"The Bible of Macarius"

For several years, I served in the public relations department of Jehovah's Witnesses. I often had to communicate with representatives of the press, radio, television, as well as with officials. All these years, I firmly believed in the honesty and holiness of my organization, including the honesty of the department in which I served. However, recently facts about the activities of this department have become known, which allow us to seriously doubt this.

The case concerns the facts related to the so-called "Macarius Bible", which, with great hype in the media, was published as a separate publication by Jehovah's Witnesses in 1996.  We are talking about the translation of some books of the Old Testament by Archimandrite Macarius (Mikhail Glukharev (1792-1847)), which was carried out by him in 1834-1844. However, it was only after his death that his works began to be published in the journal "Orthodox Review" for 1860-1867.

I remember well how in 1996-97 we enthusiastically conducted a media campaign to popularize this publication, how we made appointments with officials of various ranks to give them this Bible. I remember being overwhelmed with pride in the Watch Tower Society, which was doing what I thought was such a tremendous and useful work. I wrote several articles for newspapers at various levels to draw public attention to the educational and biblical work of Jehovah's Witnesses. I also remember how many publishers in the congregation were genuinely happy about this publication. They said: "At last we have a Bible with Jehovah's name on it." They gladly gave this Bible, when they had the opportunity, to sympathetic people, sincerely believing that they were doing a good deed. However, it is interesting that for some reason the Watch Tower Society assigned all the glory for this difficult work of translating the books of the Holy Scriptures not to Mikhail Glukharev, but to itself? I could not help noticing it then.

Thus, in 1996, Jehovah's Witnesses announced throughout Russia that they had found the magazines "Orthodox Review" for 1860-1867 with translations of Macarius in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, "with the kind permission of which a copy was provided, which served as the basis" for the publication of this work by Archimandrite Macarius as a separate book, with the addition of Psalms translated by Archpriest Pavsky and the Synodal translation of the New Testament. This is how the Macarius Bible appeared, the distinctive feature of which was the restoration of the name "Jehovah" in more than 2,500 places in the Old Testament. This is a positive trend in itself, and it should not cause any objections. However, it turned out that not everything is so simple.

The fact is that at the end of 1997, the staff of the Center for Apologological Studies (CAI) accidentally compared the Pentateuch of Moses in the translation of Archimandrite Macarius, which was published in parts in the "Orthodox Review" in the period from August 1863 to December 1864, with the text published by Jehovah's Witnesses. They "found an incredible number of very serious discrepancies! The spelling of names did not coincide, the numbering of some verses did not coincide, some phrases sounded completely different, and most importantly, the name "Jehovah" was much more common in the publication of Jehovah's Witnesses." Employees of this center sent questions to the Russian Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses in the village of Solnechnoye, and received an answer stating that Macarius' translation was published in the 60s of the 19th century in two versions: one was published in the journal "Orthodox Review", and the other - in separately published books. According to Jehovah's Witnesses, 74% of the chapters were taken from the journal "Orthodox Review", which is why they indicated the journal "Orthodox Review" as the only source in the preface to the publication.

All this could still save the reputation of Jehovah's Witnesses, but the staff of the Center for Apologological Studies found that five books of the Bible (Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua and Ruth) in the "Macarius Bible" are given according to the text of another edition, namely the collection "Genesis-Ruth" (containing the first 8 books of the Bible, published by the Russian Bible Society). The year of publication is unknown, as the surviving copies of this publication do not have title pages. But the main thing was that the staff of the Central Aviation Institute established that this translation was definitely not made by Archimandrite Macarius. And this already means that at least 5 books from the notorious "Macarius Bible" do not belong to the pen of this man. This means that all this "creation" of Jehovah's Witnesses in the publishing "field" is a falsification, if not outright deception.

There was only one goal: to produce a Bible translation in which the name "Jehovah" would appear as often as possible. But in setting such a goal, Jehovah's Witnesses overdid it and chased after the notorious figures, forgetting about elementary decency. The thing turned out to be that the name "Jehovah" in the collection of unknown authors "Genesis-Ruth" was found more often than in similar books in the translation of Macarius. The only thing that is not clear is whether it was really impossible to honestly say that this edition is just a selection of various translations where the name "Jehovah" occurs, and not pass it off as a publishing and human feat to restore the memory of the outstanding translator Mikhail Glukharev (Archimandrite Macarius).

There is no doubt that thanks to the exposure of this project of Jehovah's Witnesses by the staff of the CAI, the "Macarius Bible" was no longer published, and at the moment it is indicated to the congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses that it is "out of stock." Thus ingloriously ended the history of this publication, about which Jehovah's Witnesses are silent.

It is interesting to note that around 2001, the public relations department of Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia ceased to exist. We first received letters saying that our activities would be changed, and then we learned (from unofficial sources) that this department had "died safely." Without a doubt, the Watchtower Society's leadership could not ignore the obvious miscalculation of this department in the publication of the Macarius Bible. Because it was this department that was responsible for this publication, and most importantly, it was he who organized the grandiose hype in the media, which soon failed so ingloriously.

Disinformation