• Printing and Distributing God’s Own Sacred Word
    Jehovah’s Witnesses—Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom

    • A Bible-Publishing Society

      It was in 1896 that direct reference to the Bible was officially included in the name of the legal corporation then being used by the Bible Students in their publishing work. At that time Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society became legally known as Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.a The Society did not immediately become a printer and binder of Bibles, but it was an active publisher of them, working out specifications, providing valuable supplementary features, and then arranging with commercial firms to do the printing and binding.

      Even prior to 1896, the Society was doing much as a Bible distributor. Not for commercial gain but as a service to its readers, it drew attention to various Bible translations that were available, bought them in large quantities so as to obtain good rates, and then made them available for a price that was sometimes only 35 percent of the list price. Included among these were numerous editions of the King James Version that were easy to carry and use, also larger ‘Teachers’ Bibles’ (King James Version with such helps as a concordance, maps, and marginal references), The Emphatic Diaglott with its Greek-to-English interlinear rendering, Leeser’s translation that placed the English text alongside the Hebrew, Murdock’s translation from ancient Syriac, The Newberry Bible with its marginal references that drew attention to occurrences of the divine name in the original language as well as other valuable details reflected in the Hebrew and Greek text, Tischendorf’s New Testament with its footnote references to variant readings in three of the most complete ancient Greek Bible manuscripts (Sinaitic, Vatican, and Alexandrine), the Variorum Bible with its footnotes that set out not only variant readings of ancient manuscripts but also various translations of portions of the text by eminent scholars, and Young’s literal translation. The Society also made available such helps as Cruden’s Concordance and Young’s Analytical Concordance with its comments on the original Hebrew and Greek words. In the years that followed, around the globe Jehovah’s Witnesses frequently obtained from other Bible societies many thousands of Bibles in whatever languages were available and distributed these.

      As early as 1890, according to available evidence, the Society arranged for a special printing, bearing its own name, of the Second Edition of The New Testament Newly Translated and Critically Emphasised, as prepared by the British Bible translator Joseph B. Rotherham. Why this translation? Because of its literalness and its endeavor to benefit fully from research that had been done to establish a more accurate Greek text and because the reader was helped by devices employed by the translator to identify which words or expressions were given special emphasis in the Greek text.

      In 1902 a special printing of the Holman Linear Parallel Edition of the Bible was made by arrangement of the Watch Tower Society. It contained wide margins in which were printed references to places in Watch Tower publications where various verses were explained, also an index listing scores of subjects along with Scripture citations and helpful references to the Society’s publications. This Bible contained the wording of two translations—the King James rendering above that of the Revised Version where there was any difference. It also included an extensive concordance that alerted the user to various meanings of original-language words.

      That same year, the Watch Tower Society came into possession of the printing plates for The Emphatic Diaglott, which includes J. J. Griesbach’s Greek text of the Christian Greek Scriptures (the 1796-1806 edition) along with an English interlinear translation. Alongside this was the rendering of the text by British-born Benjamin Wilson, who had taken up residence in Geneva, Illinois, U.S.A. Those plates and the sole right of publication had been purchased and then given as a gift to the Society. After copies already in stock had been sent out, arrangements were made by the Society for more to be produced, and those became available in 1903.

      Four years later, in 1907, the Bible Students Edition of the King James Version was published. The “Berean Bible Teachers’ Manual” was bound with it, as an appendix. This included concise comments on verses from all parts of the Bible, along with references to Watch Tower publications for fuller explanation. An edition with an enlarged appendix was published about a year later.

      These Bibles were ordered from the printers and binders in lots of between 5,000 and 10,000 at a time, in order to keep the cost down. The Society was desirous of making a variety of Bible translations and related research tools readily available to as many people as possible.

      Then, in 1926 the Watch Tower Society took a major step forward in its involvement in Bible publishing.

      Printing the Bible on Our Own Presses

      It was 36 years after it first undertook publishing Bibles that the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society printed and bound a Bible in its own factory. The first one thus produced was The Emphatic Diaglott, the plates for which had been owned by the Society for 24 years. In December 1926 this Bible was printed on a flatbed press in the Society’s Concord Street factory in Brooklyn. To date, 427,924 of these have been produced.