1881 Watch Tower - A2Z.org

THE NEW VERSION.The revised version of the New Testament recently published tothe world by the translators, has excited very general attentionand criticism among all interested in God's word, as it should,being so important.Doubtless by this time most of you have examined it and areable to judge of its points of merit and demerit for yourselves.While it could have been improved upon by more radicalchanges, yet it could have been far worse: and it certainly is inmany respects much superior to the old version.We might offer commendation of their course in omittingcertain interpolations --passages not found in ancientmanuscripts, etc., but this is needless for of course it was theirduty to eradicate all words of men. We regret to notice that all ofthese interpolations have not been excluded --perhaps the mostimportant of these stumbling blocks being the first clause ofRev. 20:5--"The rest of the dead lived not again until thethousand years were finished"--already referred to in thesecolumns.We notice that the words--Christ and Baptize are leftuntranslated as in the old version; these are Greek wordstransferred into our language and it would have been a help tothe general reader had the English of them been given, viz.:anointed and immersed. The Greek word hades left untranslatedin the new version, is certainly better than to have it as in the oldversion rendered hell, which to the general reader conveyedanything but the correct meaning-- though all scholars wellunderstood it to mean death or the condition of death.We have heretofore called your attention to the fact that theGreek words, kosmos, oikoumenee, and aion, are in the oldversion all translated by the English word, world, which doesgreat violence to their meaning and grossly misleads the reader.We are very much surprised to find that the new translationleaves them just the same: we are at a loss to see how men of somuch learning could do so by mistake, for doubtless each ofthem would if asked, particularly answer that kosmos signifiesthe world of mankind, or present order of things --thatoikoumenee signifies the habitableR248 : page 8earth or land; while aion means an age or period of time. It isbecause of the mistranslation of this last word that so many havebeen led to expect "the end of the world" at the second advent ofJesus, instead of the end of the gospel age, and hence they areexpecting "a wreck of matter and a crush of worlds" instead ofthe ending of one age and gradual beginning of another which isnow in progress. Can it be that the learned translators feared thatarticles of human creeds would have been exposed as false and