No academic survey ranking English Bible translations by accuracy and placing the New World Translation last was located in this research; the one book-length comparative accuracy study that includes it, BeDuhn's Truth in Translation, placed it first of the nine translations examined for the passages studied.

Confidence note. The book itself was never opened. The previous confidence label of 'verified' rested entirely on Google Books' in-volume snippet search, which no longer runs from this environment at all: books.google.com, books.google.co.uk, books.google.de, books.google.ca and www.googleapis.com/books/v1 all answer HTTP 429, and WebFetch is redirected to Google's 'sorry' interstitial. An auditor cannot reproduce the retrieval, and a snippet is in any case not the document. Downgraded to 'supported' on 19 September 2026. What was confirmed independently on that date: the p. 163 sentence, in full and with its opening hedge, is reproduced at tetragrammaton.org; the p. 165 sentence is attested down to 'certainly better as a translation than the LB and AB'; and the fragments 'remarkably good', 'better by far' and 'consistently better' are quoted from pp. 163, 165 by The Watchtower of 1 December 2004, which has been read. The tail 'consistently better than the heavily biased NIV' is attested only in part — 'consistently better' is in the Watchtower, 'heavily biased NIV' is not — so the trailing ellipsis must stay. BeDuhn's own sigla for the New World Translation is 'NW', not 'NWT': Allin quotes him with 'NW', the reproduction of pp. 124-125 has 'the NW translation', and JW.org expands it as 'The NW [New World Translation]'. The tetragrammaton.org reproduction silently prints 'NWT' throughout. Where the two differ, 'NW' is used here. Until the printed book is in hand, do not present these quotations as letter-perfect.

Scan provenance. Not opened. The quotations below are transcribed from two independent published reproductions of the passage: the long review at tetragrammaton.org, which quotes the summary paragraph in full, and — for the second half — the partial quotation in The Watchtower of 1 December 2004 and on JW.org.

Corroborated by. src-nwt-jw-faq-accurate, src-nwt-w04-remarkably-good

Notes. This is the passage Jehovah's Witnesses quote. The organisation's 2004 Watchtower article says BeDuhn compared 'eight major translations'; the book compares nine (BeDuhn writes on p. 133 of 'the other eight translations we are comparing'). [Independent audit, 19 September 2026] The earlier version of this record began the quotation at 'the most accurate of the translations compared', with the preceding words supplied in brackets. That dropped BeDuhn's own hedge, 'While it is difficult to quantify this sort of analysis, it can be said that…', which is exactly the half JW.org also drops. The hedge has been restored and must be printed with the verdict.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-nwt-beduhn-2003-verdict

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Confidence note. Opened and read in full on 19 September 2026 — the whole printed review, not the repository abstract. The repository's PDF (cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=classicsfacpub) returns HTTP 403 to automated requests from this environment but opens through the Wayback Machine; it reproduces the printed review, headed 'APRIL-MAY, 1974' and signed 'THOMAS N. WINTER, University of Nebraska'. The quotations above are transcribed from it. The repository record gives the citation as The Classical Journal, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Apr.-May 1974), pp. 375-376, and carries the JSTOR SICI string 0009-8353(197404/05)69:4<375:TKITOT>2.0.CO;2-F, which independently encodes volume 69, issue 4, first page 375.

Scan provenance. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln repository's own PDF of the printed review, which reproduces the review in full, headed 'APRIL-MAY, 1974' and signed 'THOMAS N. WINTER, University of Nebraska'. The live viewcontent.cgi URL returns HTTP 403 to automated requests; the Wayback Machine's copy of the same PDF opens normally. Note that the repository's record page at /classicsfacpub/27 carries only a shortened abstract of the review, not the whole of it.

Corroborated by. src-nwt-jw-faq-accurate

Notes. The citation repeated in Watch Tower publications and across the internet, 'The Classical Journal 66 (April-May 1974)', gives the wrong volume: volume 66 covers 1970-71. The author's own university, and the JSTOR SICI string on the same page, give volume 69, no. 4. [Independent audit, 19 September 2026] An earlier version of this record said that the sentence Jehovah's Witnesses quote — 'The translation by the anonymous committee is thoroughly up-to-date and consistently accurate' — did not appear in the text reproduced by Winter's university and was unconfirmed. That was wrong, and it was wrong because the repository's record page carries only a condensed abstract. The full PDF has the sentence, in this form: 'The text is based on that of Brooke F. Westcott and Fenton J. A. Hort (1881, repr.), but the translation by the anonymous committee is thoroughly up-to-date and consistently accurate.' JW.org's quotation of it is accurate, and the site must say so. What the site may fairly add is the context: Winter was assessing a Greek text with word-by-word glosses as a teaching aid for classicists, and his single worked example of accuracy is 'astrologers' for magoi.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-nwt-winter-1974-classical-journal

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Confidence note. The full scan text was downloaded from the Internet Archive on 19 September 2026 and read in full; the quoted sentences, the section heading and the page markers were confirmed by eye. The bibliographic record (Theology Today vol. 10 no. 1, April 1953, pp. 65-85, DOI 10.1177/004057365301000110) was independently confirmed in Crossref. The publisher's own page on journals.sagepub.com returns HTTP 403 to automated requests and was not opened. [Independent audit, 19 September 2026] The scan was downloaded again and read independently. The quotation is verbatim. The running heads run 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 85, which confirms the 65-85 range; the 'frightful mistranslation' sentence falls between the p. 75 and p. 76 markers and the 'unwarrantably inserted' sentence between the p. 76 and p. 77 markers, so the two passages are on pp. 75 and 76. Crossref independently returns the same title, subtitle, author, volume, issue, pagination and month.

Scan provenance. Optical-character-recognition text of a scanned offprint of the article, hosted by the Internet Archive (item 'TheJehovahsWitnessesAndJesusChrist'). The offprint reproduces the journal's own page numbering (65-85), which the running heads and page markers in the scan confirm. The canonical /download/ URL answers with a redirect that some clients will not follow; the file itself resolves at an Internet Archive node host, https://ia601608.us.archive.org/0/items/TheJehovahsWitnessesAndJesusChrist/Jehovahs_Witnesses_and_Jesus_Christ_Metzger_djvu.txt, which is what was fetched. The copy consulted is hosted by a third party and its lawfulness is not established, so no link to it is published here.

Notes. This is a theological appraisal of the movement as a whole, of which the translation criticism is one section (Section IV). It is not a formal review of the translation; Metzger's short review of the translation itself came eleven years later in The Bible Translator (src-nwt-metzger-1964-bible-translator), which has now also been read. In April 1953 Metzger was associate professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary; he was made full professor in 1954. Do not call him 'Professor of New Testament' as of 1953.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-nwt-metzger-1953-theology-today

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