Luke 21:32
Luke 21:3232Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.
— alongside and — is the anchor for the Watchtower's "overlapping generations" doctrine. The 2010 study edition of the Watchtower introduced the model after the 1914 generation had visibly died off: two groups of anointed ones whose lifespans overlap form one composite "generation," extending the prophecy indefinitely beyond 1914. Earlier readings (1995 revision, 2008 revision) defined the generation differently each time. The verse is load-bearing for the entire 1914 framework — if "this generation" means what it does everywhere else in Luke, the framework collapses.
Read alongside and and ask the Witness who Jesus meant by "this generation" in those passages — there is no doubt: his contemporaries. The same Greek phrase (he genea haute) is doing the same work in all four passages. Then point to the parallel in — "when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies" — which Jesus's hearers obeyed in AD 66 by fleeing to Pella before the Roman siege (Eusebius, Church History 3.5.3). Everything Luke 21 describes happened within "this generation" because "this generation" meant exactly what it always means in the Gospels. The overlapping-generations reading is unattested in any Greek lexicon or any Christian commentary in 2,000 years — it appears for the first time in the January 2010 Watchtower, and only because the previous reading had failed.
The NWT renders the close of the verse "until all things happen" rather than the standard "until all these things have taken place." The Greek panta tauta carries an explicit demonstrative ("all THESE things") that ties the verse back to the specific events Jesus has just described in vv. 5-31. Dropping the demonstrative "these" makes the prophecy feel more open-ended and helps preserve a future, indefinite fulfilment — exactly what the overlapping-generations reading needs. in the same NWT preserves "all these things"; the inconsistency between the synoptic parallels is itself notable.