Question 1

Is the Word 'a god'?

Accepted Answer

The Society's own Kingdom Interlinear prints the literal Greek gloss — 'and god was the Word' — beneath the very verse its translation changes. Rendering it 'a god' creates a second god beside Jehovah, which Isaiah 43:10 rules out in their own Bible: no God was formed before him, and none after. The overwhelming consensus of Greek grammarians and every major committee translation reads the verse as the church always has: the Word was God. John seals it three verses later — all things were made by him — while Jehovah says he stretched out the heavens alone.

Question 2

Is Jesus Michael the Archangel?

Accepted Answer

Hebrews 1 was written to answer exactly this: 'unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son?' The Son is contrasted with all angels, worshipped by all angels, and addressed as God. Daniel calls Michael 'one of the chief princes' — one among peers; Jesus has no peer. Michael dared not rebuke Satan on his own authority; Jesus commanded him directly. A voice 'of the archangel' at the Lord's descent no more makes him an archangel than the 'trump of God' in the same verse makes him a trumpet.

Question 3

Do only 144,000 go to heaven?

Accepted Answer

The teaching reads Revelation 7 half-literally: the number 144,000 is taken as exact arithmetic while the twelve named tribes of Israel in the same sentence are taken as symbols — one verse, two opposite methods. And the great crowd it assigns to earth is seen 'before the throne' serving God 'in his temple,' the heavenly sanctuary. Jesus spoke of one fold and one shepherd; Paul of one body and one hope; and the new birth is the doorway for everyone who believes — not a quota filled in 1935.

Question 4

1874, 1914, 1925, 1975 — what happened to the dates?

Accepted Answer

Every date is documented in the Society's own publications, several in its own official history. Russell's movement taught an 1874 invisible presence for fifty years before moving it to 1914. The 1889 'Time Is at Hand' promised earthly rulership would END by 1914 — later printings quietly softened the wording. The Society's history book concedes of 1925: 'The year 1925 came and went,' and the 1980 Watchtower 'regretted' the 1975 expectations it had built. Moses gave the test: when the word does not come to pass, the LORD has not spoken it. Jesus gave the reason: of that day and hour knoweth no man.

Question 5

Did Christ return invisibly in 1914?

Accepted Answer

The arithmetic and the theology both fail. All mainstream scholarship — Babylonian chronicles, astronomical diaries, and every standard reference — dates Jerusalem's fall to 587/586 BCE, not 607; move the start date and 1914 dissolves. And Scripture leaves no room for a hidden coming: the angels promised he will return 'in like manner' as he visibly ascended, every eye shall see him, and Jesus himself warned against those who announce a presence that cannot be seen.

Question 6

Does the Bible forbid blood transfusions?

Accepted Answer

Every text cited concerns eating the blood of slaughtered animals; none envisions the transfer of living human blood to preserve life. Leviticus itself gives the reason blood was set apart: it makes atonement — a shadow pointing to Christ's blood, not a medical regulation. And Jesus settled how such laws bend before human life: David ate the forbidden shewbread and was blameless, for the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. A rule that lets a patient die to honor a food law inverts the Lawgiver's own priority: 'I will have mercy, and not sacrifice.'

Question 7

Was Jesus raised as a spirit?

Accepted Answer

The risen Lord answered this claim in person: 'a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.' He invited Thomas's finger into the print of the nails; he had foretold that the temple of his body would be raised in three days; and Peter preached that his flesh did not see corruption. A 'resurrection' in which the body stays dead and something else appears in its place is not a resurrection at all — it is the empty tomb explained away. Note carefully: Witnesses do affirm a resurrection — the examined question is whether it was bodily, as the Scriptures state.

Question 8

Should 'Jehovah' appear in the New Testament?

Accepted Answer

The Society's own Insight encyclopedia concedes that 'Yahweh' is favored by Hebrew scholars and that 'Jehovah' is a hybrid form kept for familiarity — yet the deeper issue is the insertions. With no manuscript support whatever, 'Jehovah' is written into verses where the apostles wrote 'Lord' — and the effect is doctrinal: in Romans 10, confessing 'the Lord Jesus' and calling 'upon the name of the Lord' in the same breath becomes two different persons. Even Jason BeDuhn, the academic most favorable to the NWT, condemns this practice. The manuscripts are unanimous; the apostles applied the LORD's name to Jesus, and the translation un-applies it.

Question 9

Is Christ the mediator for only 144,000?

Accepted Answer

Paul's sentence does not bend: one God, one mediator between God and men — and the very next clause says he gave himself a ransom for all. John writes that Christ is the propitiation not for a class but for the whole world, and Hebrews opens his intercession to all who come to God by him. A mediator for 0.002% of humanity is a different gospel from 'a ransom for all.'

Question 10

Is the Governing Body God's sole channel?

Accepted Answer

Matthew 24:45 is a parable about every servant's watchfulness, asked as a question — not an organizational charter conferring doctrinal monopoly on a committee in 1919. The Bereans were called noble precisely for auditing an apostle against Scripture; Paul put even himself and angels under the gospel's authority, not over it. A century of revised dates and reversed doctrines (documented in this corner from the Society's own publications) is the practical test of the claim: the channel's record speaks.

Question 11

Is the Holy Spirit a person or “God’s active force”?

Accepted Answer

The Bible keeps treating the Spirit as a “he,” not an “it.” Ananias is told he lied “to the Holy Spirit” — and in the next breath, that he lied “to God,” equating the two (Acts 5:3-4). A force does not speak, yet the Spirit says, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul” (Acts 13:2). A force has no feelings, yet the Spirit can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30); no mind, yet it teaches and reminds (John 14:26); no will, yet it gives gifts “as he wills” (1 Corinthians 12:11). Electricity is not lied to, grieved, or addressed as “me.” The Watch Tower’s “active force” is a category the texts keep breaking — because the Spirit is the personal presence of God himself.

Question 12

Should we worship and pray to Jesus?

Accepted Answer

Yet heaven does exactly what the Watch Tower forbids. The Father commands, “Let all the angels of God worship him” (Hebrews 1:6) — a verse the New World Translation softens to “do obeisance.” Every creature is heard crying to the Lamb, “Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him… for ever” — the same words given to God on the throne (Revelation 5:13). Jesus says all should “honour the Son, even as they honour the Father” (John 5:23), and invites prayer in his own name: “If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it” (John 14:14). A faithful Jew would never pray to or worship a creature. The first Christians did both — to Jesus — because they knew he was not one.

Question 13

Is the New World Translation an honest translation?

Accepted Answer

The pattern is the problem: again and again, exactly where the Greek points to Christ’s deity, the New World Translation alone bends away. In Colossians 1:16-17 it inserts the word “other” four times — “by means of him all other things were created” — a word not in the Greek, turning the Creator of all things into one created thing among others. At John 8:58 it changes Jesus’ “I AM” (the divine name of Exodus 3:14) to “I have been,” hiding the claim that made his hearers reach for stones. At Hebrews 1:8 it flips “Thy throne, O God” into “God is your throne,” so the Father stops calling the Son God. At Titus 2:13 it splits “our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ” into two persons. No Greek manuscript requires any of these; one theology does. A translation is honest when it follows the text even where the text is inconvenient.

Question 14

Cross or torture stake?

Accepted Answer

Three quiet facts undo the stake. First, Thomas speaks of “the print of the nails” — plural — in Jesus’ hands (John 20:25); a single stake takes one nail through both hands, a cross takes one in each. Second, the charge against Jesus was nailed up “over his head” (Matthew 27:37), not over his hands as a stake would require. Third, the Watch Tower itself preached the cross for fifty years — the cross-and-crown emblem sat on the cover of The Watch Tower until 1931 — before changing the teaching around 1936. The Greek stauros was used for crossed structures more than a century before Christ, and the earliest Christians (Justin Martyr, c. AD 155) described his outstretched arms. The shape was never the gospel; but this change came from the organization, not the evidence.

Question 15

Does 1914 rest on a twenty-year error?

Accepted Answer

The whole calculation hangs on one date the rest of the world rejects. Every line of evidence — Babylonian business tablets, king-lists, astronomical diaries, and the consensus of historians — places Jerusalem’s fall in 587 BCE, not 607. Move the start to the real date and the “seven times” run out around 1934, not 1914; the keystone cracks. The deeper problem is the method: Daniel 4 is about King Nebuchadnezzar’s seven years of madness, not a 2,520-year countdown, and Luke 21:24’s “times of the Gentiles” names no year at all. Jesus said plainly, “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons” (Acts 1:7). A doctrine that must overturn twenty years of settled history to keep its date is not reading prophecy; it is defending a number.

Question 16

The “generation” that keeps being redefined

Accepted Answer

The trouble is that the Watch Tower has redefined “this generation” again and again — each time the previous deadline expired. It was the people alive in 1914 (a fixed lifespan); when they aged out, the 1995 Watchtower made it “contemporary people” with no fixed length; by 2008 it was the anointed; by 2010 it became “overlapping generations,” two lifetimes chained together, stretching the word past anything it can bear. The 1914 generation Jesus supposedly meant has died, and the prediction with it. In context, Jesus spoke to his own disciples of what they would see, fulfilled when Jerusalem fell in AD 70 — and of the final day he said, “of that day and hour knoweth no man” (Matthew 24:36). A meaning that must be rewritten every time it fails was never the meaning.

Question 17

Has the Watch Tower passed the Bible’s test for a prophet?

Accepted Answer

The Society has called itself God’s “prophet” — and Scripture sets a clear test: “when a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass… the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously” (Deuteronomy 18:22). The Watch Tower named dates in God’s name — 1914, 1925, 1975 — and the things did not follow (see “1874, 1914, 1925, 1975”). That is not the eager mistake of a disciple; it is repeated public prediction, in print, of what God was about to do. Jesus warned, “Beware of false prophets… ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15-16), and Peter of teachers who “privily shall bring in damnable heresies” (2 Peter 2:1). A body that speaks for God, is proved wrong, and then asks you to trust it for the next date has answered the test itself.

Question 18

When teaching reverses, is it “new light”?

Accepted Answer

Proverbs 4:18 describes the moral path growing brighter — not a teaching organization reversing itself and calling the U-turn light. Real light gets brighter; it does not flip from light to dark and back, which is what the record shows: the cross, then the stake; vaccines forbidden, then allowed; organ transplants condemned as cannibalism in 1967, then permitted in 1980; “this generation” redefined four times. “New light” that contradicts the old light is not more light — it is the admission that the old “light” was darkness, taught as God’s truth and binding on the conscience while it stood. The God of the Bible “is not a man, that he should lie” (Numbers 23:19); “I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6). A channel that must keep unsaying what it said in his name is not getting clearer — it is guessing.

Question 19

Who is the “faithful and discreet slave”?

Accepted Answer

Two problems. First, the identification keeps changing: for decades the “slave” meant all 144,000 anointed; in 2012-2013 the Governing Body abruptly redefined it as themselves alone (Watchtower, 2013 Jul 15, p. 22) — a small group naming itself the sole channel. Second, the parable does not support the claim. In Matthew 24:45-47 Jesus asks “who then is the faithful and wise servant?” — a question urging every servant to be found faithful when the master comes, not a prophecy installing one ruling council. He elsewhere forbade exactly this: “be not ye called Rabbi… neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ” (Matthew 23:8-10); and Peter told elders to shepherd “not as being lords over God’s heritage” (1 Peter 5:3). A slave who demands obedience even when his orders “seem strange” has forgotten he is a slave.

Question 20

Does the Bible command the shunning of family?

Accepted Answer

Scripture does call for discipline of the unrepentant — but never the total, family-severing shunning the Watch Tower enforces. Paul’s aim was always restoration: when the disciplined man in Corinth repented, Paul urged them to “forgive him, and comfort him… confirm your love toward him” (2 Corinthians 2:6-8), and to restore the fallen “in the spirit of meekness” (Galatians 6:1). The father of the prodigal did not shun his wayward son; “he ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The Watch Tower’s policy — cutting off even repentant ones, even parents and children, for so much as doubting a doctrine — turns a tool meant to win a brother back into a weapon to keep members in by fear. A discipline that forbids the very contact through which a person could return is not biblical; it is control.

Question 21

Is there a hell, or only annihilation and “soul sleep”?

Accepted Answer

The Bible’s own words resist the erasure. Jesus said the wicked “shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46) — the same word for both; if heaven is forever, so is the punishment. He told of a rich man, conscious after death, “in torments” and “tormented in this flame” (Luke 16:23-24) — not asleep, not annihilated. Revelation says the smoke of torment “ascendeth up for ever and ever” with “no rest day nor night” (Revelation 14:11). And to the dying thief Jesus promised, “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43) — today, not after a long unconscious sleep. The doctrine of soul-sleep and annihilation is gentler to modern ears, but it is built by setting aside the plain words of Christ himself.

Question 22

Is salvation earned by works and door-to-door preaching?

Accepted Answer

The gospel says the opposite, in words too plain to miss: “by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us” (Titus 3:5). Jesus himself: “He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life… but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24) — has, present tense, not “might, if you knock on enough doors.” Good works follow salvation as its fruit; they do not buy it. A system that ties your eternity to hours logged and loyalty to an organization has traded the finished work of Christ for a quota — and stolen the assurance the gospel was meant to give.

Question 23

Are birthdays and holidays really forbidden?

Accepted Answer

The Bible nowhere forbids a believer from marking a birthday or a holy day — and Paul settles the matter directly: “One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind” (Romans 14:5). “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday… which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ” (Colossians 2:16-17). Two birthdays that happened to end badly are no command; by that logic the Bible’s own feasts and Jesus’ attendance at festivals would forbid nothing. The error Jesus actually named runs the other way: “laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). Binding consciences with rules God never gave is precisely what he condemned.

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