Hey zac, Katabole has already answered a lot of things, very nicely. I found some nice critiques on JW's and thought to post it, though the original critiques are very long, I have just taken out things that may help you without going though all the mixed content. I apologize for the long post, hope it helps.
-----------------
The Jehovah’s Witnesses has become one of the familiar oddities of the religious scene in America, can hardly be adequately explained apart from the history of the land that gave it birth. In its own way, it is as American as hot dogs and baseball. It has sprung from the same fertile soil that has produced Christian Science, Mormonism, the Black Muslims, and the hundreds of other religious curiosities that have left American without rival in this particular line of human endeavor.
Though the Witnesses claim to have existed for some six thousand years or more, less romantic and more objective historians trace their origin to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about the year 1872. It was in this year that Charles Taze Russell (“Pastor Russell”), a Congregationalist layman, came to the many of the conclusions that have remained ever after the basic Witness dogmas. Russell published his conclusions in a series entitled Studies in the Scriptures which gained him a large reading public and many followers. The Watchtower, the now quite famous publication of the group whose first leader he was, began to appear in 1879.
The Adventist movement was very strong in the America of Russell’s day, and it was on Adventism that Russell founded his main body of doctrine, thus forming one of an endless series of sects that have emerged from Adventist speculation. Despite the Lord’s own words concerning His Second Coming, “Of that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Mark 13:32), words that have always convinced orthodox Christians that such speculation is not only useless but also unscriptural, prophets like Russell have appeared with deadly regularity to play on the religious credulity and curiosity and have generally succeeded, as he did, in gathering a following of devout believers.
Failed Prophecies
Russell’s most precise predictions were made in 1891. The Second Coming of Christ, he proclaimed, had already taken place, invisibly in 1874. The Millennium itself would begin before the close of 1914, after a forty-years period during which the true members of Christ’s Church would be prepared under Russell’s guidance. At the time of the Millennium would occur the general resurrection and final judgment. The results of the latter would be the complete annihilation of the wicked—Russell had also come to the conclusion that there could be no such thing as eternal punishment—and the everlasting life granted to the “saints,” either in heaven or on a new earth cleansed of all evil.
This element of the doctrine of the Jehovah's Witnesses is a specific interpretation of Daniel 4 which is very easy to argue against. The Witnesses interpretation, as set forth in pages 136-141 of their You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth, extracts a prophecy which sets 1914 as the year in which Christ begins to rule as king of the "heavenly government."
Daniel 4:1-17 sees Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, describing a dream he has just had to his servant Belteshazzar (otherwise known as Daniel). Daniel 4:18-27 has Daniel interpreting the dream for his king, and Daniel 4:28-37 shows the fulfillment of the dream.
In his dream, Nebuchadnezzar first sees a great, strong, and abundantly stocked tree. Then he sees an angel descend from heaven and declare that the tree should be hewn down, but the stump and roots left in the ground and bound with a band of iron. The angel finishes by declaring:
"...let him graze with the beasts
On the grass of the earth.
Let his heart be changed
from that of a man,
Let him be given the heart of
a beast,
And let seven times pass
over him"
and letting it be known that the whole thing is a demonstration of the dominion of God over man.
What Daniel says about this dream is that (1) the tree represents Nebuchadnezzar; (2) Nebuchadnezzar will be deposed for "seven times" until he realizes that God, and not he himself, is responsible for the greatness of the Babylonian kingdom; and that (3) Babylon will still be waiting for Nebuchadnezzar when the "seven times" are finished, and he will rule again.
The Jehovah's Witnesses have a unique way of interpreting all of this: they claim that: (1) the tree represents the supreme rulership of God because "Nebuchadnezzar was forced to know that someone higher was ruling"(p.138); (2) the cutting down of the tree represents the destruction of the Kingdom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar in 607 B.C.; (3) the "seven times" constitute 2,520 years because in Revelation, 1,260 days are equal to 3 and 1/2 times, and because each day counts for a year "according to a Biblical rule"(p.141); (4) adding 2,520 days to 607 B.C. yields 1914 as the year when Christ returns to rule God's heavenly government.
Russell’s Millennium, of course, did not break out in 1914. The first World War did begin in Europe at that time, however, and it seemed that that was what the founder had somehow been talking about all along. Later, Russell’s works were revised to clear up the discrepancy: whereas he had written, “…The deliverance of the saints must take place sometime before 1914….,” the revised text read: “…The deliverance of the saints must take place very soon after 1914…” The current party line has it that in 1914 Christ began “an invisible reign of righteousness”—whatever that may mean. (The belief that 1874 marked Christ’s Second Coming has long since been discarded.) Prophets like Russell rarely lose their following merely because their prophecies prove to be false; the credulity that can accept them in the first place remains strong enough to survive scandals of this kind. However, the Witnesses today, now that both Russell and Rutherford are dead, have learnt to make their prophecies in very general terms, and they do not encourage the reading of their founders’ prophetical works.
a person with no other equipment than a knowledge of the English language and a seventeenth century English translation of the Bible in his hands is qualified to decide all matters of eternal consequence for himself and the rest of mankind, is the ridiculous conclusion to which the principle of private judgment can finally be brought.
In such a process, the countless generations of devout people who have lived and died according to other beliefs simply count for nothing. The centuries of thought and prayer that have gone into the interpretation of the Bible for all these generations likewise count for nothing. The very men who wrote the Bible--who, obviously, held to a faith that could not be sustained by a patchwork of texts culled from Genesis to Revelation and back again, books that did not then exist--these men, too, count for nothing.
All that does matter, apparently, is that a Pennsylvania draper ignorant of the Biblical languages and without the vaguest conception of the Bible's historical origins should have the right to pronounce on the meaning of a book and to judge all mankind of the past, present, and future on the basis of his pronouncements.
Here, as a Protestant author once observed, is a species of arrogance compared with which the Pope of Rome, with his claim to infallibility, is grovelling in the dust. For the Pope claims only to be the voice of Christian tradition. He cannot, as Pastor Russell did, discover new truths about which Christian antiquity was ignorant.
Mistranslations
It is inevitable that this should be the case, since this approach grew out of a total ignorance of Biblical scholarship. Take, for example, the very name by which the Witnesses wish to be known. The word "Jehovah" has become one of the fetishes of their cult, assuming an importance for them which it has certainly had for no other group known to mankind. The word is derived from the name which the ancient Israelites used to distinguish their God from the gods of the Gentiles. It is derived from that name, however, quite incorrectly. The Hebrews called their God by a name which was written YHWH--all in consonants, we note, since the Hebrew alphabet has no vowels. The pronunciation of the name, which existed independently of the spelling, was doubtless something like "Yahweh." Through an exaggerated type of reverence for the name--and also because the name eventually ceased to be used--later Jews never pronounced it, and as a result the original pronunciation is not sure to this day. What is absolutely sure, however, is that it was never pronounced "Jehovah." This
version derives from a misreading of the Hebrew Bible after it had been supplied with vowel indications in later Christian times. The vowel indications that had been attached to this word were actually taken from another, the Hebrew word for "My Lord" which was customarily pronounced instead of the sacred name YHWH. Now the Witnesses themselves know this nowadays, even if earlier Witnesses did not. On page 25 of their New World Translation of the Christian Greek
Scriptures they admit this fact, but say that they have "retained the form `Jehovah' because of people's familiarity with it since the fourteenth century" (that is, the fourteenth century after Christ). The fact is, however, as the editors of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible have pointed out: "1) The word `Jehovah' does not accurately represent any form of the Name ever used in Hebrew; and 2) the use of any proper name for the one and only God as though there were other gods from whom He had to be distinguished, was discontinued in Judaism before the Christian era and is entirely inappropriate for the universal faith of the Christian Church." The editors make this sensible statement in justifying their abandonment of the impossible "Jehovah" that has found its way into some older English translations of the Bible.
Immortality of the human soul
Russell's misunderstanding of the Bible also characterizes the creed of the Witnesses.This is their denial of the immortality of the human soul, a denial that
ties in with their rejection of eternal punishment and the strange interpretation they give to certain passages of the Book of Revelation which concern the future life of the elect. In the appendix to the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures (1950 edition) some five pages are devoted to the translations given the word "soul." In the appendix to the New World Translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (1953 edition) another eleven pages deal with the same subject. What all of these references go to prove is that the Semites who wrote the Bible looked on the human personality in a somewhat different
fashion from our own. This is not a question of Biblical revelation, but of the notions of human psychology entertained by Biblical authors.
The Hebrew did not, as we do, think of man as a composite of body and soul. When he used the word nefesh, which in older translations of the Bible
appears as "soul," he meant the whole personality--body and soul together, as we would think of it. Thus it is that modern translations of the Bible
ordinarily do not translate the word as "soul," since that is to give an erroneous impression of what the Bible author would have been talking about.
The word nefesh simply meant a living being, animal or human. In the same way, he used the same word, ruach, translated "spirit" or "breath," for the
life principle of all living things. Neither does this word mean "soul"--it simply designated the concrete evidence and fact of breathing life. The same
ideas lie behind the Greek words which were used in the LXX to translate the Hebrew, and which the New Testament authors used in their own works.
About annihilation
Matthew 25:31-46 (Witnesses' translation): "When the Son of man arrives in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit down on his glorious throne. And all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another,just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will put the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right: `Come, you who have my Father's blessing, inherit the
kingdom prepared for you from the world's foundation...' Then he will say, in turn, to those on his left: `Be on your way from me, you who have been cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels...' And these will depart into everlasting cutting-off, but the righteous ones into everlasting life."
The Witnesses would have us believe that this language is to be taken figuratively, at least as far as the accursed are concerned. An everlasting fire, they say, but it burns nobody--immortality is God's gift to the just, but the wicked are simply annihilated. Thus their strange translation, "cutting-off," in the above passage, for what other translations universally render "punishment." The Witnesses suggest in a footnote that the word means "Literally, a `pruning'; hence a curtailing, a holding in check." This is quite incorrect, as anyone can verify by consulting a Greek dictionary on the word kolasis. It means "mutilation," "torture," "punishment." The precise word occurs one other time, in 1 John 4:18, where it has been again mistranslated by the Witnesses--here, however, probably because the translator simply did not understand the text. The verb of the same root, kolazein, also occurs twice in 2 Peter 2:9 where again it is a question of eternal punishment, the Witnesses deliberately avoid using this word, and translate "to be cut off." But in Acts 4:21, where none of their dogma is at stake, they finally come right out and translate "to punish," which is exactly what the word means.
It is pointless to attempt to deny the obvious fact that the Bible teaches an eternal reward for the just and an eternal punishment for the wicked. One may not like such a teaching, but it is the height of dishonesty to change the Bible in order to suit one's likes and dislikes and still claim to depend on the Bible as the word of God. But To support this belief, they lay great stress on such passages as this from Ezekiel 18:4, "The soul that sins shall die." To quote Ezekiel to prove such a thing, one has to forget or to be ignorant of certain things. One thing, as already pointed out, is that the word translated here as "soul" does not mean what we understand by the human soul. It means, rather, the human person himself. Thus, more accurate modern translations have something quite different: "The person who sins shall die".
Weird thing about Blood
Another outstanding example of the way in which the Witnesses have misconstrued the relation of the Old Testament to the New can be found in their strange teaching about blood. As is well known, the Witnesses hold that blood transfusions are a violation of God's law. There are instances where they have permitted persons to die rather than have a recourse to the remedy which preserves life. Whence comes this extraordinary idea?
On Christ being created
"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; because by means of him all [other] things were created in the heavens and upon the earth, the things visible and the things invisible, no matter whether they are thrones or lordships or governments or authorities. All [other] things have been created through him and for him. Also, he is before all [other] things and by means of him all [other] things were made to exists." (Col. 1:15-17, for context. The New World Translation - Emphasis added.)
The Jehovah's Witnesses interpret the word "firstborn" here to mean "first created" because it is consistent with their theological presupposition that Jesus is a created thing. Of course, Jesus, the word become flesh (John 1:1,14) is not a created thing. But that hasn't stopped the Watchtower organization from claiming He is. Nevertheless, there is a Greek word for "first created" and it was in use at the time of Paul's writing to the Colossians. He did not use it here. The Greek for "firstborn" is proto with tikto which would give us "firstborn" and that is what we find here in Colossians 1:15. The Greek for "first created" would be proto with ktizo and it is not used here.
Second, the biblical use of the word "firstborn" is most interesting. It can mean the first born child in a family (Luke 2:7), but it can also mean "pre-eminence." In Psalm 89:20, 27 it says, "I have found David My servant; with My holy oil I have anointed him...I also shall make him My first-born" (NASB). As you can see, David, who was the last one born in his family was called the firstborn by God. This is a title of preeminence.
Third, firstborn is also a title that is transferable:
Gen. 41:51-52, "And Joseph called the name of the first-born Manasseh: For, said he, God hath made me forget all my toil, and all my fatherï's house. And the name of the second called he Ephraim: For God hath made me fruitful in the land of my affliction" (NASB)
Jer. 31:9, "...for I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is My firstborn (NASB)."
Scripture best interprets scripture. Firstborn does not require a meaning of first created as the Jehovah's Witnesses say it means here. "Firstborn" can mean the first born person in a family and it can also be a title of preeminence which is transferable. That is obvious since Jesus is God in flesh (John 1:1,14) and is also the first born son of Mary. In addition, He is the pre-eminent one in all things.
If it be said that God created him first, and that he, by a delegated power from God, created all things, this is most flatly contradicted by the apostle’s reasoning in the 16th and 17th verses. As the Jews term Jehovah
becoro shel olam, the first-born of all the world, or of all the creation, to signify his having created or produced all things; so Christ is here termed, and the words which follow in the 16th and 17th verses are the proof of this. The phraseology is Jewish; and as they apply it to the supreme Being merely to denote his eternal pre-existence, and to point him out as the cause of all things; it is most evident that St. Paul uses it in the same way, and illustrates his meaning in the following words, which would be absolutely absurd if we could suppose that by the former he intended to convey any idea of the inferiority of Jesus Christ.
Christ inferior to God
They admit that Christ was, at least before His coming on earth and after His resurrection, something more than man. They call Him a “spirit person,” a non-Biblical term that they have invented. They say He was “a god,” but not God Himself. They claim that this is not to deny monotheism—the thing our Lord was so concerned not to do—since the Scripture also speaks of others as “gods.” They have worked out some rules of Greek usage unknown to the authors of the New Testament in order to justify these conclusions.
In John 10:31-39 we read: "The Jews took up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, `I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of these do you stone me?' The Jews answered him, `We stone you for no good work but for blasphemy; because you, being a man, make yourself God.' Jesus answered them, `Is it not written in your law: I said, you are gods? If he then called them gods to whom the word of God came (and
Scripture cannot be broken), do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world: "You are blaspheming," because I said: I am the Son
of God? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that
you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.' Again they tried to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands."
Here Jesus does not take back a single word of His claims that had provoked His enemies to the charge of blasphemy, as their reaction proves. What He
does only is to ask them to think, referring them to Psalm 82 where a divine title (translated "gods" in the LXX used here by John) was employed of human
judges. If such a title could be used in one sense in the Scripture, asks Jesus, could not another sense be readily applicable to Himself? Or does His
suggestion of His divinity rule out, as they think, the monotheistic idea of God?
The Hebrew word used in Psalm 82 is elohim. This word, which is used of the one true God throughout the Old Testament, is as flexible as the Greek theos
or the English "god." It could also mean much more. Sometimes it was used for angels. In 1 Samuel 28:13 it is even used for the spirit of Samuel called up by the witch of Endor. Also it was used for pagan deities. The very ambiguity of the word serves as a basis for our Lord's argument--which might be a lesson for the Witnesses to take to heart: "What's in a name?" What is important is the meaning that words have in context, not what they are made to mean. There is no doubt what John the Evangelist meant when he said, "The Word was God."
For this Word, this utterance of the Father, already, before all creation and from all eternity, was with God. He became flesh, but already in the beginning He was. The opening phrase of John's prologue did not say, "In the beginning the Word came to be," but that in the beginning--wherever you place it--the Word
already was. It would require the passing of centuries before the precise theological language of Christian Trinitarianism doctrine would be worked out, language that would learn from heresies like the collection enshrined in Witness literature what errors to avoid as well as from the thinking of devout Christian men. As the Protestant Biblical scholar William Sanday once wrote: "The decisions in question were the outcome of a long evolution, every step in which was keenly debated by minds of great acumen and power, really far better equipped for such discussion than the average Anglo-American mind of today." They produced the Christian theology that characterizes orthodox Christianity. But they began where we begin, with John's affirmation of the truth:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God..."
It is in obedience to these rules of Greek usage that they first of all deny that the explicit affirmation of Thomas is an affirmation at all. It is, they say, simply an emotional ejaculation, in which Thomas was not actually referring to Christ. Why so? Because what Thomas is reported as saying is ho kyrios mou kai ho theos mou--"My Lord and my God." Ho Theos, that is, the word "God" with the Greek article, is used only of God in the true sense. The word theos only, without the article, they say means only "a god," and this word can be used of Christ to mean something less than God. They point to John's prologue, in which he says "the Word was with God" (pros ton theon--the word "God" with the article), and then "the Word was a god" (theos).
Does this really work out in practice? Let us take only a single page from the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures (1950 ed.) in order to show that it does not. This page includes the ending of Paul's letter to the Romans and the beginning of the First Letter to the Corinthians, that is, Romans 16:21-27 and 1 Corinthians 1:1-2. On this page the word "God" appears four times--"the everlasting God," "to God wise alone," "through God's will," "the congregation of God." Note that in each case the Witnesses have translated "God" with a capital "G." Yet in the Greek text only the first and last theos has an article. Why not "to an only wise god" and "through the will of a god"? It seems that when no doctrinal issue is involved, the Witnesses' rule becomes very elastic.
As a matter of fact, the Greek does ordinarily use the article with "God," just as it does with the proper names and a great number of other words that
are used in English without the article. It is not proper to translate "the" in these cases, or to translate "a" or "an" when the article is omitted,
simply because usage differs between the two languages. The article is a determiner. Also, as we have shown, the article can sometimes be omitted
without changing the meaning.
Why does John say that "the Word was with God," employing the article, and also "the Word was God," omitting the article? For two reasons, the first
being purely grammatical. When one gives a little thought to the subject, one realizes that the same word "was" in these two statements actually means
two different things. In the first instance it indicates a condition, a relationship: the Word stands in some kind of relation to Someone else, to
God. In the second instance it is merely the equivalent of an equal sign: Word and God refer to the same Person. Now this second kind of use of the
verb "to be" involves a subject to which another word is placed as its predicate, the two being the same. In Greek, the subject has the article,
while the predicate does not. In English we know the two by position rather than by the use of an article. Thus we translate "the Word (subject) was God
(predicate)," not "God was the Word." In John 4:24 our Lord says to the Samaritan woman, "God is spirit." Now the Greek here, actually is pneuma
(spirit) ho theos (God)--in that order. Still, it is not correct to translate, "The Spirit is God," because the article shows that "God" is the
subject and the lack of the article shows that "spirit" is the predicate. Note, too, that no verb "to be" occurs here at all, as often is the case in
Greek: the "equal sign" is just omitted.
The other reason that John does not use the article in saying "the Word was God" is theological. Actually, it would be very poor Trinitarian theology
for him to have done so. Ordinarily, as we stated above, the article is used with proper names as a determiner. John has placed the Word in relation to
God as a determined Person. But at the same time he affirms that the Word is God. Obviously the Word is not the determined Person with Whom He stands in
relation--He is a different Person altogether. It would have been to court confusion, therefore, to repeat the article.
The other reason that John does not use the article in saying "the Word was God" is theological. Actually, it would be very poor Trinitarian theology
for him to have done so. Ordinarily, as we stated above, the article is used with proper names as a determiner. John has placed the Word in relation to
God as a determined Person. But at the same time he affirms that the Word is God. Obviously the Word is not the determined Person with Whom He stands in
relation--He is a different Person altogether. It would have been to court confusion, therefore, to repeat the article.
There is no objection whatever to translating, as some modern versions do, something like "the Word was divine," as long as this is not falsely
construed as signifying something less than "God." Throughout the entire New Testament, however, there is not the slightest shred of evidence for holding
that any New Testament author means anything but "God" when he uses the word theos in relation to the monotheistic religion in which he believed. The
Greek word, of course, is like our own: we can also speak of false "gods" or a false "god," using the same word that we use for the true God. In 1Corinthians 8:5 and Galatians 4:8, Paul uses the term for such as are falsely called "gods." In the same sense, he speaks of "the god of this world" (2 Cor, 4:4), even as our Lord speaks of "the prince of this world" (John 12:21). But whenever a New Testament author refers the word theos to the one, true God of his faith, he can only mean "God."
144000 in heaven
From the Book of Revelation they have been able to determine the precise population of heaven: the symbolic 144,000 of Revelation 7:4-8, the four-square number of the symbolic twelve tribes of Israel with which the Biblical author peopled the four-square heavenly Jerusalem (21:9-21). They insist the total number of 144,000 is literal yet at the same time say the number 12,000 from each tribe is symbolic.
The Cross
Certain bizarre translations turn up that obviously mean a great deal to the translators but which could not matter very much to anyone else. As an example, we might take the translation given in the New Testament to the Greek word stauros, "cross." This word did, it is true, refer principally to the instrument of execution used by the Romans, without necessarily involving the form that the instrument took. It seems to be equally true, however, that the form was customarily that of a cross as we know it, that is, of an upright together with a crossbar of some kind. This was the form in which the cross as a symbol was adopted by the earliest Christians, who were at that time close enough to the practice of crucifixion to know what would have been the most likely instrument used in the case of our Lord's suffering and death. At the same time, it obviously doesn't matter one bit whether Christ was crucified on a single upright stake or one with a crossbar. The fact that Christian tradition has varied from East to West and back again in representing the cross in different forms shows how secondary the whole question is. The cross is for us a symbol, merely that, to remind us of a great event that took place, and not necessarily a photographic
description of it. In any case, the words "cross" and "crucifixion" have a meaning for everybody that commits nobody to any decision as to whether
Christ was put to death on a Latin or Greek or Tau cross. For the Witnesses to insist on using the word "torture stake" for this instrument, and to
substitute the word "impale" for "crucify," adds up merely to another of the oddities of this Bible translation.
-------------------
http://www.catholic-forum.com/members/p ... athjw.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_ ... _Witnesses
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ ... tness.html
http://www.watchtower.org/e/jt/article_03.htm
http://carm.org/religious-movements/jeh ... l-creation
http://www.forananswer.org/Colossians/Col1_15.htm
http://bible.cc/colossians/1-15.htm
Adam Clarke's Commentary
I just missed this topic in my list, was going through the topics list again and realized that you had posted, so I remembered our talk the other day where you mentioned it and so I replied.