Pick the reply a Jehovah’s Witness would make, from the faithful slave and 1914 to the 144,000 and the blood rule, and see how we answer each one from the Bible.
We state our position first. Under it are the replies a well-read Jehovah’s Witness would make, put as strongly as we can put them. Choose one to see our answer from the Bible, then the next reply that person might make. Every answer links to the fuller case, and every exchange has its own link you can share.
We share more with Witnesses than with most churches: one God, the Father; the spirit as his power; a mortal soul; no hellfire; the Kingdom on earth. Where we differ, the root is authority: no organisation stands between the reader and the Bible, and every teaching, ours included, answers to what is written.
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
Our positionChrist is the only head of his people, and every teacher answers to the written word. No committee stands between a believer and the Bible. “One is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren” (Matthew 23:8).
Jesus promised a faithful slave to feed his household (Matthew 24:45–47). Someone has to fill that role.
Read on. The same parable has an “evil servant” who beats “his fellowservants” (Matthew 24:48–49). It is a test every servant faces, not an office. The reward, “ruler over all his goods”, comes “when he cometh”, at Christ’s return (Matthew 24:46–47). Until 2012 your own literature taught that the slave was every anointed Christian since Pentecost. The Governing Body then reread the verse to mean itself, appointed in 1919. A group that names itself the faithful slave has done the one thing the parable leaves to the Lord.
Read the full case: Don’t we need a church to tell us what the Bible means?If they reply: We don’t follow men; we follow Jesus, who directs the slave
The Governing Body is like the apostles and elders in Jerusalem (Acts 15).
The Jerusalem council was led by apostles Christ chose in person, and its letter said “it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us” (Acts 15:28). The Governing Body says it is ‘neither inspired nor infallible’ and ‘can err in doctrinal matters’ (Watchtower, February 2017). It cannot claim the authority of men who spoke by the Spirit while admitting it does not. After the apostles, God left no committee. He left their writings, and “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3).
Read the full case: Peter, the keys and the first councilIf they reply: We don’t follow men; we follow Jesus, who directs the slave
We don’t follow men. We follow Jesus, who directs the slave.
Then you are free to test every teaching by the Bible and reject what fails. Are you? The Watchtower says the organisation’s direction ‘may not appear practical from a human standpoint’ and must be obeyed ‘whether these appear sound from a strategic or human standpoint or not’ (15 November 2013). The Bereans tested even Paul: they “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). Paul welcomed it: “Not for that we have dominion over your faith” (2 Corinthians 1:24).
Questioning the slave is how apostasy starts. John says not to receive such a person (2 John 10).
John’s test is “the doctrine of Christ” (2 John 1:9), not loyalty to an organisation. Scripture commands testing: “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). If a teaching is true, testing it costs nothing. Only a teaching that cannot bear testing needs to forbid it.
Read the full case: The same test applies to usIf they reply: We never claimed to be inspired prophets
Changes are new light: ‘the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more’ (Proverbs 4:18).
Proverbs 4:18 is about a righteous man’s life, set against “the way of the wicked” (Proverbs 4:19). It says nothing about an organisation revising doctrine. And light that grows adds to what was true; it does not reverse it. The Watchtower has reversed itself on who the slave is (2013), what “this generation” means (1995, 2008, 2010), whether Sodom’s people can be raised (2024), and blood (2026). God says, “I am the Lord, I change not” (Malachi 3:6).
Read the full case: Error would come from inside the churchIf they reply: We never claimed to be inspired prophets
Our positionNo one knows the day of Christ’s return. A teacher who announces dates in God’s name, and sees them fail, has not spoken for God. “When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:22).
We never claimed to be inspired prophets.
Then why publish dates as God’s timetable? In 1920: Millions Now Living Will Never Die. A 1966 Watch Tower book said six thousand years from man’s creation ‘will end in 1975’; in 1968 the Society wrote that ‘Less than a hundred months’ remained. Moses’s test does not depend on a title. It asks whether a man spoke “in the name of the Lord” and whether it came to pass (Deuteronomy 18:22). Jesus warned of those saying “the time draweth near: go ye not therefore after them” (Luke 21:8).
Read the full case: God proves his word by prophecyIf they reply: 1914 came true: the Kingdom began in heaven
Your own founders set dates too. John Thomas and Robert Roberts expected Christ in their lifetimes.
They did, they were wrong, and we say so on this site. The difference is what was done with it. Thomas and Roberts never claimed to be Christ’s appointed channel, and no Christadelphian was ever expelled for doubting their dates. We do not build a single doctrine on them. The Watch Tower made 1914 the foundation of its authority, since the slave was ‘appointed’ in 1919 on the strength of it. Take 1914 away and the Governing Body has no appointment.
Read the full case: Our prophecy page: their dates are not ours to repeatIf they reply: Jesus appointed a faithful slave to feed his household
1914 came true. The Kingdom began in heaven, and the world changed with the Great War.
The Watch Tower did not predict an unseen enthronement in 1914. It predicted the end. In 1894 it said 1914 was ‘not the date for the beginning, but for the end of the time of the trouble’. When the end did not come, the event was moved out of sight, where it cannot be checked. Christ’s invisible presence from 1874 was taught until 1929, then moved to 1914. Jesus warned against exactly this: “behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not” (Matthew 24:26).
Read the full case: The King is coming backIf they reply: Parousia means presence: he has been here since 1914
The times of the Gentiles (Luke 21:24) ran 2,520 years, from Jerusalem’s fall in 607 BC to 1914.
Two problems. First, Jesus marks the end of those times by Jerusalem itself: it “shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled” (Luke 21:24). In 1914 Jerusalem was still a Turkish city. Nothing changed there that year. Second, Jerusalem fell to Babylon in 587 or 586 BC, not 607. The Watchtower admits secular historians date it to 587 (1 October 2011). The year 607 exists to make the sum reach 1914.
Read the full case: The kingdom of men and its ‘seven times’, in our Daniel walkthrough
Bible chronology (the 70 years of Jeremiah 25) overrides secular historians.
Jeremiah’s 70 years are the years of Babylon’s power over the nations: “these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years” (Jeremiah 25:11), ending when Babylon is punished (Jeremiah 25:12). Babylon fell in 539 BC, and its dominance began after 609, the year Assyria’s last king fell. That is a natural seventy. Only the reading that needs 1914 makes them seventy years of an empty Jerusalem.
Read the full case: Babylon and the kingdoms after it, in our Daniel walkthroughIf they reply: Your own founders set dates too
‘This generation shall not pass’ (Matthew 24:34) shows the end is close.
The Watchtower has changed what that word means again and again. Until 1995 it meant people alive in 1914, and Awake! printed that promise on its cover. Then it meant wicked people of any era (1995), then the anointed (2008), and now two ‘overlapping’ groups of anointed (2010, 2014). A definition that stretches each time the last one runs out is not interpretation. It is a way of keeping a date alive.
Read the full case: The King is coming backIf they reply: Changes are new light that ‘shineth more and more’
Our positionJesus is the Son of God, begotten in Mary, and above the angels as a son is above servants. He was never an angel, created or otherwise. “For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee?” (Hebrews 1:5).
The Lord descends ‘with the voice of the archangel’ (1 Thessalonians 4:16), so Jesus is the archangel.
The same verse says he comes “with the trump of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:16). By that logic Jesus is God, which you deny. The verse describes the sounds that herald his coming, not who he is. Hebrews settles it: “unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son?” (Hebrews 1:5). The expected answer is none. If the Son were Michael, Hebrews 1 would be arguing against itself.
Read the full case: The Son of God begins with his conception
Hebrews only shows he is higher than the other angels. Michael is the chief of them.
Hebrews compares the Son with angels as a class, not with ranks inside it: “to which of the angels said he at any time, Sit on my right hand” (Hebrews 1:13); “unto the angels hath he not put in subjection the world to come” (Hebrews 2:5); “he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16). And Michael is not unique: he is “one of the chief princes” (Daniel 10:13). Jesus has no equals.
Read the full case: If you are a Jehovah’s Witness: what we share and where we differIf they reply: He existed before his birth: ‘the firstborn of every creature’
Your own John Thomas said Michael in Daniel 12:1 is Christ.
Thomas read the name in Daniel 12:1, ‘who is like God’, as fulfilled in Christ at his coming, when he takes up Israel’s cause. Others read it as the archangel acting at Christ’s command. We give both readings on our Daniel page. What Thomas never taught is that Jesus was an angel before he was born. In Daniel’s own day Michael was already “one of the chief princes” (Daniel 10:13), centuries before Jesus was conceived.
Read the full case: Michael and the time of troubleIf they reply: He existed before his birth: ‘the firstborn of every creature’
He existed before his birth: ‘the firstborn of every creature’ (Colossians 1:15) and ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (John 8:58).
“Firstborn” is rank, not first made. God said of David, the youngest son, “I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth” (Psalm 89:27). Hebrews says God spoke in time past “by the prophets” and “in these last days” by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2). He did not speak through the Son in Old Testament times. The angel told Mary when the Son of God began: “that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
Read the full case: Doesn’t Colossians 1:16 say Christ created all things?‘Before Abraham was, I am’, in our conversation on the Trinity
John 1:1 says ‘the Word was a god’ (New World Translation). Jesus is a god, but not Almighty God.
That gives you two gods, Jehovah and a lesser one. God says, “before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me” (Isaiah 43:10). We agree Jesus is not God the Son. But the answer to the Trinity is not a second, created god. The Word is God’s own word and purpose, which “was made flesh” (John 1:14) in the man Jesus.
Read the full case: “In the beginning was the Word”If they reply: ‘A god’ in John 1:1 is good Greek
Our positionJesus rose in the body that died, changed to immortality, and he will come back in person, seen by everyone. “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39).
He was ‘put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit’ (1 Peter 3:18) and raised ‘a spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15:44).
A spiritual body is still a body: raised, changed, made immortal by the Spirit. Jesus said a spirit “hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). He promised to raise “the temple of his body” (John 2:21), and Peter says “neither his flesh did see corruption” (Acts 2:31). If the body stayed dead, the tomb would not have been empty.
He materialised bodies, as angels did. Taking his body back would cancel the ransom.
Then Jesus misled Thomas, showing him wounds in a body that was not his (John 20:27). Scripture says the opposite about the ransom: God “brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus … through the blood of the everlasting covenant” (Hebrews 13:20). His raising is how the sacrifice is accepted, not how it is undone. And his body is our pattern: he “shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). A borrowed body is no pattern.
Read the full case: Saved out of death by his own sacrificeIf they reply: Parousia means presence: he has been here since 1914
Parousia means presence. Christ has been invisibly present since 1914.
The angels said, “this same Jesus … shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11): bodily and visibly. “Every eye shall see him” (Revelation 1:7). Jesus warned against the very claim of a hidden return: “if they shall say unto you … behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not. For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Matthew 24:26–27).
The first resurrection is already under way: anointed ones are raised to heaven as they die.
Paul named two men who taught something very like it, Hymenaeus and Philetus, “saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some” (2 Timothy 2:18). The resurrection happens at one moment, at a visible return: “the Lord himself shall descend from heaven … and the dead in Christ shall rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:16). An unseen resurrection, which no one witnesses and no one can check, is the error Paul condemned.
Read the full case: The appointed day is Christ’s returnIf they reply: We don’t follow men; we follow Jesus, who directs the slave
Our positionEvery believer has the same hope, the same Mediator and the same place at the Lord’s table. Scripture knows no second class of Christian. “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling” (Ephesians 4:4).
Revelation 7 and 14 name a fixed number, 144,000, taken from the earth to heaven.
If the number is literal, so are the rest: “of all the tribes of the children of Israel” (Revelation 7:4), and men who “were not defiled with women; for they are virgins” (Revelation 14:4). Few Witnesses believe the anointed are all unmarried Jewish men. And the redeemed in Revelation do not reign from heaven: “we shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:10). Jesus promised the same to all his people: “the meek … shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).
Read the full case: Don’t Christians go to heaven when they die?
Jesus had ‘other sheep, which are not of this fold’ (John 10:16). That is the great crowd, with an earthly hope.
Finish the verse: “them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd” (John 10:16). The other sheep are Gentiles brought in beside Jewish disciples, into one flock. Christ “hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition” (Ephesians 2:14). The Watch Tower builds that wall again, between the anointed and the rest.
Read the full case: Into Christ, heirs of the promiseIf they reply: Only the anointed should eat the bread and drink the wine
Only those in the new covenant should eat and drink. The rest of us attend and give thanks.
Jesus said: “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” (John 6:53). At the supper: “Drink ye all of it” (Matthew 26:27). Paul told the whole church: “as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26). When twenty million attend and twenty-five thousand eat, the Lord’s command has been turned into something to watch.
Christ mediates the new covenant for the anointed. The rest benefit through them.
“There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:5–6). Between God and men, not between God and 144,000. A believer told that Christ is not his mediator has been placed under a class of men instead. And every believer inherits: “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29).
Then how do you know who is anointed?
By baptism into Christ, not by a private feeling. “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body … and have been all made to drink into one Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:13). The heavenly calling closed in 1935, the Watchtower said; in 2007 it dropped that date, and the number of partakers has risen since. A calling that one decade closes and another reopens is an organisation’s rule, not God’s.
Read the full case: Into Christ, heirs of the promiseIf they reply: Changes are new light that ‘shineth more and more’
Our positionA translation must follow what the inspired writers wrote, even where it is inconvenient. “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book” (Revelation 22:18).
We restored God’s name to the New Testament, where it was removed.
We agree God’s name matters; it fills the Old Testament. But no Greek manuscript of the New Testament has it, and your own appendix says so. The apostles, quoting the Old Testament, wrote ‘Lord’, and the Spirit let them. Sometimes that was the point. Romans 10 calls on “the Lord Jesus” (Romans 10:9), then “the same Lord over all” (Romans 10:12), then “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord” (Romans 10:13). Putting ‘Jehovah’ in verse 13 cuts the link Paul made: God’s name is called on through his Son.
Read the full case: The Name of GodIf they reply: ‘A god’ in John 1:1 is good Greek
‘A god’ in John 1:1 is good Greek. There is no article before theos.
Then the New World Translation should apply its rule. In the same chapter theos without the article is translated ‘God’: a man ‘sent as a representative of God’ (verse 6) and ‘No man has seen God at any time’ (verse 18). If grammar demanded ‘a god’ in verse 1, it would demand it there too. The choice was theology, not grammar.
Read the full case: “In the beginning was the Word”If they reply: John 1:1: ‘the Word was a god’John 1:1, in our conversation on the Trinity
Our positionA rule Scripture does not give, enforced as if God gave it and then withdrawn by the men who made it, is what Jesus called “teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9).
The apostles said ‘abstain … from blood’ (Acts 15:29). A transfusion takes blood into the body.
Three of the decree’s four items belong to the dinner table: “pollutions of idols … things strangled, and … blood” (Acts 15:20). James gives the reason: “For Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every sabbath day” (Acts 15:21). Gentile believers were asked to avoid what would make shared meals with Jewish believers impossible. The law behind it is about eating: “flesh with the life thereof … shall ye not eat” (Genesis 9:4). A transfusion is not a meal. The decree never had medicine in view.
The Holy Ghost decided it (Acts 15:28). It binds every Christian for all time.
Paul shows how the apostles applied it. Meat offered to idols, the first item on the list, he made a matter of conscience: “Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question for conscience sake” (1 Corinthians 10:25). The limit was a weaker brother: “take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumblingblock to them that are weak” (1 Corinthians 8:9). The concern was love for the brother at the table, not the substance itself.
Read the full case: ‘At liberty on all questions of eating and drinking’, in the Commandments of ChristIf they reply: We are only being careful
Blood stands for life and is sacred (Leviticus 17:11). Respect for life means refusing it in every form.
Scripture gives the reason: the blood of an animal killed for food is its life, so “thou shalt pour it upon the earth as water” (Deuteronomy 12:24), giving the life back to God. Nothing is killed in a transfusion. The donor gives part of himself and goes home. A law about the blood of slaughtered animals cannot require a man to die rather than receive blood. “Is it lawful … to save life, or to kill?” (Mark 3:4)
Read the full case: ‘At liberty on all questions of eating and drinking’, in the Commandments of ChristIf they reply: We are only being careful
If your doctor told you to abstain from alcohol, you wouldn’t inject it into your veins. Blood is the same.
A doctor’s reason is what alcohol does to your body, so the route makes no difference. God’s reason is different: blood is the life of a creature that has been killed, and that life belongs to him (Leviticus 17:11; Leviticus 17:14). That is why it was poured out, not eaten. A transfusion kills no creature and takes no life; the donor lives. The reason for the command is absent, so the command is not broken.
Read the full case: ‘At liberty on all questions of eating and drinking’, in the Commandments of ChristIf they reply: We are only being careful
We are only being careful. Better to go further than risk breaking God’s law.
That is the rabbis’ ‘fence around the law’. “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” (Deuteronomy 14:21) became a rule never to eat meat with milk at all. Jesus did not praise that kind of care: “laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). The fence becomes the law, and people are judged by it: “they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders” (Matthew 23:4). A food law stretched to forbid medicine, and long enforced by expulsion, is that kind of fence.
Read the full case: Tradition: what Paul commanded, and what came later
The Governing Body has only adjusted details. The principle stands.
For decades Witnesses refused red cells, plasma and platelets; from 1961 accepting blood could cost a Witness his membership, and some died refusing. Since 18 September 2026 each component is ‘a matter of personal conscience’. Robert Roberts put the test well: ‘Divine law would leave no liberty whatever.’ A rule that can be handed to conscience was never God’s law. It was a fence, and men were judged by it.
Read the full case: Robert Roberts, The Law of Moses, chapter 29If they reply: Changes are new light that ‘shineth more and more’
We still refuse whole blood. Only the components are left to conscience.
Whole blood is made of those components. If each one may be accepted, the line around whole blood is not drawn by Scripture. It is drawn by how the blood is separated in a laboratory. A command from God does not depend on that.
Read the full case: ‘At liberty on all questions of eating and drinking’, in the Commandments of ChristIf they reply: Shunning is biblical: ‘with such an one no not to eat’
Shunning is biblical: ‘with such an one no not to eat’ (1 Corinthians 5:11).
We agree the church must not keep fellowship with open, unrepentant sin, and we practise withdrawal ourselves. But Paul’s list is of conduct: fornicators, the covetous, idolaters, drunkards (1 Corinthians 5:11). Its aim was restoration: “ye ought rather to forgive him, and comfort him” (2 Corinthians 2:7). The Watch Tower applies the hardest form, no greeting at all, to ‘apostates’: people who disagree with the Governing Body from Scripture. Testing a teacher by the Bible is not wickedness (Acts 17:11).
Read the full case: The aim is faithful communion and restorationIf they reply: We don’t follow men; we follow Jesus, who directs the slave
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