Colossians 2:9
Colossians 2:99For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form.
JWs read through the NWT's "divine quality" rendering and conclude that Jesus reflects God's qualities without being God himself. The verse becomes a description of Christ as the perfect mirror of Jehovah's attributes — a created being who fully displays the character of his Maker, much as a son might display the character of his father. The "bodily" element is acknowledged but read as the locus of the reflection rather than as the locus of the Deity.
Paul deliberately chose theotetos (the essence of being God) rather than theiotes (divine quality, used at ). Lightfoot's classic formulation: "theiotes is the quality, theotes the essence." Paul stacks three intensifiers on the strongest available Greek word for deity: pan to pleroma — "all the fullness" — and somatikos — "in bodily form." There is no stronger way to say "Jesus is fully God in a human body" in koine Greek. Paul could have written theiotes if he had meant divine quality. He did not. The bodily reference grounds the claim in the historical incarnation rather than allowing it to evaporate into metaphor. Even the NWT's own Kingdom Interlinear shows the literal Greek as "the godship" (1969 KIT) — a term close to deity, not "divine quality." The 2013 KIT revision quietly weakened the gloss to "divinity," moving the interlinear toward the smooth text rather than the reverse.
The NWT renders theotetos as "divine quality," a translation no major English version supports. Every other translation — KJV, ESV, NASB, NIV, NRSV, CSB, NET — renders the Greek as "deity" or "Godhead." The NWT's choice inverts the standard lexical distinction by applying the weaker English gloss ("divine quality") to the stronger Greek word (theotetos), while reserving "deity" for nothing. The 1969 KIT interlinear glossed the underlying Greek as "godship"; the 1985 KIT weakened this to "divinity" — a rare instance of the Watchtower adjusting its own interlinear toward the NWT smooth text rather than letting the literal gloss stand. The verse appears in the master divergence table as a "High" doorstep-utility passage: easy to show side by side with any standard translation.