Luke 21:11
Luke 21:1111There will be great earthquakes, famines, and pestilences in various places, along with fearful sights and great signs from heaven.
is one of the proof-texts for the Watchtower's "composite sign" of the last days. Earthquakes, food shortages, pestilences, and fearful sights are read as cumulative evidence that we have lived in the last days since 1914. JW publications cite news reports of natural disasters and pandemics as ongoing fulfilment, and the verse is routinely paired with to argue that conditions are worsening like "birth pangs."
Read first — Jesus's own warning against people who say "the time is very near now" — and then . Notice that Jesus describes earthquakes, food shortages, and pestilences as things his contemporaries would face, not as a uniquely modern signature. Every generation since AD 33 has experienced all of these simultaneously, and the documented data shows famines, wars, and pestilence have dramatically decreased rather than increased over the past century (Jonsson and Herbst, "The Sign of the Last Days — When?", 1987). The Watchtower itself admitted in 1983 that the worst recorded famine in history was the Chinese famine of 1876-79, before 1914. Jesus told his disciples not to be alarmed by these events (v. 9). The Watchtower does the opposite — it builds an entire eschatology on the very category Jesus said should not lead to eschatological conclusions.
The NWT renders the second clause as "in one place after another food shortages and pestilences." Standard English translations (ESV, NASB, KJV, NIV) render the Greek limos as "famines." "Food shortage" is a softer, ongoing category that fits modern news cycles more easily than the acute, episodic event Jesus actually named — a famine. The substitution makes the verse read like a description of twenty-first-century commodity prices rather than the catastrophic starvation events that punctuated the ancient world. The shift is doctrinally relevant because the JW last-days argument depends on the ability to point to ongoing news headlines as fulfilment.