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

    • Some examples illustrate the impact of this translation. In France the Catholic Church had for centuries prohibited possession of the Bible by the laity. Catholic translations that had become available were relatively expensive, and few homes had these. The New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures was released in French in 1963, followed by the complete Bible in 1974. By 1992 a combined total of 2,437,711 copies of the New World Translation had been shipped out for distribution in France; and the number of Jehovah’s Witnesses in France increased 488 percent during that same period, reaching a total of 119,674.