The Name

Words to Know

Jehovah’s Witnesses — the movement that grew out of the Bible Students gathered by Charles Taze Russell in Pittsburgh in the 1870s. It took the name Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931, from Isaiah 43:10, and today counts more than eight million active members around the world.¹

Jehovah — an English form of God’s name, written in Hebrew with four letters, YHWH. The form Jehovah comes from reading those four letters with the vowels of a different word, Adonai, Lord. Most scholars think the name was first pronounced Yahweh, which is how the World English Bible prints it.²

The Governing Body — the small group of men at the headquarters in Warwick, New York, who direct the organization worldwide. Since 2012 it has taught that it is the faithful and discreet slave of Matthew 24:45.³

Disfellowshipping — expelling a member. Since 2024 the organization’s own term is removal from the congregation. Members are told to avoid association with the person. Relatives who share a home still share ordinary family life, but not religious fellowship. Relatives who live elsewhere are to keep contact to a minimum.⁴

Start with the name.

Your movement is named for God’s name. It took the name in 1931 from a line in Isaiah: “You are my witnesses,” says the LORD (Isaiah 43:10). Your own translation of the Bible prints the name about seven thousand times. You were taught that the churches hid it, and that a true worshipper uses it.

I am not going to tell you that the people in your congregation are bad people. Many of them are honest, sober, kind and brave in ways most churchgoers are not, and some of your people have died rather than take up a weapon. I will come back to that, because it is very close to me. The question is whether the four things your organization is built on, the name, the organization, the date and the door, are the ones I set down. Let me take them one at a time.

The First Pillar: The Name

You were taught that a true worshipper uses God’s name. I taught you to call him Father.

So notice how I spoke to God.

When my friends asked me to teach them to pray, I did not begin with the name. I began: Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy (Matthew 6:9; Luke 11:1–2). In the garden on the night I was arrested, I prayed: Abba, Father (Mark 14:36). Abba is the plain, close word for father that a family used at home. In all four gospels I call God Father again and again, and in no surviving Greek copy of the gospels am I recorded saying the four-letter name aloud.

That was not because I was ashamed of it. In my day my people honored the name so deeply that it was hardly ever spoken. Scripture readers said Lord in its place. In the Temple the name was still spoken, by the priests when they blessed the people and by the high priest on the Day of Atonement.⁵ As far as the gospels show, I kept that reverence. And I gave you something closer than a name. I gave you a father.

The name was never kept holy by saying it. Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven (Matthew 7:21).

The Second Pillar: The Organization

You were taught that Jehovah has an organization, and that it speaks through the Governing Body. The parable you take that title from is about a servant, and it is a warning.

Since 2012 the Governing Body has taught that it alone is the faithful and discreet slave, the channel through which God feeds his people.³ Before that, your organization taught that the slave was all of the anointed together. The teaching about who speaks for God was changed by the men it now names.

Read the parable it comes from. Who then is the faithful and wise servant, whom his lord has set over his household, to give them their food in due season? (Matthew 24:45). The servant is praised for one thing: feeding the household. Then I describe the other kind of servant, the one who begins to beat his fellow servants (Matthew 24:48–49). The parable is not a title. It is a test, and every servant is under it.

And I told my followers plainly: one is your teacher, the Christ, and all of you are brothers … Neither be called masters, for one is your master, the Christ (Matthew 23:8, 10).

An organization that cannot be questioned will, sooner or later, protect itself before it protects the weak. Between 2013 and 2017 a Royal Commission in Australia examined how institutions handled the sexual abuse of children. It found that your organization’s own files there recorded allegations of child sexual abuse against 1,006 members, going back to 1950, and it found no evidence that the organization had reported any of them to the police. The organization says its policy is not to discourage anyone from going to the police. But the Commission found that it applied its rule that an accusation needs two witnesses even to children abused in secret, and called that wrong.⁶

I said: Whoever will cause one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him if he were thrown into the sea with a millstone hung around his neck (Mark 9:42).

The Third Pillar: The Date

You were taught that the last days began in 1914. I told you not to follow people who say the time is at hand.

Your organization teaches that I began to rule invisibly from heaven in 1914, and that the end of this world is very near.⁷ It has said so for more than a century. In 1920 its president preached that millions now living will never die, and pointed to 1925. In the late 1960s its publications pointed to 1975. The teaching about which generation would see the end has been revised more than once, most recently in 2010.⁸

I was asked about the end, and I answered: Watch out that you don’t get led astray, for many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he,’ and, ‘The time is at hand.’ Therefore don’t follow them (Luke 21:8).

And: of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Mark 13:32). After I rose, when my friends asked again, I said: It isn’t for you to know times or seasons (Acts 1:7).

A date is a powerful thing to hold over people. Some families put off college, careers and children because the end was said to be so close.⁸ The end did not come. The people were real.

The Fourth Pillar: The Door

You were taught to knock on every door, and to shut the door on those who leave. I ate with the people the door was shut against.

Your people knock on doors more steadily than almost any other church on earth, and they do it with courage. But the same organization that sends you to every door teaches you to close your own door on a grown son or a sister, living elsewhere, who has been disfellowshipped, or who has formally resigned. Some parents have gone for decades without speaking to children who were put out or who left. Some people have been left with no one, because everyone they knew was in the congregation.⁴

Your elders point to a line of mine: let him be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector (Matthew 18:17).

So ask how I treated tax collectors. I called one of them, Matthew, to follow me, and then I ate in his house with many tax collectors and sinners. The Pharisees asked my disciples, Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners? (Matthew 9:9–11; Luke 5:29). Treating someone as a tax collector, in my way, meant going to dinner with him.

I told a story about a son who left home and wasted everything. When he came back, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him (Luke 15:20). And when the older brother refused to come in to the party, his father came out, and begged him (Luke 15:28). The father went out the door for both of his sons. He never shut it.

What Your Church Kept

Now, in fairness, look at what your church kept. Some of it is very close to me.

You refused the sword. I said love your enemies (Matthew 5:44) and Put your sword back into its place (Matthew 26:52). Your people have taken that more seriously than almost any church in the last century. Under the Nazis, they would not give the Hitler salute or serve in the army, and they were sent to the camps wearing a purple triangle. Hundreds were executed for refusing military service, and many more died in the camps.⁹ In the United States, Witness children who would not salute the flag won a case in the Supreme Court in 1943 that protects every American’s freedom of conscience.¹⁰

You have no paid clergy. Your elders work ordinary jobs, your halls are built by volunteers, and no plate is passed at your meetings. Freely you received, so freely give (Matthew 10:8).

And you refused some of the additions other churches kept. You never taught that God tortures people forever in hell.¹¹ That is not what I meant by Gehenna, and The Lessons of Jesus tells the story of how that idea grew. You knew that the verse about the Trinity in some old Bibles, in 1 John 5:7, was added centuries later. It was.¹¹

So the question is not whether I am in your congregation. I am in the prisoner with the purple triangle, and in the volunteer on the roof of the hall. The question is which part stands on top. On top is the organization.

What You’ll Hear Back

If you show this to someone you love, they will have answers ready. Here are the six you will hear most, and what is underneath each one.

“The churches took God’s name out of the Bible. Jesus made it known.”

They mean my prayer: I made known to them your name, and will make it known (John 17:26). Read that same gospel and count how I named God to my friends. Over and over, the word is Father. That was the name I made known.

And you should know this about your own translation: it puts the name Jehovah into the New Testament 237 times, though no surviving Greek manuscript of the New Testament has it.¹² The translators say, in appendix A5, that copyists replaced the name with Lord in the earliest copies, and they restored it for that reason. That is an argument about what the lost originals said, not a reading found in any manuscript we have.

“We are living in the last days. The signs prove it.”

People have said so in many centuries since mine, and they have often pointed to wars and earthquakes. I told you what to do with anyone who says The time is at hand: don’t follow them (Luke 21:8). And I told you what the servant should be found doing when the master comes: feeding the household (Matthew 24:46). Not counting the days.

“The Governing Body is the faithful and discreet slave.”

Before 2012 your organization taught something else about who the slave was. A teaching that names its own teachers as God’s only channel should be looked at very carefully. Look at the parable. It does not name anyone. It asks every servant one question: did you feed the household, or did you beat your fellow servants?

“Disfellowshipping keeps the congregation clean. Paul said not even to eat with such a person.”

He did say that, in 1 Corinthians 5:11. Read what he wrote to the same church in a later letter, about a man they had punished: This punishment which was inflicted by the many is sufficient for such a one; so that on the contrary you should rather forgive him and comfort him, lest by any means such a one should be swallowed up with his excessive sorrow. Therefore I beg you to confirm your love toward him (2 Corinthians 2:6–8). Some scholars think it was the same man. Most recent commentators think it was someone else. Either way, Paul told the church to forgive and comfort a man it had punished.¹³

Even Paul knew when a punishment had gone far enough. Some families have gone for decades without speaking.

“The Bible forbids blood.”

They mean the letter in Acts that tells Gentile believers to abstain … from blood (Acts 15:29), which most scholars think meant, in that world, eating meat with the blood still in it. Your organization applied it to medical transfusions in 1945.¹⁴

I had my own argument about a law that seemed to forbid doing good. On the Sabbath, in a synagogue, with a man in front of me whose hand was withered, I asked: Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to do good, or to do harm? To save a life, or to kill? (Mark 3:4). The law was given for life. The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). A rule about eating that is applied to refuse a treatment a doctor says will save a life has been turned against its own purpose.

“We are the only ones who preach from house to house, like the apostles.”

Your courage at the door is real, and Paul did teach from house to house (Acts 20:20). But in my scene of the last judgment, nobody is asked how many doors they knocked on. They are asked whether they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, and visited the sick and the prisoner (Matthew 25:35–36). Your organization itself stopped asking most members to report their hours in 2023, saying that the ministry “involves much more than counting time.”¹⁵

If You Were Raised in It

You may remember no birthday parties and no Christmas, the meetings at the Kingdom Hall, the Watchtower study, the big assemblies in stadiums, Saturday mornings at strangers’ doors with your parents, and being different from everyone at school. You may remember being told the end would come before you grew up. Some of you are still in, and love it. Some of you left, and lost your parents, your brothers and sisters, and every friend you had, on the same day.

If your own family will not speak to you because you left, that is not me. I am the father in the road.

Nothing here asks you to stop loving the people who taught you, or to give up the courage they gave you. It only asks you to do what I asked of the lawyer: How do you read it? (Luke 10:26). Read the gospels yourself, without the study questions at the bottom of the page. Count how many times I say Father. Then read Luke 15 and decide what kind of father he is.

Check It Yourself

Read Matthew 6:9–13 and Mark 14:36. Write down what I called God.

Read the Gospel of John and count how often I call God Father.

Read Matthew 24:42–51. Write down what the good servant is found doing, and what the bad one does.

Read Luke 21:8, Mark 13:32 and Acts 1:7.

Read Matthew 18:15–17, then Matthew 9:9–13. Write down how I treated tax collectors.

Read 1 Corinthians 5, then 2 Corinthians 2:5–11.

Read Mark 3:1–6 and Mark 2:23–28.

Read Luke 15:11–32. Write down every time the father goes out of the house.

The Short Version

• Your movement is named for God’s name, Jehovah, a form most scholars think was first pronounced Yahweh.
• I taught you to pray Our Father, and in the garden I said Abba. No Greek copy of the gospels records me saying the name aloud.
• The name is kept holy by doing the will of the Father, not by saying it.
• Since 2012 the Governing Body has called itself the faithful and discreet slave. The parable praises a servant for feeding the household and warns the one who beats his fellow servants.
• An Australian Royal Commission found no evidence that your organization there had reported any of the more than a thousand members accused of child abuse in its files to the police.
• 1914, 1925 and 1975 were all preached. I said: when someone says The time is at hand, don’t follow them.
• Treat him as a tax collector meant, for me, eating at his table. The father in my story ran out the door.
• Paul himself told the church to forgive and comfort the man it had punished.
• You kept the refusal of the sword, the purple triangle, an unpaid ministry, and you refused eternal torment and the added Trinity verse.
• Is it lawful … to save a life, or to kill? The law was given for life.