Russia banned the Jehovah's Witnesses' Bible by ruling it "not a Bible"

On August 17, 2017, a city court in the Russian border town of Vyborg declared a translation of the Bible to be extremist literature.^[1]

The translation was the New World Translation, the edition of the Bible produced and used by Jehovah's Witnesses. The Vyborg City Court's ruling — upheld on appeal by the Leningrad Regional Court that December — banned the book and cleared the way for it to be added to Russia's Federal List of Extremist Materials, the government register of texts that are illegal to distribute.^[1][2] Jehovah's Witnesses called it the first time the Bible had been banned in a country where most citizens identify as Christian.^[1]

But reaching that ruling required an unusual piece of legal reasoning — because, on its face, Russian law appeared to forbid exactly this.

The law that should have stopped it

Two years earlier, Russia had passed a law specifically to keep courts from banning scripture. In November 2015, President Vladimir Putin signed Federal Law No. 314-FZ, adding to the country's anti-extremism statute a new provision, Article 3.1: "The Bible, Quran, Tanakh and Kangyur, their content and quotations from them cannot be recognized as extremist materials."^[3]

The amendment had been prompted by an uproar earlier that year, when a court in the far-eastern city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk ruled a book containing Quranic quotations extremist — drawing a furious response from Chechnya's leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who vowed to hold the judge and prosecutor personally to account.^[3] The law was meant to put the world's major scriptures beyond the reach of extremism prosecutions. So how did a Russian court ban a Bible two years later?

The "not a Bible" finding

The answer was to rule that the New World Translation is not, in fact, a Bible.^[1][4]

The case had begun in 2015, when customs officers at Vyborg, on the Finnish border, seized a shipment of some 2,000 Russian-language New World Translation Bibles arriving from Finland and sent copies for "expert study."^[4] That study — produced by a Moscow center whose lead author, the religious-freedom monitor Forum 18 reported, was a mathematician by training rather than a religious-studies scholar — concluded that the New World Translation was not a Bible.^[4] Its reasons: the book does not carry the title "Bible"; it is a translation with what the experts called significant changes; and, most tellingly, it renders God's name as "Jehovah." As Forum 18 quoted the study, "the most revealing example is the use of a tetragrammaton in the form of Jehovah."^[4]

The reasoning struck critics as plainly circular. The presiding judge, Forum 18 reported, accepted that the translation "partially coincid[ed] in its content with the text of universally accepted translations of the Bible" — and still concluded that this did not make it a Bible, which let the court sidestep the 2015 protection entirely.^[4] Defense experts, including a specialist from the Russian Academy of Sciences who had compared hundreds of passages across five translations, testified that the New World Translation matched the accepted canon in meaning. The court was unpersuaded.^[4]

What the New World Translation is

The dispute over whether the New World Translation is "really" a Bible is a genuine, if contested, scholarly question — though not in the way the Russian court framed it. The translation, first published in full in English in 1961 and revised in 2013, is the work of Jehovah's Witnesses' own publishing arm, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society.^[5] It differs from mainstream Bibles in ways that have drawn decades of debate: it uses "Jehovah" for the divine name, including in New Testament passages where the surviving Greek reads "Lord," and it renders the opening of John's Gospel as "the Word was a god" rather than "the Word was God."^[5] Scholars have long divided over these choices. The Princeton textual scholar Bruce Metzger faulted the New Testament insertions of "Jehovah"; the religious-studies scholar Jason BeDuhn, in a 2003 study comparing major English translations, rated the New World Translation among the more accurate while criticizing those same features.^[5] It is, in short, a real and disputed piece of translation — the kind of scholarly argument that unfolds in seminaries and journals, not the kind that decides whether a book is criminal to own.

None of that scholarly dispute, however, is what Russian law made relevant. The 2015 amendment protected the Bible as such; the question the court chose to pose was a categorical one — is this a Bible? — and its answer placed the translation outside a protection the law had been written to provide.

A campaign, in sequence

The Bible ruling did not stand alone, and its timing is worth getting right, because it is often muddled. The organization itself was banned first: on April 20, 2017, Russia's Supreme Court liquidated the Administrative Center of Jehovah's Witnesses and some 395 local organizations as extremist. The Vyborg Bible ruling came four months later.^[6] Before either, Russian courts had spent years banning the Witnesses' literature — dozens of publications ruled extremist beginning in 2009, and the jw.org website blocked and blacklisted in 2015.^[6] The Bible ruling was, in that sense, less a beginning than a culmination: having outlawed the organization and its literature, the state moved to outlaw the specific book at the center of its worship.

Enforcement followed. The ban would be pressed through the courts against individual believers, from the Danish Witness Dennis Christensen — the first imprisoned under the campaign — to hundreds of others prosecuted, in the years since, simply for continuing to meet and read.^[6]

Reactions

The ruling drew condemnation well beyond the Witnesses. A spokesman for the religion, Yaroslav Sivulskiy, said Russian authorities were "trying to bypass" their own sacred-texts law by "claiming that the New World Translation is not a Bible so that they can declare it extremist."^[1] The chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Daniel Mark, was blunter: "The conclusion by the court — by any court — that the NWT translation is not a Bible is nonsense."^[7] Forum 18 and the Russian monitoring group SOVA Center, which track the state's use of the extremism law, documented the ruling's circular logic and the expert panel's lack of qualifications.^[4]

For Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia, the effect was concrete: their own edition of the Bible had become, in the eyes of the state, contraband.