Jude 1:5
Jude 1:55Although you are fully aware of this, I want to remind you that after Jesus had delivered His people out of the land of Egypt, He destroyed those who did not believe.
The NWT renders the verse with "Jehovah" as the agent who saved Israel out of Egypt, fitting the Watchtower's broader project of inserting "Jehovah" into the New Testament where the underlying Greek reads kyrios. The verse is read as ordinary OT recap: Jehovah delivered Israel; Jesus did not exist as a person until Bethlehem; pre-incarnate, he was the archangel Michael who served as Jehovah's instrument.
This is one of the strongest "Jesus is YHWH of the Old Testament" proof-texts in the New Testament — and the textual evidence is weighty. The earliest manuscripts of Jude — including P72 (the oldest copy of Jude we have, third or fourth century), Codex Vaticanus, and Codex Alexandrinus — read "Jesus" (Iēsous), not "the Lord" or "Jehovah." P72 actually reads "God Christ" (theos christos), an even stronger Christological reading. The NA28 and UBS5 critical editions favour "Jesus" as the original. ESV (2011) and NASB 2020 footnote it; NIV 2011 reads "the Lord." Bruce Metzger argued that scribes "struck by the strange and unparalleled mention of Jesus in a statement about the redemption out of Egypt" would have substituted kyrios — making "Jesus" the harder and more likely original reading. Pair with where the NWT itself admits "the rock meant the Christ" in the wilderness wandering. The cumulative evidence: the New Testament authors identify the deliverer of Israel as Jesus.
The NWT inserts "Jehovah" where the strongest manuscript evidence (P72, Sinaiticus, A, B) reads "Jesus." Even on the lesser-attested reading "the Lord" (kyrios), the NWT's choice of "Jehovah" goes further than the manuscripts allow — and it suppresses the earliest Christological reading that identifies Jesus as the Old Testament deliverer. Open the NWT to ("the rock meant the Christ") and ask why the same Watchtower framework that admits Christ in the wilderness at one verse removes him from the Exodus at another. The pattern is consistent: where inserting "Jehovah" reinforces the separation of Jesus from the divine identity, the NWT inserts it; where the underlying Greek would identify Jesus as YHWH, the NWT changes the Greek instead. Of the two strongest divergences in this batch (Jude 5 and Jude 9), this is the weight-bearing one.