Found another NWT lie! Romans 6:23 - Wages sin pays is death

So I was speaking to a pastor friend of mine while I was explaining why I have a hard time beleiving how a loving God could send any of his creation to an eternal hell, and I brought up Romans 6:23, which says in the NWT "The wages sin pays is death", and mentioned now when we die, our death covers our sins, according to JWs.

He said, no, Romans 6:23 says "The wages of sin is death". Very different meaning!  The JW translation means when you die, you sins are washed clean.  The standard non-JW translation means you die because you sin.

Even further, I looked at the JW Interlinear translation, and the Greek side says "the for wages of the sin death", basically "the wages of sin is death", but on the right, the NWT version says "the wages sin pays is death".

The WTS completely changed the translation of the scripture to meet their doctrine.  Yet another reason I do not trust the WTS!

Here is the text in the Kingdom Interlinear.

Wow, thank for posting. We will continue to catch them with their pants down from time to time.

The JW translation means when you die, you sins are washed clean.  The standard non-JW translation means you die because you sin.

I think it is more accurate to say that the JW interpretation of that verse is that "your sins are washed clean" at death (such that there is no postmortem judgment for those who have died), which of course misconstrues Paul's point.  The translation itself imo more plainly means that "you die because you sin", and while not word-for-word literal expresses the same thought as in the literal rendering.  Death is the wages that sin pays out, i.e. death is the reward or result of sin.  Throughout the chapter, Paul uses a metaphor of personified sin as a slaveholder.  In ancient Roman times, slaves could obtain their manumission if they saved up their wages (peculium); without Christ, a person is released from bondage to sin only through death.  Paul argues that Christ offers freedom from this bondage through a sharing in his death via baptism (v. 3-5).  The Society also misunderstands the passage stating that that "anyone who has died has been freed/acquitted from sin" (v. 7); this verse does not claim that death absolves one's debt to God for sins committed during life, rather, it claims that death absolves one's debt to sin, as the prior verse makes clear ("that we should no longer be slaves to sin", v. 6).

Yes, thanks for posting Robbo 7 !

This makes a lot of difference to those who believe. 

Thanks too to Leo for the usual skilled and informative comment.

Wobble

p.s Leo I have sent you a PM, thanks.

Leo, thanks.  You are right that it's an interpretation.   They twist things to fit their non-conventional beliefs, and as we all know it is tied around faithfulness to the organization and the FDS and not Jesus.

Why does a cat die? Or a petunia?

Stone age thinking has made the victim responsible for the crime.

The nature of human life is that it is a process of becoming and withering. PERIOD!

Just like every other living thing.

Religion is ignorance pretending to be something it isn't: a source of information.

Religious explanations only work on people who use words in a very shoddy and sloppy way.

In Jesus' day the state-of-the-art thinking about how a human being activates consciousness centered the source of thought in the physical HEART and not the head.  The brain was thought to be a COOLING mechanism for the blood!!!

So, why do we listen to anything these ridiculously ignorant people have to say--ESPECIALLY when they are speaking metaphorically and allegorically instead of scientifically and precisely???

Keep this rule of thumb in mind: ignorant speakers, writers and philosophers speak in GENERAL terms to hide their ignorance. They resort to the mystification of languge.

INTELLIGENT speakers, writers and philosophers speak in SPECIFICS to reveal their wisdom. They use words with clarity, measurement, specificity and precision.

Who would you want writing your prescription for an important life-saving medicine, a Poet or a Scientist?

SIN is a ridiculous stone age concept.  There is no such thing.

DEATH is telelogical reality.

Why does the upward flight of a thrown stone pause and reverse field only to plummet earthward?

If you say GRAVITY you will imagine you've said something intelligent. But, you haven't.  You've uttered a useful word which PRETENDS to explain.

Nobody actually KNOWS what "gravity" is.  They can measure its effect and accurately predict the force of it over distance. But, nobody can really explain it without resorting to storytelling and metaphor.

Why? Because human knowledge fuzzes out at a certain point and yet, the "explanation" continues by switching from a precise terminology into a poetic terminology.

SIN is cartoon thinking.

I can believe people thought that then. They also believed if a pregnant woman looked at a rabbit, her baby would be born with a cleft palate.

Sympathic magic is the basis of all Neolithic and Bronze Age religions, which are the basis for all the ones we still have now.

Sympathetic magic is the human brain making connections based on observations that are incomplete or unknown and so making connections between unrelated things.

If you didn't know that germs caused illness, it was easy, from observation, to believe it was fumes or anything else around the sick or the dead causing it. So, for years people believed illness was caused by bad smells. They're vaguely related, so believing that did some good (it caused people to burn and wash things attached to illness, or to practice quarantine, sometimes), but the cause of decomposition and the bad smells emanating from ill people was bacteria, which wasn't known about...but decomposition and illness does indeed smell BAD.

I'm not sure what the big deal is.

If the interpretation is incorrect and the invisible fiend, does punish forever for a finite evil, then screw the invisible fiend.

I think too many x-ians have Stockholm Syndrome and have two measurements of justice: 1 for the IF (invisible fiend) and the other for humans.

The IF is allowed to do all manner of things which if were done by humans would be condemned.

Robert7:

I think too, what you are seeing is some of Paul's writing style in Romans. In some instances he leaves the verbs to be assumed. And then translators (NWT included) supply what they think the context best fits.

In the case of 6:23, the interlinear reads "The for [which gets swapped in English] wages of the sin [insert verb here for understandable English] death. The NWT used "pays is."

The latter part of the verse does the same: "gracious gift of the God [insert verb here; NWT="is"] life everlasting ..."

(As an aside, putting the article ["The"] for "wages" ahead of the causitive "for" gives some emphasis to "wages" in the opening phrase of 6:23. If my rusty Greek is in error, corrections are welcome.)

There are several more examples of assumed verbs in Romans 8:6, 7

"minding of the flesh [verb; NWT=means] death..."

"minding of the spirit [verb; NWT=means] life and peace..."

"minding of the flesh [verb; NWT=means] enmity..."

Admittedly, though, it is possible for the translator's insertion to reflect his bias.

By the way, how do you insert a graphic capture from a PDF? I figured out how to copy a section from a PDF to the Windows clipboard, but haven't been able to figure how to insert the graphic here. (I use Chrome, if that matters.)

Robert7:

I was actually responding to a different thread when I inserted this here. Sorry about that. 

Though I don't think any translation can be perfect, I've seen enough minor word insertions or one-word tweaks that change the meaning of the scriptures in the NWT to know for sure that it can't be trusted to accurately render the original Greek.  I stopped using it at a certain point except for specific reasons. 

--sd-7

sd-7 said: "I've seen enough minor word insertions or one-word tweaks that change the meaning of the scriptures in the NWT to know for sure that it can't be trusted."

I know what you mean. There are features that I like in the NWT, e.g. the general literalness or word-for-wordiness (?, I coined that phrase in a happifying moment.) But like you said, there are tweaks and such that have since forced me not to trust it. Now I always have to check behind to make sure. One I particularly dislike is "gifts in men" in Eph 4:8. That is a self-serving rendering if ever there was one. This one also taught me that the footnotes in the reference version cannot be fully trusted either.

The NWT is so subtle and incredibly insidiuious!

This seemingly minor and palatable change supports the WT doctrine that death pays for one's sin and is totally false.

It runs hand in hand with everything else the WT preaches to keep JWs away from the atoning blood of Jesus.

Christ is the sacrifice, "once for al"l who believe and take the free gift Hebrews 10

Blessings in Christ,

Stephen xx

Be sure and get it right kids, other wise its Roasta-Dora time