top of the page.

The founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who dares to write books on the meaning of the Bible floundered and said “Well, I don’t know that I would be able to.” Note that Pastor Russell, the Bible teacher, was not being asked to translate a Greek passage from Acts or Hebrews but simply to identify a few letters of the Greek alphabet, AND HE COULD NOT.

As a teacher of New Testament Greek I would be embarrassed to death if one of my beginner Greek students, after a week in class with me, answered the way Russell did.

How then can one take seriously the statement from the Watchtower of September 15, 1910, p.298 that if one reads Russell’s SCRIPTURE STUDIES without reading the Bible one would find more light than reading the Bible alone minus Russell’s SCRIPTURE STUDIES?

In a television broadcast in Barbados over the Christmas period of 2009 the representatives of the Jehovah’s Witnesses waxed warm about John 1:1 and the alleged impropriety of the traditional translation of the third clause “and the Word was God”.

The New World Translation (NWT) of the Witnesses translates “and the word was a god”.  The Witnesses defend their translation by arguing that in this clause the Greek word for God (theos) does not have the article (‘the’)  before it, hence it ought not to be translated in English with a capital G.  Even if this argument was a genuine point in Greek (and it is not) then the persons behind the NWT broke their own invented rule a few times in the same John 1. Verses 6, 12, 13 and 18 all have the word God without the article [Greek has no indefinite article =a, an] yet the NWT translates God with a capital G in all of these verses.  Take the reading of v. 6 from the NWT “There arose a man that was sent forth as a representative of God [no article] his name was John.”

There are other passages where theos appears without the article but where the whole context demands a reference to Almighty God. By the whole context I am implying not only the operative principles of sentence construction but as well the author and his beliefs.

The author of John’s gospel is a monotheist writing to fellow monotheists and in that context ‘the Word was a god’ would be nonsensical. If the author was a polytheist then the NWT’s translation would be permissible.

Jehovah’s Witnesses argue the way they do because they do not believe that Jesus is God or that he is eternal. Yet John, careful writer that he is, not only hints at the opening words of Genesis in Greek by locating the Word ‘in the beginning’ but carefully chooses his verbs in Jn. 1.1-14.

When he speaks of the Word (Jesus) before the incarnation (at v. 14) he always uses the imperfect tense ‘was’ (Greek: ēn, sound=‘an’ of ‘angel’, suggesting ongoingness in the past, roughly approximating the English ‘used to be’). However when he speaks of an entity coming into being he uses an aorist tense (point action). Hence, “In the beginning was [Greek: ēn] the Word and the Word was [Greek: ēn] with God and the Word was [Greek: ēn] God”. But in v. 3 “All things through him came into being [Greek aorist: egeneto]. Likewise the reference to John in v. 6 uses the aorist egeneto.

Similarly at v. 14 when the Word became flesh John uses egeneto.  The Word was eternal Spirit before the incarnation.

If John believed that the Word was not eternal but had a beginning in time he would have said at v.1 “In the beginning the Word came into existence [Greek: egeneto].”

There is no question that the author of John’s gospel sees Jesus as God. In 5.16-18, Jesus attracts Jewish hostility and persecution because he healed someone on the Sabbath.

In v. 17 Jesus declared, to the horror of his Jewish audience, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.” (New International Version, NIV). John’s commentary on this declaration is instructive of his view of Jesus as God.

V. 18 says “For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making Himself equal with God.” (NIV, emphasis added)

In 8.24 and 28 Jesus makes ‘I am’ declarations  [Greek egō eimi, the ‘ō’ is long as in ‘omen’], without a clarifying predicate explaining who Jesus is (like “…the bread of life”) These stark declarations are muted a bit in almost all English translations by the addition of a predicate like ‘He’ (yielding “I am He”, New King James Version) or ‘the one I claim to be’ (yielding “I am the one I claim to be”, New International Version).  The Greek simply has egō eimi, thus “…if you do not believe that I am you will indeed die in your sins” (v. 24b), and “…then you will know that I am, and that I do nothing on my own…” (v. 28b).

Yet again in 8.58 our Lord invokes the absolute use of egō eimi (i.e. minus a predicate) when he shocked his listeners with “Before Abraham was [=came into being, was born] I am”. This absolute use of egō eimi would remind the average Jew of the identical declaration by the Almighty in the Greek version of Exodus 3.14, where the Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh is rendered in the Greek Old Testament as egō eimi ho ōn (lit. ‘I am the one/He who is’).  In our Lord’s time, the Greek Old Testament was more popular than the Hebrew. In response to this startling declaration by Jesus, his audience took up stones to kill him (v. 59) presumably for blasphemy in line with Leviticus 24.16.

This passage, Jn.8.58, flushes out the fallacies of the NWT. The NWT renders the passage thus, “Before Abraham came into existence, I have been.” So egō eimi is rendered as ‘I have been’ and in the 1950 edition, the NWT defends this mistranslation by saying that egō eimi is “the perfect indefinite tense”. As the late Walter Martin and others have pointed out, there is no perfect indefinite tense in Greek. The later Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures (1969) attempts damage control in a footnote on p.467 thus “I have been= [egō eimi] after the aorist infinitive clause [prin Abraham genesthai] and hence properly rendered in the perfect tense…” I can find no rule in Greek that allows a present tense clause following an aorist infinitive clause to be translated as a perfect tense clause! This is just another Russellite ruse.

Jesus is again threatened with stoning in John 10.31-33. He had just said “I and the Father [we] are one.” The outraged Jews told Jesus they were planning to stone him “…for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God [no article in the Greek].”  The Jews would have had no legal basis for stoning Jesus if all he was claiming was to be a god, as Jehovah’s Witnesses claim for the unarticled theos.

Consistent with John’s view of Jesus as God we find the sterling affirmation from Thomas in 20.28 “My Lord and my God.” In Greek ho kurios mou kai ho theos mou. Here theos has the article and Jesus does not rebuke Thomas for declaring blasphemously, though he chides him, mildly, about the reason for his faith in his (Jesus’) resurrection.

Jesus, for John, is indeed God and he affirms this from the first chapter and throughout his gospel.  This is the witness of the New Testament documents on the whole, as they provide both direct and indirect testimony to the deity of Jesus Christ.

Jehovah’s Witnesses need to supplement their commendable zeal with solid biblical knowledge.