Matthew 24:8
Matthew 24:88All these are the beginning of birth pains.
The Watchtower reads "the beginning of pangs of distress" as describing the period of escalating troubles that began in 1914 — the wars, famines, earthquakes, and pestilences increasing in frequency and intensity like birth pangs as Armageddon approaches. The metaphor is taken to support the JW empirical apologetic: things should be getting worse, and Witnesses are trained to see escalation in current events.
Read carefully. Jesus says these things are "the beginning" — not the climax, not even the middle. And the verb is descriptive, not predictive: these events are how every generation begins. Birth pangs in classical and koine Greek describe purposeful, painful events leading to a defined outcome — not a pattern of increasing frequency. And the data contradicts the escalation reading anyway: famines, wars, and pestilences have dramatically decreased over the past century (Jonsson and Herbst, "The Sign of the Last Days — When?", 1987). Jesus's birth-pangs metaphor describes the painful, purposeful, providential nature of these events, not a graph trending upward toward Armageddon.
The NWT renders ōdinōn ("birth pains, labour pains") as "pangs of distress" — flattening the specific eschatological metaphor Jesus borrows from Jewish apocalyptic and Pauline usage (; ). Standard English translations preserve "birth pains" because the metaphor carries theological weight — labour pains lead to a defined birth, with directional purpose. "Pangs of distress" is more generic and removes the directional-purposeful element. The shift is small but cumulative across the JW last-days apologetic — Jesus's specific labour-pain imagery is recoded into a vaguer "things will hurt" register that fits Watchtower exhortations more easily.