Matthew 12:41
Matthew 12:4141The men of Nineveh will stand at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now One greater than Jonah is here.
is treated as a future-judgement saying — the resurrected Ninevites will stand at God's final judgement and condemn the unbelieving Jewish generation that rejected Jesus. Like , the verse is uncoupled from to preserve the JW overlapping-generations doctrine. The Watchtower allows that "this generation" means Jesus's contemporaries here, but argues that the meaning shifts in .
makes the contemporaneous reference of "this generation" unmistakable. The Ninevites of Jonah's day will rise at the resurrection alongside Jesus's audience to judge them — "for they repented at what Jonah preached, and look! a greater than Jonah is here." The "they" who heard Jesus and the "they" being condemned are the same people. Pair with , , , and . Five uses of the same phrase in the same Gospel; in four of them every translation and the Watchtower itself agrees the referent is Jesus's contemporaries. The exegetical burden of demonstrating that is the single exception falls on the Watchtower, and no Greek lexicon or commentary in 2,000 years has shouldered it.