Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses are best known for two things: going door-to-door, and calling God by his personal name, Jehovah. Both come from the same conviction — that most of Christianity has drifted from what the Bible actually teaches, and that their organization has recovered it.
Jehovah's Witnesses hold distinctive teachings on the identity of Jesus Christ, the nature of God, and the translation of the Bible itself. This collection examines those teachings using Jehovah's Witness sources, then compares them with Scripture.
What Jehovah's Witnesses Believe
Why they use the name “Jehovah”
In the Old Testament, God has a personal name — four Hebrew letters, usually written YHWH. Most English Bibles translate it as “LORD.” Jehovah's Witnesses translate it as “Jehovah” and use it constantly, because they believe using God's actual name matters.
They trace their movement to Charles Taze Russell, a Bible teacher in Pennsylvania in the 1870s. They adopted the name “Jehovah's Witnesses” in 1931, based on a verse where God says, “You are my witnesses” (Isaiah 43:10).
Who decides what they teach
Jehovah's Witnesses are led by a small group called the Governing Body, based at the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society's headquarters. They teach that this group is the channel God uses today to explain the Bible correctly.
In practice, that means a Witness doesn't just study the Bible alone — they're expected to accept how the organization's magazine, The Watchtower, interprets it.
Their own translation of the Bible
Jehovah's Witnesses read the Bible in a translation their own organization produced, called the New World Translation. Several of its most disputed word choices fall exactly on the verses that speak most directly about who Jesus is — examined one at a time below.
Is Jesus God, or God's first creation?
This is the heart of it. Jehovah's Witnesses teach that only the Father — Jehovah — is Almighty God. Jesus, they say, is not God, but God's first and greatest creation: the angel Michael, in human form.
That means they reject the Trinity, the historic Christian teaching that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God in three persons. They teach instead that the Son is a created being, and that the Holy Spirit isn't a person at all, but God's active force — not someone you can know.
What happens after this life
Jehovah's Witnesses teach that 144,000 people go to heaven to rule with Christ. Everyone else who's faithful hopes for something different: eternal life in a paradise on earth, after God destroys the present world at Armageddon. Getting there depends on faith in Jesus, obedience, and staying loyal to the organization.
Where This Differs From What the Bible Teaches
The Bible calls Jesus God, not God's first creation. John says “all things were made through him” (John 1:3) — which means he can't be one of the things that were made. Thomas calls him “my Lord and my God,” and Jesus doesn't correct him (John 20:28). And the Holy Spirit acts like a person throughout the New Testament — he can be lied to (Acts 5:3) and grieved (Ephesians 4:30), which an impersonal force cannot be.
The Bible also teaches that eternal life is a gift, not something earned through an organization: “by grace you have been saved through faith… not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). The questions below walk through each of these differences slowly, using the New World Translation's own wording and the Greek text behind it.
Everything else on this page comes back to one question: is Jesus God, or something less than God? Start there — with the single verse the New World Translation is most famous for changing, John 1:1.
Is Jesus God or "a god" in John 1:1?
Examine the New World Translation's "the Word was a god" against the Greek text, the grammar both sides actually argue from, and John's own wider claims about Jesus.
Jesus Christ
The New World Translation
Why does the New World Translation say "all other things" in Colossians 1:16-17?
Examine the New World Translation's inserted word "other" in Colossians 1:16-17 against the Greek text, which contains no word for "other" at all.
Does "Jehovah" belong in the New Testament?
Examine the New World Translation's use of "Jehovah" in the Christian Greek Scriptures against what the surviving Greek manuscripts actually contain.
Why doesn't The Berea include the New World Translation?
An overview of why The Berea does not carry the New World Translation, summarizing the specific renderings examined in depth elsewhere in this series.
Go deeper
The positive biblical foundation behind this comparison — not a response to Jehovah's Witnesses, but what Scripture teaches on its own terms.