Acts 8:16
Acts 8:1616For the Holy Spirit had not yet fallen upon any of them; they had simply been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus.
Read within the account of the Samaritans receiving holy spirit through the apostles, which the Watchtower uses to show that the spirit came in an orderly way through appointed channels — a pattern it applies to its own arrangement of oversight.
The phrase to notice is the one Luke uses in passing: they had been baptised in the name of the Lord Jesus. It is the same formula at and . Luke says it three times without comment, which is how you can tell it was simply what was done. Baptism in the earliest church attached a person to Jesus. That is worth establishing calmly, because it sets up the real question. Paul asks the Corinthians whether they were baptised in the name of Paul, expecting an emphatic no — attaching baptism to any other name is the error. Yet since 1985 the second JW baptismal question has the candidate publicly affirm that their baptism identifies them as one of Jehovah's Witnesses in association with God's spirit-directed organisation. The earlier 1955 wording did not mention the organisation at all. So the question is not whether the organisation is good or bad. It is where in the New Testament anyone was baptised into one. Compare , .