John 12:38
John 12:3838This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the prophet: “Lord, who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”
John quotes — "Lord, who has put faith in the thing heard from us?" — and the NWT inserts "Jehovah" where the Greek reads kurie ("Lord"). The Watchtower applies the quotation to the unbelief of Jesus' contemporaries and treats the "Lord/Jehovah" question as addressed to the Father, not to Jesus.
This is the verse where the Isaiah 53 / Isaiah 6 chain locks Jesus into the position of the YHWH whose glory Isaiah saw. John quotes here and in the next verses, then concludes in verse 41 that "Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke about him." The "him" is the same person both quotations are about — and that person is Jesus, the subject established in verse 37. Pair with , 5 ("I saw Jehovah… my eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of armies") and the conclusion is unavoidable: the Jehovah of Isaiah's vision is the Jesus of John's gospel.
The Greek text reads kurie ("Lord") — the New Testament's standard vocative for the divine Lord, drawn from the Septuagint of . The NWT replaces it with "Jehovah." The translation choice introduces a doctrinal cost: the next several verses identify the Lord/Jehovah of the Isaiah quotations with Jesus (verse 41 says Isaiah saw "his glory and spoke about him"). When the NWT writes "Jehovah" into verse 38 and verse 41 then keeps the antecedent "him" referring to Jesus, the resulting English text invites the reader to bifurcate two figures the Greek text deliberately identifies.