What Jehovah's Witnesses Believe

1. Who Jehovah's Witnesses Are

Jehovah's Witnesses are a worldwide religious movement that grew out of the Bible Student circles gathered around Charles Taze Russell in Pennsylvania in the 1870s and took the name Jehovah's witnesses in 1931, under Russell's successor Joseph Franklin Rutherford. They teach that Jehovah alone is God, that Jesus Christ is Jehovah's first creation and his appointed king, and that God's Kingdom is a real government in heaven that will shortly remove wickedness from the earth. Their legal and publishing arm is the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, and their teaching is settled by a small Governing Body based in Warwick, New York.

The organisation reports its own worldwide numbers each year. Recent reports have given a figure approaching nine million publishers, meaning baptised and unbaptised members who report taking part in the preaching work, with attendance at the annual Memorial of Christ's death reported above twenty million.

Publisher totals and Memorial attendance are published by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society itself in its annual service year report on jw.org. A publisher count measures reported preaching activity, which is a different measure from self-identification in surveys such as those run by the Pew Research Center, and it is the organisation's own count rather than an independent audit.

What a Witness Life Looks Like

Congregations meet in Kingdom Halls, led by unpaid elders and ministerial servants, with no salaried clergy and no distinct clerical dress. Baptism is by full immersion, and there is no infant baptism: a candidate is baptised after a course of study and after answering questions before the congregation. Witnesses are known for house-to-house preaching and for public literature carts, work they regard as a duty laid on every member by Matthew 24:14. They do not use the cross, holding that Jesus died on an upright stake, and they do not observe Christmas, Easter or birthdays, which they consider to have pagan roots or to draw honour away from God. The one annual observance is the Memorial, held after sundown on the date they calculate for Nisan 14.

2. Jehovah, the Son and the Holy Spirit

Jehovah's Witnesses teach that God is one person, whose personal name is Jehovah, and that the Trinity is a doctrine foreign to Scripture. Everything else on this page follows from that one commitment, and it is the point on which the whole Catholic disagreement rests.

Jehovah, the Name

Witnesses hold that the divine name represented by the four Hebrew letters YHWH must be used, and that its suppression behind the title Lord in most Bibles has obscured God's identity. They render it Jehovah, a form built from the Hebrew consonants with the vowels of Adonai, and they treat its restoration as central to true worship, citing Psalm 83:18 and Exodus 3:15. Catholic scholarship reads the same evidence and reconstructs the name as Yahweh, and the Congregation for Divine Worship directed in 2008 that the name is neither to be used nor pronounced in Catholic liturgy, following the ancient Jewish reverence that lies behind the Septuagint's use of Kyrios.

Jesus Christ as the First Creation

Witnesses teach that Jesus is a created being, the only-begotten Son in the sense that Jehovah made him directly and alone, and that Jehovah then made all other things through him. They identify him in his prehuman existence with the archangel Michael, citing 1 Thessalonians 4:16, where the Lord descends with an archangel's voice, and Jude 9. They read Colossians 1:15, which calls Christ the firstborn of all creation, and Revelation 3:14, which calls him the beginning of the creation by God, as plain statements that the Son had a beginning. Jesus is honoured, obeyed and prayed through, and Witnesses hold that worship belongs to Jehovah alone.

The Holy Spirit as God's Active Force

Witnesses teach that the holy spirit is Jehovah's impersonal active force, the power by which he accomplishes his will, comparable to a directed energy rather than a person. They point to the spirit being poured out (Acts 2:17), to people being filled with it, and to its being paired with other impersonal things, and they conclude that the personal language used of it in John 14 to 16 is figurative. On this account the spirit has no name, no worship and no distinct personhood.

3. The New World Translation

The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures is the Bible that Jehovah's Witnesses publish and use, issued in parts from 1950, completed in 1961 and thoroughly revised in 2013. The Watch Tower Society has never named its translation committee, explaining that the translators wished the credit to go to God rather than to themselves. The translation is distributed free in hundreds of languages and is now the version quoted in almost all Witness study material.

The Divine Name in the New Testament

The New World Translation uses Jehovah throughout the Old Testament, where the Hebrew has the four letters YHWH, and it also places Jehovah in the New Testament at a substantial number of verses. No surviving Greek New Testament manuscript carries the divine name at those places, where the text reads Kyrios, Lord, or Theos, God. The Society's own appendix explains the choice as a restoration of a name it believes was removed by later copyists, and it lists the Hebrew versions on which it relies. Critics answer that no Greek New Testament manuscript supports the change and that the substitution sometimes decides a disputed question, since verses where the New Testament applies Old Testament Lord texts to Jesus read differently once Jehovah has been inserted.

John 1:1 and the Article

The most argued sentence in the translation is the last clause of John 1:1, which the New World Translation renders as saying the Word was a god. The Greek reads theos en ho logos, with no article before theos. Witnesses argue that the missing article marks a quality or a lesser divine status, and they point to translators who have taken a similar line. The large majority of Greek scholars outside the movement answer that a predicate noun standing before the verb regularly drops the article without becoming indefinite, a pattern set out in the mid twentieth century by E. C. Colwell and refined since, and that the same Gospel closes the circle in John 20:28, where Thomas addresses the risen Jesus as his Lord and his God.

A second much discussed passage is Colossians 1:16-17, where the New World Translation supplies the word other, so that all things becomes all other things. The word has no counterpart in the Greek. Witnesses defend the addition as clarifying that the Son himself was made first. The 1984 edition printed the word in brackets, and the 2013 revision drops the brackets and keeps the word. Catholic and Protestant scholars answer that the addition imports the conclusion into the evidence, since Paul's argument in that hymn is precisely that everything in existence was created in, through and for the Son.

4. The 144,000 and the Great Crowd

Jehovah's Witnesses teach that exactly 144,000 people, the anointed, receive a heavenly calling and will rule with Christ, while all other faithful people, the great crowd of Revelation 7:9, are destined for everlasting life on a restored paradise earth. The two hopes divide the movement in practice: only those who profess the heavenly calling eat the bread and drink the wine at the annual Memorial, and everyone else present passes the emblems along. This site treats the exegesis of that number in full in our guide to the 144,000 of Revelation 7 and 14, which sets out why a symbolic reading of twelve times twelve times a thousand fits the genre and why Revelation 7:9 identifies the sealed with the countless multitude.

One consequence is worth noting here, because Witnesses discuss it themselves. The number of Memorial partakers reported worldwide has risen over recent decades and now stands above twenty thousand, which is more than the organisation once expected to find alive. Witness publications explain the rise by saying that some who partake are mistaken about their calling, and that the number of the anointed on earth is known to Jehovah rather than to any human counter.

Memorial partaker figures are published annually by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in its own service year report on jw.org. The explanation offered for the rising figure is likewise the Society's own, given in The Watchtower's studies of the Memorial.

5. The Refusal of Blood Transfusions

Jehovah's Witnesses refuse transfusions of whole blood and of its four primary components, red cells, white cells, platelets and plasma, because they read the biblical command to abstain from blood as binding on medical treatment as well as on diet. The position is a religious one about the sacredness of blood, and Witnesses press it in hospitals and in courts with considerable persistence.

The chain of texts is Genesis 9:4, given to Noah before Israel existed and therefore, Witnesses argue, binding on all humanity; Leviticus 17:10-14, which forbids eating blood because the life is in the blood; and the decree of the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15:28-29, which tells Gentile converts to abstain from blood. Witnesses hold that abstaining covers taking blood into the body by any route, and they compare a transfusion to a meal delivered intravenously.

What Is Left to Conscience

The policy has boundaries that are often misreported. Since 2000 the Watch Tower Society has taught that fractions taken from the primary components, such as albumin, immunoglobulins and clotting factors, are matters for the individual Witness to decide. Procedures that keep the patient's own blood in a continuous circuit, including cell salvage, haemodilution and dialysis, are likewise left to personal conscience. Witnesses have become sophisticated users of bloodless surgery, and Hospital Liaison Committees exist in most countries to connect patients with clinicians who will treat without transfusion. Bloodless techniques developed partly under this pressure are now used for patients of every faith and none.

The Consequence of Accepting Blood

A baptised Witness who accepts a transfusion willingly and without repentance is regarded by the organisation as having disassociated himself, which carries the same social consequences as removal described in section 8. Most Witnesses carry a signed advance directive refusing blood, and the courts of many countries uphold that refusal for a competent adult while treating cases involving children very differently.

The description of primary components, permitted fractions and conscience-matter procedures follows the Watch Tower Society's own published guidance, set out in a Questions From Readers article in The Watchtower in 2000 and maintained on the medical pages of jw.org. The consequence of unrepentant acceptance is stated in the Society's own literature.

The Catholic Position on Transfusion

Catholic teaching reads Acts 15 as a disciplinary decree given to hold Jewish and Gentile Christians together at table, later superseded, and it reads the Levitical blood law as fulfilled in the blood of Christ (Hebrews 9:11-14). Donating and receiving blood are treated as acts of charity and as legitimate medical care. Where a Catholic hospital or family meets a Witness patient, the Catholic obligation is to respect the informed refusal of a competent adult while never pretending to agree with the reasoning, and to seek a court's judgement where a child's life is at stake.

6. Political Neutrality and Military Service

Jehovah's Witnesses hold that Christians must stay strictly neutral in the affairs of the nations, because they belong to God's Kingdom and to no earthly one. In practice they refuse military service, decline to salute flags or sing national anthems, do not vote or stand for office, and take no part in political campaigns. They obey civil law, pay taxes and treat the state as a relative authority under Romans 13, and they accept the penalty when the two obligations collide.

The supporting texts are John 17:16, Jesus before Pilate saying that his kingdom is from another place (John 18:36), and Isaiah 2:4, where the nations beat their swords into ploughshares and learn war no more. Witnesses conclude that a Christian may not take up arms for any state, however just its cause, and that a salute or a vote would compromise exclusive devotion to Jehovah.

This stance has cost them heavily and has also changed the law in their favour. Witness litigation produced landmark rulings on religious liberty in the United States, including the Supreme Court's reversal in 1943 of an earlier decision requiring schoolchildren to salute the flag, and the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly found against states that imprisoned Witnesses for conscientious objection. Their refusal to bear arms is what brought them into collision with the Nazi state, which is the subject of the next section.

The Catholic View of the Same Question

Catholic teaching holds that legitimate defence can be a grave duty for those responsible for the lives of others, and it works out the conditions in the just war tradition, which this site sets out in its guide to just war doctrine. The Church also honours conscientious objection: the Catechism asks public authorities to make equitable provision for those who refuse to bear arms for reasons of conscience, obliging them to serve the human community in another form (CCC 2311). A Catholic can therefore respect the Witness objector's courage while rejecting the claim that all military service is forbidden to Christians, and while holding that voting is a genuine exercise of the responsibility owed to the common good.

7. What They Suffered Under the Nazis

Jehovah's Witnesses were among the first religious groups banned by the Nazi regime and among the very few that refused it as a body. Their refusal of the Hitler salute, of military service, of membership in Nazi organisations and of the Heil Hitler greeting marked them out immediately, and the state moved against them from 1933, with a general ban in force across the Reich by 1935.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that roughly 20,000 Witnesses lived in Germany when the Nazis took power. About 10,000 were imprisoned at some point, some 2,000 of them in concentration camps. Between 1,000 and 1,500 German and Austrian Witnesses died in custody, and about 250 were executed, most of them after military tribunals condemned them for refusing conscription. In the camps they were identified by a purple triangle, a badge used for no other group. Their children were taken from parents and placed in Nazi homes or reform schools.

One detail sets their case apart from every other group of camp prisoners. A Witness could obtain release at any time by signing a declaration renouncing the faith and promising obedience to the state. The paper was offered repeatedly, and very few signed it. August Dickmann, a young Witness shot at Sachsenhausen on 15 September 1939 before assembled prisoners for refusing military service, is remembered as the first conscientious objector executed in the war.

Figures and details in this section follow the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's published account of the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in its Holocaust Encyclopedia, which is also the source for the purple triangle marking, the renunciation declaration and the execution of August Dickmann.

8. Disfellowshipping and Leaving

Disfellowshipping is the formal removal of a baptised Witness from the congregation, decided by a committee of elders after serious wrongdoing that the person does not repent of. The listed grounds include sexual immorality, drunkenness, fraud and idolatry, and they also include promoting teaching contrary to Witness doctrine. Someone who resigns, or who takes an action the organisation treats as incompatible with membership, is regarded as having disassociated himself, with the same practical effect.

Members are then expected to limit association with the removed person. The rule reaches into families: relatives who live in a different household are told to keep contact to necessary family business, while a removed person living at home remains part of the household. Witnesses defend the practice from 1 Corinthians 5:11, where Paul tells the Corinthians not even to eat with an unrepentant member, and from 2 John 10, which withholds a greeting from someone who does not bring the teaching of Christ. They present it as a discipline meant to protect the congregation and to move the person to return.

In 2024 the organisation announced adjustments. The congregation announcement was reworded to say that the person is no longer one of Jehovah's Witnesses, elders were told to review reinstatement more frequently rather than waiting a year, and members were told that a greeting or a brief kindness toward someone removed is not itself wrongdoing. Former members and researchers have argued for decades that the practice imposes severe social and psychological costs, and courts and parliamentary inquiries in several countries have examined it.

The grounds for removal, the association rules and the 2024 adjustments are the organisation's own, announced at its 2024 annual meeting and set out in its subsequent study material. Criticism of the practice comes from former members and from public inquiries, which are separate sources with separate interests, and this page reports both as what they are.

The Catholic Comparison

Catholic canon law has its own penalties, including excommunication, and the comparison is instructive on both sides. An excommunicated Catholic remains bound to attend Mass, is barred from receiving the sacraments until the penalty is lifted, and suffers no rule requiring family or friends to withdraw ordinary contact. The purpose is stated as medicinal, aimed at repentance and restoration (Code of Canon Law, canon 1311 and following). Catholics who find the Witness practice hard to accept should also know their own history well enough to be honest about periods when the Church behaved with far less restraint. On the general marks of healthy and unhealthy religious communities, pressure, information control and the cost of leaving, this site treats the question separately in our guide to discerning cults from Christianity.

9. 1914, Armageddon and the Paradise Earth

Jehovah's Witnesses teach that Christ began ruling invisibly as king in heaven in October 1914, that the last days began at the same moment, and that God's Kingdom will shortly destroy all wicked human government at Armageddon and restore the earth as a paradise for the obedient. Their eschatology is the engine of the preaching work, since they hold that the good news of that established Kingdom must be declared to all the inhabited earth before the end comes (Matthew 24:14).

How 1914 Is Calculated

The date rests on a chain of readings. Witnesses take the seven times of Daniel 4, the period during which Nebuchadnezzar was driven from his throne, as a prophetic measure of the Gentile Times that Jesus mentions in Luke 21:24. Applying a day for a year, seven times of 360 days yields 2,520 years, counted from the destruction of Jerusalem, which Witness chronology places in 607 BC. The count lands in 1914. Mainstream biblical scholarship and Near Eastern chronology date the fall of Jerusalem to 587 or 586 BC on the evidence of Babylonian records, which removes the arithmetic that produces 1914.

The Two Hopes and the End of the Wicked

After Armageddon, Witnesses expect a thousand-year reign in which the earth is cleansed and the dead are raised to live on it under the anointed rulers described in section 4. They teach that the human soul is mortal, that the dead are unconscious (Ecclesiastes 9:5, 10), that hell in Scripture means the common grave rather than a place of torment, and that the finally wicked are destroyed for ever rather than punished consciously. Catholic teaching holds instead that the soul survives death, that the just enter the vision of God and the damned suffer eternal separation from him (Matthew 25:46; CCC 1035), a difference this site works through in its guides to hell and the resurrection of the body.

The Record of Expectation

The movement's history includes dates that arrived without the expected events. Russell's Bible Students looked to 1914 for a visible end, and after the First World War the teaching was reinterpreted as an invisible enthronement. Rutherford began delivering the lecture Millions Now Living Will Never Die in 1918 and published it as a booklet in 1920, pointing to 1925 for the return of the ancient patriarchs. Watch Tower literature in the late 1960s drew wide attention to 1975 as the close of six thousand years of human existence, and a 1980 Watchtower acknowledged that some statements had encouraged expectations that did not come to pass. The organisation today teaches that no one can know the day or the hour and warns members against fixing dates.

10. The Catholic Response: Nicaea and the Divinity of the Son

The Catholic answer to Jehovah's Witnesses is one question asked in one place: is the Son a creature. The Council of Nicaea in 325 met over exactly this, when Arius taught that the Son was the highest of creatures, made before time out of the Father's will, so that there was a moment when the Son did not exist. The council confessed the Son as begotten from the Father, God from God, true God from true God, begotten and not made, of one substance with the Father, the Greek homoousios (CCC 242, 465). Jehovah's Witnesses reject the label Arian and point to differences between their teaching and his, and on the one question the council decided, whether the Son is a creature, they give the answer Arius gave.

The Scriptural Case

Catholic argument here works from the text, since Witnesses accept no other authority. John 1:1 places the Word with God and identifies him as God before anything was made, and John 1:3 says that everything that came into being came through him, which leaves nothing for him to be numbered among. John 8:58 has Jesus claim the divine name of Exodus 3:14 for himself, and his hearers pick up stones. John 20:28 has Thomas call him God with no correction from Jesus. Colossians 2:9 says the whole fullness of deity dwells in him bodily. Hebrews 1:6 has the Father command the angels to worship the Son, which is decisive against identifying the Son as an angel, and Hebrews 1:8 addresses the Son as God with a throne for ever. Titus 2:13 awaits the appearing of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Philippians 2:6 says he was in the form of God and did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.

On Colossians 1:15, the word firstborn (Greek prototokos) carries the sense of rank and inheritance rather than sequence in time, which is how the Old Testament uses it of David in Psalm 89:27, a man who was the youngest of Jesse's sons. On Revelation 3:14, the word arche, beginning, also means source or origin, and the same book calls Christ the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last (Revelation 22:13), which Isaiah 44:6 makes a title of the Lord God alone.

Side by Side

Witness positions in this table are drawn from the Watch Tower Society's own publications, including its doctrinal study books and the reference material on jw.org. Catholic positions cite the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Scripture. On baptism, the Catholic judgement is that the Trinitarian formula requires the faith the words carry, so a person baptised as a Jehovah's Witness who becomes Catholic is baptised, with the diocese deciding any doubtful case.

What Catholics Should Concede

Honest argument names the strong points on the other side. Jehovah's Witnesses know their Bible, often better than the Catholic who answers the door. They give their time and money freely, keep sober and orderly lives, cross racial and national lines in their congregations, and have paid real prices for their conscience under more than one regime. Their insistence that God has a name is a corrective to a vague religiosity that treats God as an abstraction. The Catholic case rests on the Christology and gains nothing from pretending these things are absent.

11. How to Talk With a Witness at the Door

The two people on the doorstep have prepared for the conversation and you probably have not, which is the whole difficulty. What follows is a way of talking that keeps the real question in view and treats the callers as the neighbours they are.

Go Straight to the Son

Conversations about 1914, the flag, birthdays and blood can run for an hour and settle nothing, because each of them is downstream of the Christology. Ask the question that decides everything, directly and kindly: was there ever a time when the Son did not exist. The answer commits your visitor, and the discussion becomes honest. From there both sides can work through John 1:1-3, John 20:28, Colossians 1:15-17 and Hebrews 1:6 with the text open.

Learn Your Own Faith First

A Catholic who cannot explain the Trinity will lose the conversation and will deserve to. Learn what consubstantial means and why Nicaea needed the word. Learn why firstborn in Psalm 89:27 belongs to the youngest son of Jesse. Learn the difference between honouring an angel and worshipping God. Someone who has memorised a presentation notices at once whether you have done the work.

Say the Hard Thing Plainly, Once

Charity includes telling the truth. The Catholic Church holds that the Son is God from God, that the holy spirit is a divine person, and that a baptism which does not carry that faith is invalid. Say so, give your reasons from Scripture, and stop. An argument repeated louder persuades nobody, and a friendship that survives one clear disagreement can carry many more conversations. If a family member has joined the Witnesses, keep the door open, keep praying, and refuse to make the relationship depend on winning.

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