1 John 1:1
1 John 1:11That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have gazed upon and touched with our own hands—this is the Word of life.
Jehovah's Witnesses rarely cite directly in Watchtower literature, but the opening is routinely absorbed into the broader "the Word was with God" reading from — Jesus as a prior heavenly being who later came to earth. Because the rs book frames 1 John as the charter text for the "antichrist Christendom" argument (rs pp. 32-33), its tactile language about seeing, hearing, and handling the Word of life is usually passed over in favour of the later chapters that can be enlisted against mainline Christianity.
Start the whole letter here. John opens with a string of first- person sensory verbs — heard, seen, looked at, handled — piled on top of "the Word of life." That is not abstract theology; it is John insisting that the Word they proclaim was physically real and physically among them. That opening tells you who John is writing against: first-century teachers who denied Jesus Christ came in actual flesh (docetists and proto-gnostics), the same opponents named explicitly in and 2 John 7. Once sets the target, the "they went out from us" verse in 2:19 can only mean the docetists John has already specified — not the Reformation, and not mainline Christianity. This verse is the key that turns the whole rs antichrist argument around. Read it aloud first; everything else in the discussion follows from it.