Last month I spent several days comparing the PDF of the original August 2013 New World Translation to the 2025 revision, to find out just how many changes the org has made to their Bible in that time. It turns out, quite a few. Altogether, the org has changed the text of 108 verses. When you include changes to footnotes, cross-references, headers, content summaries, and appendices, the total reaches well over 200. Those are all significant textual changes, ignoring the way they slightly resized all the footnotes or made minor changes in page layout.
Many of these changes are relatively benign; correcting punctuation, grammar, or typos. But others are motivated by change in official beliefs, or even responses to world politics. Here is a summary of the most notable changes, with a full list of changes in the comments:
Fixing Mistakes
Some of the changes are to fix genuine, obvious mistakes. A notable example is in Ezekiel 8:15. The 2013 revision said "things that are even more terrible that are worse than these". This duplication of a thought seems to have been caused by the translator accidentally leaving in two alternate renderings of the same text. In 2014 one of those were deleted, leaving just "that are even more terrible than these".
At 1 Chronicles 2:49, a subtle change in punctuation caused the parentage of a person named Gibea to move from their mother Sheva to their grandmother Maacah (one of Caleb's concubines). This was later corrected and it returned to Sheva. A similar mistake appears in Joshua 22:11 where they accidentally changed who the speaker was in the verse. In the 2013 revision the Israelites west of the Jordon heard a rumour, spoke the rumour, and then heard about what they just said. They later changed "heard about it and said" back to "heard it said".
Other clear mistakes include: The running header on one page displaying "Numbers 35:37-33:22" (the 35 should be 32). Misspelling the Hebrew letter "Shin" as "Sin" in the acrostic at Psalm 37:37. Missing the quotation marks at the start of four paragraphs in Ezekiel 48:31-34. Duplicating the footnote for Nehemiah 7:65, 70 when they should both direct to a single footnote. Even placing a single long em dash in a header where a shorter en dash should appear (page 1696). Those are just a few examples, with changes in grammar often also qualifying as fixing a "mistake".
Changing Spelling & Pronunciation
A less interesting category of changes are tweaks to pronunciation and spelling. For instance changing Zo'rah•ites to Zor'ath•ites; O•hol'i•bah to O•ho'li•bah; and Hamon-Gog to Ha'mon-Gog. There were also a few instances of Ho'reb and Zo'rah accidentally being written as Hor'eb or Zor'ah, and just one example of "Jo'ab" missing the stress mark at 2 Samuel 20:15. They also changed the spelling of tranquillity to tranquility (with just one L).
Grammatical Changes
Many of the changes were slight grammatical changes and fixes. Dropping a "then" in Exodus 36:33. Changing "themselves" to "them" in Leviticus 22:16. Flipping "the day following" to "the following day" at Joshua 5:12. Changing "have" to "had" at Isaiah 26:18, and "approaches" to "approach" at Isaiah 29:13. Lots of these changes show that over the years they have gone over the text with a fine-tooth comb.
Changing Beliefs
Another kind of change is motivated by aligning the Bible to fit their official beliefs. For instance, in a recent Watchtower they modified their opinion about what qualified as a "chariot", specifically the one that Philip the Evangelizer rode in with the Ethiopian Eunuch. This change was motivated by their staging a video portraying the two men in the chariot; with the change being announced just prior to the video being released. In line with this, they also changed the definition of "Chariot" in the Glossary of Bible Terms.
In another instance, the height of the first temple porch at 2 Chronicles 3:4 was changed to a more practical and likely height, and explained by a scribal error. In that instance, the Bible verse itself was changed to reflect their new teaching. And in a video where Geoffrey Jackson was explaining how they were developing scripts for the series of Jesus movies, he described a problem with staging a group of events specifically in Capernaum. This realization was isubtly reflected in the "place" column in Appendix A7-D, where they changed "Capernaum" to "Capernaum area".
There are also similar changes throughout the Mosaic Law: about how the garments of the High Priest are designed, about whether they're using cans or buckets, utensils or equipment, these may also be changes reflecting new org beliefs about technical details.
Political Changes
Perhaps the most interesting changes are the ones motivated by politics or cultural changes. In the "Table of the Books of the Bible" (just after Revelation) they recently changed the location for the writing of Matthew and Jude from "Palestine" to "Israel". This seems to be a reaction to the current political climate. They made a conscious decision to change the text to align with a particular side of that political debate. A similar change was replacing the word "race" with "people" in Acts 7:19; 10:28, and 1 Peter 2:9. Those three verses were the only ones that used the word "race" in that context.
One significant feature of the 2013 revision was the way they changed many instances of "men" or "boy" to a gender-neutral "people" or "child". But since 2013 they've made further changes in this direction. For instance in John 6:10 they changed Jesus' words from "Have the men sit down" to "Have the people sit down", presumably so the reader doesn't assume that the women remained standing. It's possible that they made this and other changes to the gospels in preparation for filming their movie series that uses their NWT text as the script. They may have decided that they didn't want Jesus to say "men" in front of a mixed crowd. Another example of this kind of change was at John 16:21, changing "joy that a man has been born" to "joy that a child has been born". But in the context of the full verse it still plays strangely, since the verse refers to a child and then an adult. This change leaves the person as a child.
Changes in Meaning
There were a few examples that stood out where the organization clearly changed the meaning of a verse, particularly in the New Testament. For instance in Romans 1:26 they changed "uncontrolled sexual passion" to "disgraceful sexual passion". In Matthew 5:18 they seemed to have forgotten part of the verse, restoring the "one smallest letter" part of "for one smallest letter or one stroke of a letter" in 2014. And in the hard-to-translate verse of Philippians 2:6 they changed their long-standing rendering "gave no consideration to a seizure, namely, that he should be equal to God" to a simple paraphrase of their interpretation: "did not even consider the idea of trying to be equal to God".
But perhaps the most interesting change for people on this sub is in 2 Thessalonians 2:11. That chapter is talking about people being lead astray by apostasy. Most translations describe a feeling from within a person that fools them. The original NWT used the term "an operation of error", and the 2013 revision a "deluding influence". But recently that has been changed to a "deceptive influence", which seems to be a departure from most major translations and a shift to imply an external influence deceiving a person.
It's also noteworthy that in the Glossary of Bible Terms, they made a slight change to the definition of "Apostasy". It originally said that "In the Christian Greek Scriptures, "apostasy" is used primarily with regard to those who deflect from true worship". They later removed the word "primarily".
Conclusions
I was surprised how manual much of the translation project was, with even the generation of the header seemingly not being automated. There were also a few duplicated cross-references that were later deleted.
I was also surprised by the number of times small changes in wording were made to the 2013 revision, only to eventually be changed back to how it was in the original NWT. It seemed like they didn't use the original version as a template, allowing for more of those errors to creep in.
Despite the number of changes and mistakes made since the August 2013 printing, it seems like the project was completed on time and not rushed. Because there were no changes between the August and September 2013 printings. And after nearly a year, there were only 18 changes made in the May 2014 printing. This seems to show there wasn't a concerted effort to review the text in the first year, with many obvious mistakes being found and corrected later. My best guess is the careful review came gradually, ahead of the audio recording.
Straining the Gnat
I think the change that best illustrates the problems with the NWT is in the Contents heading that describes Luke 23:33. Here is how the NWT translates that verse:
"And when they got to the place called Skull, they nailed him to the stake there alongside the criminals, one on his right and one on his left."
The original summary at the front of the book read "Jesus and two criminals nailed to stakes". At first glance that seems like a fair summary of the verse. But at some point, somebody reviewed that verse and realized something. In the text only Jesus is explicitly nailed to the stake, between the criminals. The Bible doesn't say how the criminals were secured. So they changed the summary to a more neutral "Jesus and two criminals hung on stakes".
But when you think further about it, the original Greek also doesn't specify a stake. And a cross is far more likely when considering other Bible verses and contemporary writings. So for me, this is a great example of their "straining out the gnat but swallowing down the camel" approach. They have spent 13 years going over and over the text, noticing and changing these small details. But they're willfully blind to the large errors in their text that reflect erroneous doctrines. The ones inherited from Russell, Rutherford, Knorr, Franz, and others, that they have been committed to for many decades and refuse to acknowledge as wrong. And it makes their efforts to correct and refine the text feel so hollow.