1 Corinthians 1:23
1 Corinthians 1:2323but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
The NWT rewords Paul's "Christ crucified" around the torture-stake theology. JW commentary treats the verse primarily as a statement about gospel opposition — Jews and Gentiles found the crucifixion a scandal and foolishness — and rarely dwells on its Watchtower- specific tension: Paul calls preaching about the instrument the gospel centre, while the Watchtower teaches that remembering that same instrument in any cross-shaped form is pagan. The NWT's stauros-family rendering further distances English readers from how early Christians (and even hostile pagan witnesses like the Alexamenos graffito) actually described the execution.
1:23 is Paul's pivot inside the cross-preaching flow — the message IS the cross, and its offensiveness is the point. Use it in the cross-pagan-symbol chain: "Paul spent his whole ministry preaching a 'stumbling block' and 'foolishness' — the instrument of execution. The rhetorical question rs asks — 'would you cherish the instrument?' — is the same question first-century hearers threw at Paul, and his answer was that the offensiveness of the instrument was the point." Pair with (Paul boasts in the stake) and (preaching the stake is God's power). The Watchtower and Paul cannot both be right about whether the cross is something to remember.
Part of the NWT's systematic stauroō → "impale" / "execute on the stake" rendering across the New Testament (46 occurrences). Where mainstream translations have "Christ crucified," the NWT restructures Paul's cross-preaching language around the Watchtower stake theology. The Kingdom Interlinear itself renders stauroō literally as "to stake"; mainstream scholarship from hostile pagan witnesses (Tacitus, Lucian, the Alexamenos graffito c. AD 200) through secular historians (Ehrman, Crossan, Hengel) converges on a crossbeam. The effect on English readers is to make a shape-of-wood distinction carry the verse's theological weight, when Paul's own weight is on the accomplishment of the atonement, not the geometry of the execution.