Court of Session, Edinburgh — Pursuer’s Proof, “Douglas Walsh v. The Right Honourable James Latham Clyde, M.P., P.C. — evidence of Frederick William Franz”
“Q. You, yourself, read and speak Hebrew, do you? A. I do not speak Hebrew. Q. You do not? A. No. Q. Can you, yourself, translate that into Hebrew? A. Which? Q. That fourth verse of the Second Chapter of Genesis? A. You mean here? Q. Yes. A. No. I won’t attempt to do that.”
The exchange follows counsel for the defender directing the witness to the New World Translation of the Hebrew Scriptures at Genesis 2:4. Elsewhere in the same cross-examination the witness is recorded as saying that when the translation was donated “the Translation Committee made it known that they did not wish their names to be disclosed . . . that the names would not be revealed now or after death”, that whether the translators are all Jehovah’s Witnesses “is part and parcel of the agreement that their names shall not be revealed”, and that doctrinal advances are not voted on by the board of directors: “They go through the editorial committee, and I give my O.K. after Scriptural examination. Then I pass them on to President Knorr, and President Knorr has the final O.K.”
No online copy located.
Provenance and verification note for Court of Session, Edinburgh — Pursuer’s Proof, Douglas Walsh v. The Right Honourable James Latham Clyde, M.P., P.C. — evidence of Frederick William Franz
Confidence note. The scanned typescript and its OCR were downloaded and read on 19 September 2026. The wording above is transcribed from a poor-quality OCR of the scan and has been reconstructed where the OCR is plainly corrupt, so it must be treated as a reading of the scan, not as certified transcript text. Independent corroboration: Raymond Franz, Crisis of Conscience (4th ed., 2004, pp. 76-77), reproduces the ‘editorial committee / final O.K.’ exchange in almost identical words and cites “the official court transcript”, and at p. 100 footnote 14 cites “the official court record, pp. 387, 388”, showing he worked from a paginated transcript. A further internal check, stated with its weakness: the scan’s session headings run “Tuesday, 23rd November”, “Wednesday, 24th November” and “Thursday, 25th November”, a sequence that fits November 1954 and not November 1953, and 23 November 1954 is the proof date The Watchtower itself gives. But the only year legible on a session heading in the scan reads “1953”, which must be either an error on the document or an OCR failure and which the scan cannot resolve; this weakens rather than supports the check. The page footers of the two pages quoted here read “102. F.W. Franz. (Cross.)” and “103. F.W. Franz. (Cross.)”, and the same pages also carry a second, stamped number (“Page 347”), so the typescript has two numbering systems and a page citation must say which one it uses. No repository-authenticated copy was located, so this is not recorded as verified.
Scan provenance. Scanned typescript uploaded to the Internet Archive on 16 November 2008 by a private individual, identified in the item metadata only by a personal email address. The item is titled simply “Walsh Trial”; it names no holding repository and records no chain of custody, and the uploader’s own description misstates the case as “L Strachan v. Douglas Walsh (1954)”. The uploader attached a public-domain dedication to the item, which is an assertion by the uploader and not evidence of provenance. The copy consulted is hosted by a third party and its lawfulness is not established, so no link to it is published here.
Corroborated by. src-nwto-w-1955-0601-walsh, src-nwto-rfranz-2004-cc-walsh
Notes. The National Records of Scotland hold Court of Session processes, and the LSE archives catalogue lists a file referenced RAEBURN/6/25 described in search results as “[Douglas Walsh Case]”; neither was accessible to our tools on the access date. Until a repository copy is examined, the site should describe this as a widely circulated transcript whose provenance we have not been able to authenticate.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-nwto-walsh-1954-transcript