Luke 1:43
Luke 1:4343And why am I so honored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
The Watchtower acknowledges Elizabeth's words but reads "the mother of my Lord" as recognition that Mary's child is the promised Messiah and the future King of God's Kingdom, not as a recognition that the child is God incarnate. "Lord" in JW theology applies legitimately to Jesus as the Messianic King without carrying any divine identity — Jehovah remains the only God, and Jesus is "Lord" in a delegated sense.
The verse does Christological work the JW reading cannot bear. Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit (v. 41), calls Mary "the mother of my Lord" — the New Testament's own functional equivalent of the Theotokos title affirmed at the Council of Ephesus in AD 431. The title hangs on the identity of the child: if the one Mary bore is the eternal Son in whom "all the fullness of the divine quality dwells bodily" ( NWT), then calling Mary "mother of the one who is my Lord" is not Marian elevation but accurate description. Protestants reject the full Catholic Marian apparatus (perpetual virginity, Immaculate Conception, Assumption, prayers to Mary) but keep the Christological fence: denying that the eternal Son was born of Mary produces Nestorianism. Notice also that the NWT does not substitute "Jehovah" for Kyrios here, even though the referent is the unborn Jesus — a decision that makes Elizabeth's confession Christologically inescapable in the JW's own translation.