Luke 23:43
Luke 23:4343And Jesus said to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.”
JWs read this verse as "Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise" — placing the comma after "today" so that Jesus is merely emphasising the day of his statement rather than promising the thief immediate entry into paradise. This supports the Watchtower's soul-sleep doctrine: the dead are entirely unconscious until the resurrection. The verse is also used to reinforce the earthly-paradise hope — the thief will be resurrected to a future paradise earth, not taken to heaven that day.
The phrase "truly I tell you" (Greek: amen lego soi) occurs 74 times in the NWT. In 73 of those occurrences the NWT places the break immediately after "you," treating everything that follows as the content of Jesus' statement. is the sole exception — the only time the NWT attaches an adverb ("today") to the introductory formula rather than to the statement itself. The consistent pattern demands: "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise." Paul confirms the implication: departing to be with Christ is "far better" (), and to be "absent from the body" means being "present with the Lord" (). If death means unconsciousness, being dead is not "far better" — it is nothing at all. Jesus' promise to the thief is the strongest first-person declaration of immediate conscious presence after death in the Gospels.
The NWT moves the comma after "today" — "Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in Paradise" — making "today" modify "I tell you" rather than "you will be with me." This is the sole exception among 74 occurrences of the "truly I tell you" formula in the NWT: in every other instance the break falls immediately after "you." No major English translation agrees with this placement. Ancient Greek had no punctuation, so the placement is editorial — but the NWT's own 73-to-1 pattern argues against its choice here.