Rarely—if ever—do Jehovah’s Witnesses compare the Watchtower claims to what the Bible texts actually say. Rather, they trust the Watchtower organization implicitly and assume that when the Watchtower quotes or cites Bible texts that those passages fully support the points the Watchtower is making.

Often, that is not the case at all. The Watchtower frequently misrepresents the Bible through use of inaccurate quotations. In his book, Scripture Twisting,  James Sire defines this error as follows: “A biblical text is referred to but is either not quoted in the way the text appears in any standard translation or is wrongly attributed.”[1]         

Here are some examples of how the Watchtower misleads through inaccurate quotation: Continue reading

The late Walter Martin, author of The Kingdom of the Cults, once said in a lecture, “There are basic rules of language that God himself observes, so we need to learn what they are and teach and apply them.”

The apostle Peter put it this way, “There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. 17 You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.” (2 Peter 3:16-17)

In his excellent 1980 book, Scripture Twisting, James W. Sire spells out specific ways in which various groups go wrong in the way they understand and teach Bible doctrine.

Most of his categories are applicable to the Watchtower, so I have decided to do a series on this topic, giving my own examples of where the Watchtower goes wrong. Continue reading