Another Verse Proving the Deity of Christ

By Ryan Hemelaar

"Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood." - Acts 20:28 (ESV)

Here Paul equates Jesus' death as being God's death. Therefore, it is clear that Jesus is God.

The New World Translation (the Bible of the Jehovah's Witnesses) has once again erroneously translated this verse, by rendering the last phrase of it as: "...which he purchased with the blood of his own [Son]." For the Greek is: τοῦ αἵματος τοῦ ἰδίου. Since there is a definite article (τοῦ) before both the word that means 'blood' (αἵματος) and the word that means 'own' (ἰδίου), the construction clearly shows that ἰδίου ('own') is an attributive adjective. What this means, as the name implies, is that a quality is attributed to the noun (eg: "the good man"), unlike a predicate adjective (eg: "the man is good"), and a substantive (eg: "only the good die young"), where an adjective stands in the place of a noun. This last category is what the translators of the New World Translation think this adjective is, that is, a substantive. However, it is clear that there is a noun with an article preceding the adjective and its article, so therefore it simply cannot stand there as a substantive. Instead the last phrase of Acts 20:28 should be translated: "...which he obtained with/through his own blood", which the ESV has nicely done.

Moreover, to expose the New World Translation's double standard, it translates John 10:11a as "I am the fine shepherd" even though it's in the exact same restrictive attributive position (ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός) as Acts 20:28! That is clearly a double standard; translating one as a substantive, and the other as an attributive.