Titus 1:12
Titus 1:1212As one of their own prophets has said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.”
Rarely raised by JWs, and understandably so. The Watchtower's teaching is that Jehovah's people avoid material rooted in false religion, and this verse has an apostle quoting a pagan seer with approval and calling him a prophet. Where the verse comes up at all, the quotation is treated as a proverbial saying rather than as a citation of religious poetry.
Paul quotes Epimenides, a Cretan religious poet, calls him "their own prophet," and endorses what he said as true. The same poet supplies half of Paul's line at . An apostle is drawing on pagan religious literature twice, in two different letters, without apology. There are two uses for this. The first is the pagan-origins conversation: if a source's origin permanently contaminates what comes out of it, Paul has broken his own rule in writing. He evidently believed a true statement stays true regardless of who said it. The second is the canon question. Paul quotes Epimenides here and Aratus in Acts; Jude quotes 1 Enoch. None of those works is in anybody's Bible, and none ever was. That is the clean answer when a Witness — or anyone else — suggests that Jude's use of Enoch implies Enoch should be Scripture. Quotation is not canonisation, and the early church clearly knew the difference. Compare , .