Let’s say for argument sake that the Governing Body is right, that the Bible is God’s inspired Word.
The Watchtower brand of religion is still flawed because it is built upon the view that true religion is based upon the Bible.
This is impossible for several reasons.
The first is simply logical: without a religion to begin with, you couldn’t have faithful followers to write any books to put into the Bible. A religion would have to come first for someone to believe in God to write something down. Afterwards these writings would have to be put together by some religious authority to be put into this collection. For faithful people to write about their religion, they would have to belong to that religion. For religious authorities to select which books belonged to the sacred library (and which did not) there would have to be a central religious authority to begin with before the Bible existed. So the Bible cannot be the authority, otherwise the Bible wrote itself or floated down from the sky (which we know didn’t happen).
The second is historical: Judaism is a culture and a civilization that came with a religion as part of it (as most ancient civilizations of the Bronze Age did as well). That culture has several countries connected with, in Biblical times most notably the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. What we today call a religion was more or less part of state patriotism due to the fact that one’s state government chose the religion and god you worshiped, and it was no different for the Jews. But when the monarchy of Israel disappeared, and later the kingdom of Judah found itself in exile in Babylon, the culture of the Jews found a way to survive based on the invention of something new for the time: the synagogue. A liturgical system built around the Levant’s old farming and reaping calendar but changing the celebrations associated with planting and harvesting to the religious stories of the Exodus and the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Sinai, the Jews began the development of what was to become what people know today as the Torah or the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. While other writings of the Scriptures existed, they were not “scripture” until the synagogue system found a use for them in Babylon.
There’s a part B to this historical part and it goes like this: Christianity had just survived (though barely) both the fall of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE and then the final battle between the Jews and Rome over Jerusalem after the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135/136 CE. With the Jerusalem Church completely gone and no Christian Jews in Jerusalem or anywhere near Judea, Rome (which now considered Christians to be the same as Jews) was the bishopric center. With trust in the bishops as there shepherds in this dark time, one named Marcion of Sinope, perhaps building on the failure of the failure of the Messianic hope in Bar Kochba, adopted Gnosticism and created a “rule” (in Greek, “canon”) for gaining salvation. One could “reap” knowledge (Greek “gnosis”) from “holy writ” but only from select epistles of St. Paul which spoke against the Jews and from the gospel of Luke if one removed any reference of the Hebrew texts from it. This in effect made the first “canon” of scriptures, claiming that salvation was from knowledge of texts. He claimed that Jesus was a new god that replaced the mean, evil, and now weaker Jewish god.
The other bishops of the church would excommunicate Marcion (who reportedly was surprised and couldn’t understand why), but by the time their order came, Marcion’s gnostic canon had created a large following. In response the church would spend about 200 years debating the need for its own canon, and would have to replace the well-received Petrine literature read in the churches (like the Apocalypse of Peter) with far less-known Pauline letters and an unknown apocalypse by an unknown “John.” To date Luke is the only writer of a gospel who is not Jewish and not attached to an apostle (Mark is supposed to be Peter’s scribe or redactor).
In all this, like Judaism, Christianity came first, and its members wrote the texts. It was in the late 300s, the fourth century, when the New Testament canon was finalized, and by Catholic authority--well after the Trinity doctrine itself had been settled.
Third, an imposter religion would make a similar mistake and in an uneducated attempt, create a big lie (unless you want to believe that too). In 1830, Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon, a book which he claimed was taken away by the angel Moroni.
This is a book that is the basis for the LDS religion. While he claims the same angel showed where ancient golden plates upon which ancient Egyptian words that contained the Book of Mormon were inscribed were buried for Smith to dig up, virtually the story is more or less the plates are heaven-sent--and went back to heaven so no one else could see or translate them.
If you are going to base a “true religion” on a set of writings, that is the way to do it. The writings have to come first. They have to drop down from the sky and then go back up from where they came. But the Book of Mormon and the stories Smith tells (along with his own story and religion) have so many holes and problems of their own that it is more likely that the stories that Jesus claims are parables are true…and those are parables.
So without going into any of the doctrines of the Jehovah’s Witnesses at all, we are left with the biggest problem of all, and that is the claim that true religion must be based on the Bible.
But you can’t do that.
True religion has to come first, if you believe in such a thing. Otherwise the scriptures can’t be useful to base a religion upon.
You can’t say which books belong in the Bible unless you have a religious authority first. So who decides who that authority is? If the Bible doesn’t exist yet, then true religion can’t be based on the Bible.
Marcion was excommunicated for teaching what he did. He said that salvation came from reaping knowledge from scripture texts. He was making himself an authority and claiming which books belong in the Bible canon. He in fact made the first Bible canon. But that doesn’t work either. His canon failed, as we all know, so being an authority in and of itself doesn’t work either. You can’t just say: “I’m an authority.” Something else had to happen, because authorities came and took Marcion away and ended him and his work.
One can’t say that the Jews always had a Bible because even though there was the Septuagint and the Christians were using it (and even the Catholics got their extra books from the Septuagint library), the Jews did not have an official canon until the Masoretic text was completed in the 10th century CE.
That is CE, not BCE.
To this day, it is the Masoretic text that is the official text that everyone uses, including the New World Translation, for the official Hebrew text of the Hebrew Scripture section, including Catholics and Protestants. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, they found out that they matched the Masoretic text and not the Septuagint. That baffled some scholars, but it leaves the argument intact:
There’s a religious authority at work, and it isn’t the Bible. The Bible gets set by a religious authority, and not the other way around.
So, it isn’t for any of us to say what fence you want to sit on. Sit all you want. We can argue any point you want.
But at the end of the day, the Bible is what the Watchtower religion claims is the basis for its beliefs.
Yet is the Bible the basis for religion or is religion the basis for the Bible?
Which came first?
How long can you stand on that fence of yours now?
