The New World Translation
Four boxes at the bottom of the chart, one of which is not really a Bible at all but an apparatus — and is the reason much of the rest of this chart can be checked.
| Bible | Year | The spirit of the change |
|---|---|---|
| New World Translation | 1950–61 | A fresh translation from the Westcott and Hort Greek and Kittel’s Hebrew, with the divine name restored throughout. |
| NWT—With References | 1984 | Show the workings. 125,000+ cross-references and a full variant apparatus. |
| 2013 revision | 2013 | Say the same thing in plain modern English, consulting Nestle-Aland, the UBS text, BHS and BHQ alongside Westcott and Hort. |
| Kingdom Interlinear Translation | 1969 · rev. 1985 | Let the reader check the Greek themselves. |
⭐ The Reference Bible is its own book
The 1984 revision came out in two printings, and they are not the same tool. The ordinary one is a Bible. The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures—With References is an apparatus:
- A footnote for every word that differs across the original-language sources, naming which manuscript, scroll or ancient version each variation comes from — the Vulgate, the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, individual codices.
- Extensive appendices on the divine name, on textual sources, on renderings that get argued about.
- A concordance, and cross-references to related verses throughout.
Nothing is quietly resolved. Where the sources disagree, the reading chosen goes in the text and every alternative goes at the foot of the page with its source named. For anybody who wants to trace a word or a phrase back to the ancient languages, that is the difference between reading a translation and being able to audit one.
What it contains, from its own Introduction
| Feature | What the Introduction says |
|---|---|
| Cross-references | “More than 125,000 marginal (cross) references” — parallel accounts, biographical and geographical links, prophecy and fulfilment, direct quotations |
| Hebrew base | Codex Leningrad B 19A via Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica, 7th–9th editions (1951–55), for the text; Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia 1977 for the footnote apparatus — two different printed editions doing two different jobs |
| Greek base | Westcott and Hort, The New Testament in the Original Greek, 1881 (1948 reprint). “The Greek texts of Nestle, Bover, Merk and others were also considered” |
| Other sources cited | Syriac Peshitta (Lee 1826), Latin Vulgate (Stuttgart 1975), Septuagint (Rahlfs 1935), Targums, Samaritan Pentateuch, the Isaiah scroll from Qumran |
| Manuscript sigla | A full chart — א A B C D W, the Chester Beatty and Bodmer papyri, 1QIsa, the Aleppo and Cairo codices, Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, five separate Syriac versions |
| Corrector notation | * = the reading of the original hand of a Greek manuscript; c = the reading of any corrector — standard critical-apparatus practice |
| Divine name | 6,973 times in the Hebrew Scriptures, 237 in the Christian Greek Scriptures |
And it says in one sentence what it is for:
“We thus provide a critical apparatus for the translation rather than a commentary on the Scriptures.”
That is the whole distinction. A commentary tells you what a verse means. An apparatus tells you what the sources say and leaves the conclusion to you — and it is a genuinely uncommon thing for a Bible aimed at ordinary readers to attempt.
⭐ The single best demonstration that the apparatus is honest
Appendix 1D lists all 237 places where “Jehovah” stands in the New World Translation’s New Testament, and beside each one prints the J-sources supporting it — J1 through J27, identified by name and date in the Introduction. A reader can check every line.
And it flags its own weakest case, in print, unprompted:
“Thus, out of the 237 times that we have rendered the divine name in the body of our translation, there is only one instance where we have no agreement from the Hebrew versions. But in this one instance, namely, 1Co 7:17, the context and related texts strongly support rendering the divine name.”
A translation trying to persuade rather than disclose does not volunteer that sentence. It also lists a further 72 places where “Jehovah” appears only in the footnotes and not in the text — the cases it judged did not meet the bar.
What the J-sources are matters, and the appendix does not hide it either. Most are translations of the Greek Scriptures into Hebrew, the earliest being Shem-Tob’s Matthew of 1385 (J2) — they are versions, not Greek manuscripts, and no surviving Greek New Testament manuscript carries the Tetragrammaton. A few are not Hebrew versions at all: J21 is the Emphatic Diaglott (English, 1864), J24 Heinfetter, J25 Rutherford, J27 von Brentano.
All of that is printed in the Introduction where anyone can read it. You can disagree with the weight the committee gave that evidence; you cannot say you were not told what it was. That is the difference between transparency and agreement, and it is worth keeping the two apart.
The 2013 revision
Say the same thing in plain modern English, and consult Nestle-Aland, the United Bible Societies text, BHS and BHQ alongside Westcott and Hort.
Which is also why the 1984 stays in use. The 2013 revision’s Study Edition has far more study notes and far fewer textual footnotes — a different tool for a different job. For tracing a reading back to its sources, the older book is still the one.
The Kingdom Interlinear — three texts on one page
The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures (1969, revised 1985) prints three things at once:
- The Westcott and Hort Greek text, 1881.
- A word-for-word English rendering underneath each Greek word — following the Greek’s own order, not English word order, so it reads oddly on purpose.
- The New World Translation’s own English, 1984, in a parallel side margin.
Which means you can see, on one page, what the Greek says, what each Greek word means on its own, and what a translation committee did with it.