Acts 1:3
Acts 1:33After His suffering, He presented Himself to them with many convincing proofs that He was alive. He appeared to them over a span of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.
The Watchtower reads — Jesus "presented himself alive to them by many positive proofs, appearing to them throughout forty days and telling them about the Kingdom of God" — as general confirmation of the resurrection without the physical- bodily emphasis the text actually carries. The "many positive proofs" is treated as authoritative testimony but detached from the implications for the mode of his post-resurrection body and therefore from the mode of his eventual return. In the 1914 framework, Christ's return is invisible — so 's bodily visibility must not carry structural weight.
is the foundation for the angels' declaration. For forty days, Jesus "presented himself alive" — Greek parestēsen heauton zōnta — visibly, physically, with many positive proofs. He ate with the disciples (, ). He invited them to touch him: "a spirit has no flesh and bones, as you see I have" (). He spoke, taught, and finally ascended visibly before their eyes in .
This is the immediate context the two angels invoke in when they say Jesus "will come in the same manner as you have seen him going into the sky." The disciples had just spent forty days with a physically visible, bodily risen Christ. That is the "same manner" the angels reference. in the NWT then seals the pattern: "every eye will see him, and those who pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth will beat themselves in grief because of him." Every eye. Those who pierced him. Not a mental perception — an ocular, bodily, universally-witnessed return. The Watchtower's 1914 invisible- parousia requires you to decouple from — to treat the forty-day visibility as incidental rather than as the definitional context for the angels' promise. The text refuses that move.