James 5:14
James 5:1414Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.
JWs cite as the scriptural warrant for calling the elders in cases of spiritual struggle — and, by extension, as biblical support for the judicial committee process where elders hear confession of serious sin. The Watchtower reads "elders of the congregation" as authorising the present-day arrangement in which three appointed elders convene to determine repentance, apply reproof, or remove the member from the congregation.
is about prayer and anointing in sickness, not judicial determination of repentance. The very next verse (5:16) generalises confession in a different direction: "confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed." The verb is mutual — to one another, not to three appointed elders for adjudication. The biblical elder's role here is intercessory, not magisterial. The Watchtower system has imported a juridical model (a closed ecclesiastical court with charges, witnesses, and a verdict of reproof or removal) and read it back into James 5. Read the verse in its own context: prayer for the sick, mutual confession among brothers, healing as the goal. Pair with (the sympathetic high priest, throne of grace, confident approach) and (restoration in gentleness, with self-suspicion). The New Covenant's pastoral architecture is grace and mutual burden- bearing, not tribunal.
The NWT 2013 renders the closing phrase "in the name of Jehovah" — inserting the divine name into a New Testament verse where the Greek reads en tō onomati tou kuriou, "in the name of the Lord." This is a representative example of the NWT's wider pattern of inserting "Jehovah" into the New Testament when the Greek reads kurios, even where there is no Old Testament citation triggering the substitution. The effect quietly reroutes the prayer from the Lord (in James, naturally read as the risen Jesus) to Jehovah specifically, flattening one of the New Testament's loaded kurios-overlap moments.