---
title: Luke 11:50
url: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/luke-11-50/
markdown: https://jw-apologetics.app/verses/luke-11-50.md
type: verse
perspective: Protestant (historic Nicene) response to Jehovah's Witness teaching
reference: Luke 11:50
testament: NT
section: Gospels
index: https://jw-apologetics.app/llms.txt
---

# Luke 11:50

## Text (Berean Standard Bible)

> As a result, this generation will be charged with the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the foundation of the world,

## NWT Wording of the Key Phrase

- NWT (2013 revision): "so that the blood of all the prophets spilled from the founding of the world may be charged against this generation,"

## JW Usage

This verse rarely appears in Watchtower publications because it does not serve a JW eschatological proof-text. When it is cited at all, it is read as a generic warning about apostate religion incurring blood-guilt, with "this generation" treated either as a class of opposers or as an indefinite "kind of people who reject Jehovah's organisation."

## Protestant Usage

Pair Luke 11:50 with the four other uses of "this generation" in the Synoptics — Matthew 11:16, 12:41-42, 23:36, and Mark 13:30 — and ask the Witness who Jesus meant. In every other Gospel occurrence, "this generation" is unambiguously the contemporaries standing in front of him. Here Jesus says the blood of the prophets "from the founding of the world" will be charged against "this generation" — an anchor that cannot mean a generation 1,900 years later. Use it with Matthew 23:36, where Jesus says the same thing in identical language, and the AD 70 fulfilment in Josephus's Wars of the Jews makes the application concrete. The verse is one of the cleanest pieces of evidence that the Watchtower's "overlapping generation" reading of Matthew 24:34 is not an exegetical decision — it is a chronological rescue operation.

## Arguments Using This Verse

- ["This Generation" — Matthew 24:34](https://jw-apologetics.app/arguments/this-generation.md) — Jesus meant the generation standing in front of Him [Eschatology]