1 Corinthians 15:50
1 Corinthians 15:5050Now I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
The Watchtower reads 15:50 as a universal denial of bodily heavenly existence — "flesh and blood cannot inherit" is taken at face value as proof that any heavenly-hope believer must shed physical embodiment entirely and be raised as a spirit creature. This pairs with the general JW doctrine that Jesus himself was raised as a spirit and that the 144,000 follow the same pattern. The phrase is deployed especially against the hope of a bodily rapture — Paul is read as explicitly ruling it out.
Read one verse further. is Paul's own gloss on 15:50: "we shall all be changed... this which is corruptible must put on incorruption, and this which is mortal must put on immortality." "Changed" is transformed, not replaced. "This" is a demonstrative pointing at the existing body. "Put on" is clothing imagery — immortality on top of mortality, not discarding the body. "Flesh and blood" is Semitic idiom for mortal creatureliness — Jesus uses it in ("flesh and blood did not reveal this to you") and Paul in . closes the loop: the risen Christ says "a spirit has no flesh and bones, as you see I have" — deliberately not "flesh and blood." Paul is ruling out the mortal-human state, not physical embodiment.