Luke 16:19
Luke 16:1919Now there was a rich man dressed in purple and fine linen, who lived each day in joyous splendor.
opens the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, which the Watchtower treats as a parable about wicked religious leaders ("the rich man") and a downtrodden faithful class ("Lazarus") rather than as a description of the afterlife. Because the dead are taught to be unconscious (), the parable cannot be read at face value; the rich man's torment, conversation, and memory are reframed as symbolic of class inversion in some future earthly arrangement, not as testimony to conscious post-mortem existence.
Even granting that the rich man and Lazarus is a parable, parables use real categories. Jesus's sowers really sow. His vineyards really exist. He never builds a lesson on a cosmology that does not match reality. If the dead are unconscious and non-existent, this is the worst possible parable Jesus could have chosen — every detail (eyes lifted, voice raised, thirst, memory of brothers, request for warning) is built on conscious post-mortem awareness. And Jesus introduces the rich man simply ("there was a rich man") — no signal that we are entering a fictional cosmology rather than using a real one. Read v. 19 as the setup verse; the punchline is vv. 22-26 where the conscious-afterlife framework does the theological work.