Acts 17:23
Acts 17:2323For as I walked around and examined your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore what you worship as something unknown, I now proclaim to you.
JWs read this as Paul correcting ignorance — the Athenians worshipped blindly, and Paul supplied the true object of worship in place of the false. The altar itself is understood as evidence of their error, not as something Paul made any positive use of. The Watchtower's broader teaching that objects and customs from false worship are to be rejected outright makes it difficult to notice what Paul actually does with this one.
Look carefully at what Paul picks up. He is standing in a city full of idols, and out of everything available to him he chooses a pagan altar as his text. Not a Hebrew scripture — the Athenians had no reason to care about one — but an object built by idolaters for idolatrous worship. And he says: this. What you have been worshipping without knowing it, I am here to tell you about. He does not destroy the altar or demand it be pulled down before the conversation can start. He repurposes it. The gospel enters the culture through a door the culture had already built. When a Witness explains that a practice with pagan roots is permanently contaminated, this is the passage to sit in. Ask what Paul did with the most contaminated object in Athens. The apostolic pattern is not quarantine; it is capture — taking what idolaters misused and handing it back to the God it always belonged to. Compare , , .