Not the Watchtower:
WT 9/15/1950
10 Particularly since 1946 the president of the Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society has been in quest of such a translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures. On September 3, 1949, at 8 a.m., at the Brooklyn headquarters (Bethel) the Society’s president convened a joint meeting of the boards of directors of the Pennsylvania and New York corporations, only one director being absent. After the meeting was opened with prayer the president announced to these eight fellow directors the existence of a “New World Bible Translation Committee” and that it had completed a translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures. This it had turned over to the possession and control of the Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society, Pennsylvania corporation, just the preceding day. He read the committee’s document by which it assigned the translation manuscript to the Society in recognition of the Society’s unsectarian work of spreading the sacred Word of God and of promoting the knowledge and understanding of its teaching among the people of every nation, kindred, people and language, and in order that the translation might be a new means toward the expanding of its Christian educational activities throughout the world.
WT 12/1/50
You open and close your article with a reference to the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures, released at Yankee Stadium, Wednesday, August 2, the fourth day of the International Assembly of Jehovah’s witnesses there. During the remaining four days of which Assembly 85,850 copies of this new translation were placed with the conventioners. We being the printers who have come into possession of the publication rights of this translation, we feel the obligation of making some answer to your article. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the general public who read your adverse article is expecting a published reply from us, and we do not want either to disappoint these or to fail in our obligation to the Most High God and his recorded Word.
WT 10/1/60
4 In 1948 the Watch Tower Society became aware of the existence of the New World Bible Translation Committee, formed for the purpose of producing a modern translation of the entire Bible from its original languages, with features that would be most suitable for accurate Bible education today. The Committee agreed to turn over its translation to the Watch Tower Society to hold as its property and to publish as part of its Bible educational work. On September 3, 1949, the Society’s president had the pleasure of introducing to a meeting of associate directors the completed translation, in typewritten form, of the Christian Greek Scriptures, which the Translation Committee had then recently turned over to the Society. On August 2, 1950, it was my privilege to address the international assembly of Jehovah’s witnesses in Yankee Stadium, New York, and to release to the 82,075 there present the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures fresh from the Society’s own presses in Brooklyn, New York. The first edition was 480,000 copies. In ten years our Society has printed 1,408,668 copies of the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures.
The Watchtower did Translate It:
In what other way has the modern “faithful and discreet slave,” assisted since 1935 by “a great crowd” of “other sheep,” acted as the modern steward of the Sacred Scriptures? (Revelation 7:9, 10; John 10:16) Over the past hundred years, members of the anointed remnant have kept abreast of the discoveries of early Bible manuscripts. Eventually an anonymous committee of anointed Witnesses of Jehovah produced, between 1950 and 1960, the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures in English. This was a completely new translation, untouched and unfettered by Christendom’s religious traditions.
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