Jehovah’s Witness Bible vs King James: God’s Name and John 1:1

Understanding Jehovah’s WitnessesSee all 44 articles in this series

The two Bibles differ most over God’s name and over who Jesus is. Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation prints “Jehovah” nearly 7,000 times in the Old Testament alone, where the King James Version mostly prints “LORD,” and in John 1:1 it says “the Word was a god.” Its New Testament also follows a Greek text prepared long after 1611.

Topic	King James Version	New World Translation
Made by	47 scholars under King James I	An anonymous committee of Jehovah’s Witnesses
Published	1611	New Testament 1950; whole Bible 1961; revised 2013
Greek New Testament	The printed Greek texts of its day	Westcott and Hort’s text, with later Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies findings
God’s name	“LORD” in capitals; “JEHOVAH” four times	“Jehovah” nearly 7,000 times in the Old Testament and 237 in the New
John 1:1	“the Word was God”	“the Word was a god”
John 8:58	“Before Abraham was, I am”	“before Abraham came into existence, I have been”
Colossians 1:16	“by him were all things created”	“by means of him all other things were created”
Hebrews 1:8	“Thy throne, O God”	“God is your throne”
Matthew 27:32	“his cross”	“his torture stake”
Luke 23:43	“Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me”	“Truly I tell you today, you will be with me”
1 John 5:7	Names the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost	Leaves those words out

The two Bibles open the Gospel of John with the same words. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,” says the King James Version, and the New World Translation says it too. Then, in the last clause, they part. The King James Bible finishes “and the Word was God.” The Witnesses’ Bible finishes “and the Word was a god.” The sharpest difference between these translations is in that small gap, because the deepest difference between the people who read them is there too: whether the Word who “was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) is God himself, or the first and greatest thing God made.

In 1604, soon after James I became king of England, a conference of churchmen asked for a new English Bible, saying the existing ones “were corrupt and not answerable to the truth of the original.” By June that year the king had approved 54 revisers, and 47 scholars took part. They worked in six companies, two each at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, with Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury, as overseer. The new Bible came out in 1611.

The translators drew on earlier English Bibles, William Tyndale’s among them, and on Jewish commentaries. Encyclopaedia Britannica judges the result “more faithful to the original languages of the Bible and more scholarly than any of its predecessors.” From the middle of the 1600s to the early 1900s it was the standard English Bible, and its words still shape how many of us pray: “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105).

Before 1950 Jehovah’s Witnesses read other translations, and they still say they “have used many different translations in their study of the Bible.” In 1950 they published the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures in English, and the complete Bible followed in 1961. A revised edition in plainer English appeared in 2013. No translator is named. The Witnesses contrast their Bible with translations that list the people who made them yet leave out God’s name: theirs, they say, “restores the divine name in the thousands of places where it existed in the original text, while the committee that produced the translation remains anonymous.”

The Witnesses give the New World Translation away free. As of 1 May 2026, jw.org lists the whole Bible in 174 languages and the Greek Scriptures in about 100 more. The story of how it was made is told in the origin of the New World Translation.

God’s name, the four Hebrew letters YHWH, “appears nearly 7,000 times in the Hebrew Scriptures,” the New World Translation’s appendix notes, and that Bible renders each of them “Jehovah.” The King James translators followed the older custom of printing “LORD” in capital letters in those places. They kept the name itself only four times: in Exodus 6:3, Psalm 83:18, and Isaiah 12:2 and 26:4. Psalm 83:18 is one: “That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.” The name also stands inside three place names, Jehovahjireh, Jehovahnissi and Jehovahshalom.

The bigger difference is in the New Testament. The King James Version never uses the name there. The New World Translation uses it 237 times. Its committee explains that the Greek manuscripts we have “are not the originals,” and that by the time they were copied, scribes had “replaced the Tetragrammaton with Kyʹri·os, the Greek word for ‘Lord.’” The Witnesses believe the apostles wrote the name and later copyists took it out. Most other translators follow the manuscripts as they stand, and print “Lord.”

The Witnesses believe Jesus is God’s Son and first creation, but not God. The churches that read the King James Version confess him as God the Son. On a handful of verses each Bible’s wording follows its readers’ belief.

John 1:1. The New World Translation’s “a god,” jw.org explains, “describes the divine or godlike nature that Jesus possessed before he came to earth.” The Witnesses note that the second “God” in the Greek has no article before it, and they quote the scholar Jason BeDuhn: “the Word is not the one-and-only God, but is a god, or divine being.” Others disagree. The scholar Bruce Metzger, writing in Theology Today in 1953 about the 1950 edition, called the rendering “a frightful mistranslation.” He cited a rule of Greek grammar set out by E. C. Colwell, which, he wrote, “necessitates the rendering” the King James gives. The Witnesses answer that Colwell himself allowed “a” when “the context demands it,” and that it does here, “for the testimony of the entire Bible is that Jesus is not Almighty God.”

John 8:58. “Before Abraham was, I am,” says the King James Version. Many Christians hear in those words the name God gave Moses at the burning bush: “I Am That I Am” (Exodus 3:14). The New World Translation says “before Abraham came into existence, I have been,” and the echo of Exodus is gone. The Witnesses say Jesus was not taking a title but speaking of his life in heaven before Abraham. The Greek verb, their study note says, describes an action that began “before Abraham came into existence” and “was still in progress,” so it is “properly translated” as “I have been.”

Colossians 1:16–17. The King James says “by him were all things created” and “he is before all things.” The New World Translation says “all other things” each time, four times in the passage. Metzger wrote that “the word ‘other’ has been unwarrantably inserted four times.” The Witnesses add it because they believe Jesus was himself created, “the firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15), and then made everything else.

Hebrews 1:8 and Titus 2:13. The King James Version has God the Father speak to the Son: “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.” The New World Translation reads “God is your throne forever and ever.” The Witnesses say this “shows that Jesus’ throne, his office or authority as a sovereign, has its source in Jehovah the Almighty God.” They point to the next verse, “God, your God, anointed you,” and to the psalm it quotes, which “originally was addressed to a human king of Israel.” In Titus 2:13 the King James speaks of “the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ,” and the New World Translation of “the great God and of our Savior, Jesus Christ,” which makes two persons where the King James can be read as one. Metzger wrote that the two-person rendering “overlooks a principle of Greek grammar” set out by Granville Sharp in 1798, by which both titles belong to Jesus. The Witnesses reply that the rule’s validity “has been much debated by scholars,” and that several modern translations also speak of two persons here.

The Witnesses’ teaching about Jesus, and where the churches answer it, is set out in what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe about Jesus. One verse stands the same in both Bibles: Thomas’s cry to the risen Jesus, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28).

Because the Witnesses believe Jesus died on a single upright stake. They argue that the Greek word stauros basically means “upright stake,” so where the King James Version says Simon of Cyrene was compelled “to bear his cross,” the New World Translation says he carried “his torture stake” (Matthew 27:32). The 2013 revision also dropped the word “impale,” which earlier editions used, and now says Jesus was “executed on a stake.” Most other Bibles, the King James among them, keep the word “cross.”

The difference is one comma. To the thief beside him, Jesus says in the King James Version, “Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” The New World Translation reads, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise.” With the comma after “today” instead of before it, the word tells us when Jesus spoke rather than when the thief would be with him. The Witnesses read it that way because they believe that “people who have died are unconscious” until the resurrection, a teaching explained in what Jehovah’s Witnesses believe happens after death.

A related choice shapes other words. The King James Version translates the Hebrew Sheol as “hell” in places, as in Psalm 16:10: “For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell.” The 2013 New World Translation renders Sheol and Hades “the Grave,” because the Witnesses believe both mean “the common grave of mankind.”

Sixteen verses that the King James Version prints are not in the New World Translation’s text, among them Matthew 18:11, Acts 8:37 and John 5:4. The longer ending of Mark (16:9–20) and the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) are left out too. The Witnesses say these passages “were actually additions made by later copyists,” shown by the older manuscripts that Westcott and Hort and later editors used. Many modern translations that are not Witness Bibles also omit these verses or mark them as doubtful.

The best-known is 1 John 5:7. The King James Version reads, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” The New World Translation has only “For there are three witness bearers,” followed by “the spirit and the water and the blood.” The Witnesses call the longer wording a Trinitarian passage “added hundreds of years after the Bible was written.” Here a leading Trinitarian scholar agreed with them. Metzger himself wrote that the manuscript evidence for the King James wording “is insufficient, this text should not be used,” and added that there is “abundant proof for the doctrine of the Trinity elsewhere in the New Testament,” beginning with the command to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19).

The Witnesses say it is, and that it is more literal than many translations. They quote scholars who praised it, among them Jason BeDuhn, who compared nine English translations and wrote that “The NW … emerges as the most accurate of the translations compared.” Other scholars, Metzger the best known, judged that its key renderings about Jesus were shaped by Witness doctrine. On most of the Bible’s pages, a reader would find the two translations telling the same story in different English. The disagreement gathers where the question of who Jesus is comes up.

It depends on the verse. The King James Version is a translation of great care and beauty, and it remains the favoured Bible of a number of Protestant churches. On the verses about Jesus, most other translations side with it: most English Bibles, Catholic and Protestant, say “the Word was God” in John 1:1, the reading the historic churches defend. On the sixteen missing verses and 1 John 5:7, most modern translations side with the New World Translation. The King James followed the Greek texts printed in its day, and later editors, working from older manuscripts, set those words aside or marked them as doubtful.

Whichever Bible lies open on our table, it carries a promise that both translations print in their own words: “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8).

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• Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Bible: origin of the New World Translation
• What do Jehovah’s Witnesses believe about Jesus?
• What do Jehovah’s Witnesses believe about God?
• Jehovah’s Witnesses and Catholics: how they differ
• Is the King James Bible Catholic? The Bibles Catholics use

More from this seriesUnderstanding Jehovah’s WitnessesSee all 44 articles