Johannes Greber

Johannes Greber (1874–1944) 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.

Title page of Greber's New Testament

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’’.[1] 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’’ (1935). 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.”[2]

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’’.”[3]