Johannes Greber


Johannes Greber born in Wenigerath, Germany, was ordained a Catholic priest who claimed he had never become a medium himself but whose wife later became a medium and involved in a variety of spiritualist activities.
In Germany, he was ordained in 1900 and served a church in the poor area of Hunsrueck. Many in the area suffered from tuberculosis, even ‘’organizing nurses to treat large numbers of tuberculosis’’. During WW1, he also helped thousands of children escape the war by fleeing into Holland.
In 1923, he attended a séance and his life was changed. He renounced his vows and left the Catholic church. He emigrated to the USA in 1929 and began a nondenominational church, with prayer and healing sessions in Teaneck, NJ. He later worked on a translation of the New Testament, publishing ‘’The New Testament, A New Translation and Explanation Based on the Oldest Manuscripts’’. He claimed using the oldest sources available including the Greek codex D, and where a meaning was not clear, he received supernatural guidance after, as he says in his prologue, much time in prayer, as he translated with his wife acting as a medium, along with visions given to him of the actual words on occasion, to the point that the text he translated. “In the rare instances in which a text pronounced correct by the divine spirits can be found in none of the manuscripts available today, I have the text as given by the spirits.”
Greber's belief in spirit communication with holy spirits of God, a common occurrence throughout the Old and New Testament, affected his translation clearly in 1 Corinthians 12:28, “...mediums who speak in various foreign languages’’.”

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