Acts 7:37
Acts 7:3737This is the same Moses who told the Israelites, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers.’
JWs accept that Stephen identifies Jesus as the prophet of in his Sanhedrin sermon. They do not typically press the exegetical implication — that the chapter's speaking role is filled by the Son in the New Testament — because that reading constrains later institutional claims to interpretive authority.
Stephen, defending the gospel before the Sanhedrin moments before his martyrdom, identifies Jesus as the prophet Moses predicted. This is the second apostolic application of in Acts (Peter in is the first), and the convergence is decisive: across apostolic preaching, the singular eschatological prophet of Moses' prediction is Jesus. Stephen pays for the identification with his life. Pair with and 7:40 (the gospel crowds also identifying Jesus as "the Prophet" with the article — the Deut 18 figure they were waiting for) and (the prophetic age closed in the Son). The doorstep insight: when the apostles cite Deuteronomy 18, they cite it Christologically. Any institution today that occupies the speaking role of that chapter has to displace Christ from the slot the apostles assigned him.
Notably, NWT does NOT insert "Jehovah" here even though Stephen is paraphrasing the same Deuteronomy 18 passage that quotes. The Greek text reads "ho theos" (God) rather than kyrios, so the Tetragrammaton-restoration logic does not trigger. The result is a small but observable inconsistency in the NWT's NT method — Peter's citation gets "Jehovah", Stephen's paraphrase does not, even though both refer to the same Mosaic original.