Romans 9:5
Romans 9:55Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them proceeds the human descent of Christ, who is God over all, forever worthy of praise! Amen.
Jehovah's Witnesses argue that does not call Jesus "God." The NWT repunctuates the verse to separate the doxology from Christ, rendering it so that "God, who is over all" is a separate sentence praising the Father rather than a description of Christ. This allows the Watchtower to maintain that Paul never directly calls Jesus "God" in this passage. The verse appears in the NWT's unidirectional bias pattern: every doctrinally significant divergence from standard translations moves away from Christ's deity, and is one of the clearest examples.
Most standard translations render as a single sentence in which Paul identifies Christ as "God over all, blessed forever" (or similar). The Greek text contains no punctuation — ancient manuscripts lacked it — so the question is purely syntactical. The natural reading of the Greek takes "the one being over all, God blessed forever" as a relative clause describing Christ, the nearest antecedent. Paul is making a climactic statement about Israel's privileges, culminating in the Messiah "who is God over all, forever praised." This reading fits the literary context (Paul lists Israel's greatest blessings, ending with the highest claim) and is supported by the Granville Sharp pattern and the overwhelming majority of Greek scholars. Combined with and , it forms part of Paul's pattern of identifying Jesus within the divine identity — consistent with the Christian Shema of .
The NWT repunctuates to separate "God" from Christ. Where most translations read the doxology as describing Christ — "who is God over all, blessed forever" — the NWT inserts a break so that "God, who is over all, be praised forever" becomes an independent sentence about the Father. This is part of the NWT's documented unidirectional bias: the change moves away from Christ's deity, consistent with every other doctrinally significant NWT divergence.