John 16:13
John 16:1313However, when the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth. For He will not speak on His own, but He will speak what He hears, and He will declare to you what is to come.
JWs cite this verse to argue that the holy spirit is an impersonal force that God uses to guide his organisation. The Watchtower teaches that the Spirit's "guiding into all truth" is fulfilled through the Governing Body's publications — the Spirit guides the organisation, not individual believers. The NWT's depersonalised rendering reinforces the claim that the Spirit is an active force rather than a person.
Jesus ascribes a constellation of personal actions to the Spirit in this verse: guiding, hearing, speaking, and declaring. These are not the behaviours of an impersonal force — electricity does not hear, wind does not speak. The Greek uses the masculine demonstrative ekeinos ("he/that one") and the masculine reflexive heautou ("of himself"), both agreeing with the masculine paraklētos (helper/ advocate) from . Even the NWT's own rendering preserves personal actions — "guide you into all the truth" and "declare to you the things to come" — that are unintelligible if attributed to an impersonal force. The passage forms part of the Upper Room Discourse (John 14–16), where Jesus consistently uses personal pronouns and personal-action verbs for the Spirit, treating him as a person who will continue Jesus' own ministry.
The NWT renders the masculine pronoun ekeinos as "that one" rather than "he," and uses "it" for some masculine forms — depersonalising the Spirit. The 2013 NWT partially corrected some pronouns in , using "him" and "he" for forms tied to paraklētos, but retains lowercase "holy spirit" and "that one" for ekeinos throughout. The correction was incomplete and inconsistent.