Matthew 24:35
Matthew 24:3535Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away.
JWs cite to affirm the reliability and permanence of God's word — "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away." This is used in Watchtower literature to support the trustworthiness of Scripture as a basis for the organisation's teachings. However, the verse is deployed selectively: the Watchtower affirms biblical preservation in principle while simultaneously claiming that "trinitarian translators" have biased the text and that only the NWT restores the correct meaning.
is a powerful self-attestation by Jesus that his words are indestructible and permanently reliable. The Bible reliability argument (039) uses this verse as the capstone: Jesus promised his words would never pass away, and the manuscript evidence confirms it — nearly 5,800 Greek manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls matching after a millennium of copying. The three-groups-one-move argument (072) deploys this verse against the shared claim of Muslims, Mormons, and JWs that the Bible is "broken" and only their group has the fix. If Jesus keeps his promises, then his words have not been corrupted, lost, or mistranslated beyond recovery. The NWT is built on the same Westcott-Hort and Nestle-Aland manuscript base as every other modern translation — if the manuscripts are reliable enough for the NWT, they are reliable for everyone. The verse also functions as a self-refutation test: the Watchtower inserts "Jehovah" 237 times into the New Testament with zero manuscript support, which is altering the very words Jesus promised would never pass away.