Mark 14:22
Mark 14:2222While they were eating, Jesus took bread, spoke a blessing and broke it, and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take it; this is My body.”
Mark's account of the Last Supper sits beside Matthew, Luke, and Paul as one of the four institutional texts. JWs cite the NWT's "this means my body" across all four to support the Memorial doctrine: bread and wine are symbols only, the body is in front of the disciples and therefore cannot literally be the bread, and the rite is annual rather than regular. Mark's brevity makes it the cleanest verse to quote — there is no longer commentary surrounding the words of institution to complicate the symbolic reading.
Mark's Greek (touto estin to sōma mou) is the same construction as Matthew, Luke, and Paul — and the verb is the simple copula estin. Every major English translation reads "this is my body." The argument from "his physical body was right there" is theological, not lexical: the translator's task is to render the verb Jesus used and let the reader work out what "is" means in this context. Reformed Protestants, Lutherans, Anglicans, and Memorialist Baptists all read "is" and reach different conclusions about its meaning — that is what a faithful translation looks like, because it preserves the ambiguity the original carries.
The NWT renders estin as "means" — identical to its rendering at Matt 26:26, , and 1 Cor 11:24-25. Mark's Greek offers no special grammatical reason for the substitution; the verb is the same predicative copula. The Watchtower's own Kingdom Interlinear glosses the Greek as "is" beneath the line and prints "means" in the smooth column above. The verb swap aligns wherever literal "is" would create doctrinal pressure on a sacramental reading — the rule scatters everywhere else in the corpus, so the alignment is the signal.