Evidence collection
The Bible, the translation and the dates
Most of this site compares what was published at one time with what is published now. This section asks a different question: where a teaching and the text of the Bible meet, does the text carry the teaching, or has the teaching shaped how the text is presented?
What this section is not. Nothing here argues that another church, another translation or another chronology is “the true one”. Those are questions of faith, and they are not ours to settle. The questions asked here are narrower and answerable from evidence: what does the Greek or Hebrew say, how do other translators render it, what have reviewers published, what do the ancient records show, and what does the organisation itself say about each? Every source is cited so you can weigh it yourself.
The two collections
Translation · 76 claims
The New World Translation
What biblical scholars have actually published about it, the passages where the English wording carries a distinctive teaching, the places where the translation is defensible, and the organisation’s own account of how and why it was made.
Chronology · 68 claims
607 BCE, and the arithmetic behind 1914
The date from which 1914 is calculated, the organisation’s own two-part defence of it, the cuneiform and astronomical record, and the one date the organisation calls absolute, which rests on the same evidence.
Why these two questions and not others
There are many things one could argue about the Bible. Almost all of them come down to what a person believes, and this site has nothing useful to add to those. These two are different, because both can be checked against documents anyone can open.
- A translation can be compared. The Greek and Hebrew texts are published. So are a dozen other English translations. So are the organisation’s own explanations of its choices, in the appendices of its own Bible. Where a rendering is unusual, that can be shown rather than asserted, and where it is defensible, that can be shown too.
- A date can be tested. The neo-Babylonian period left clay tablets recording business transactions, royal inscriptions totalling reigns, chronicles of campaigns, and astronomical diaries recording where the planets stood on particular nights. These are not interpretations. They are contemporary documents, and they are published.
In both cases the organisation has published its own reasoning at length. That reasoning is quoted here in full before any assessment of it, because a reader deserves to meet the argument before they meet the answer to it.
Related sections
The chronology collection is the foundation of the 1914 evidence bundle and, through it, of the generation teaching. The translation collection bears on how the organisation describes its own authority to interpret scripture, and on several entries in the doctrine comparison library.