Module 3 — How to Read a Watchtower

A question, before anything else

Has it ever happened to you to read a paragraph of The Watchtower, finish it, feel convinced, and — five minutes later — no longer remember exactly which argument had convinced you? You have a general impression of "it's right that way," but if someone asked you to repeat the logic you wouldn't know where to start.

This is not your fault. It's structure.

The Watchtower — and most of the organization's material — is written with precise techniques of persuasion rather than argumentation. This is not a moral criticism, it is a technical description. And when you recognize the techniques, they stop working on you. Like a magician: the trick only impresses those who don't know how it's done.

In this module we give you four lenses for reading the organization's articles with new eyes.

Lens 1 — The emotional "sandwich"

Open any Watchtower. Probably the first paragraph does not contain an argument. It contains a scene: an elderly sister recalling her early years of service, a brother who overcame a trial thanks to faith, a couple weeping with joy at their son's baptism.

This is the emotional opening. Its purpose is to lower your rational defenses. A moved brain accepts as "right" what a clear brain would question. It is an ancient and powerful technique.

Then comes the heart of the article: a doctrinal claim. Almost always without critical preambles, presented as established "truth." Often the key sentence sounds like this: "As the faithful and discreet slave reminds us…" — and from this point onward, everything that follows rests on that premise.

Finally, the closing: emotion again, and a call to action. "Let us continue to faithfully support Jehovah's organization." "We are grateful to have so much knowledge." "How wonderful to know that Jehovah guides us!"

This structure — emotion → claim → emotion — is called a persuasive "sandwich." The bread is the emotions. The filling is the thesis. Your brain chews the bread and swallows the filling without tasting it.

What to do: when you read, identify the three layers. Where does the emotional opening end? Where is the central thesis? Where does the emotion return? When you distinguish the layers, you can ask yourself cleanly: "If I removed all the bread, would the naked thesis hold up?"

Lens 2 — Self-referential loops (when a source cites itself)

Definition: a self-referential loop is when the sender of a message, to demonstrate that what they say is true, cites… themselves.

We're not exaggerating. Read carefully the footnotes of any Watchtower. You'll probably find references like these:

• "See The Watchtower of July 15, 2013, page 22."
• "See Awake! May 2017."
• "As explained in the book Insight on the Scriptures, volume 2."

These are all publications of the same organization writing the Watchtower you're reading. So the proof of what The Watchtower claims is… another Watchtower. Which in turn, if you went and read it, would cite another Watchtower. All the way down.

This is not how serious biblical research works. A serious biblical scholar, when making a historical or linguistic claim, cites sources independent of their position: Hebrew and Greek dictionaries written by non-Witnesses, university historians, papyrologists, archaeologists. Because an idea is shown to be true not when you say it twice, but when people who have no interest in your thesis reach the same conclusion.

What to do: the next time you read a Watchtower with a footnote, go to the note and ask yourself: "Is this source independent of who is writing, or is it a product of the same organization?" If the source is internal, the thesis still has no external proof. It might be true anyway. But until it is confirmed by someone who has no interest in supporting it, it is a self-citation.

Lens 3 — Verses out of context

This is perhaps the most important lens, and it will give you the most work. Open your NWT 2013 Bible and keep it nearby.

Every time The Watchtower cites a verse, do this: read the twenty verses before and the twenty verses after. Yes, twenty. Why twenty? Because a chapter of the Bible is on average more than forty verses long, and reading twenty+twenty gives you the minimum literary context to understand whether the verse is saying what The Watchtower claims.

Verification checklist, to apply always:

1. Whom is the biblical author addressing? A first-century Jew? A converted pagan? All of Christianity? A single individual?
2. In what historical situation? War? Peace? Persecution? Celebration?
3. Is the cited verse a complete sentence, or is it a piece of a sentence cut out? If you look at the whole verse, does the meaning change?
4. Does the verse in turn cite the Old Testament? If yes, go and read the original passage — often the meaning changes.
5. Is The Watchtower using the verse for the same reason the biblical author wrote it? Or is it transporting it into a completely different discourse?

A famous example: Matthew 24:45 — the "faithful and discreet slave." If you read Matthew 24 from the beginning, you'll notice that Jesus is answering a very specific question from the disciples: "Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your presence and of the conclusion of the system of things?" (Matthew 24:3). The discourse is a great account of Christ's return and the watchfulness of the individual servants. The parable of the faithful slave speaks to the individual Christian who must be found watchful — like the parable of the ten virgins in the next chapter. Turning "the slave" into a specific group of men who teach all the others is not in the text. It is an added interpretation. If you want to go deeper, read the article "The faithful and discreet slave: appointed over the domestics or over the belongings?".

This does not mean that the interpretation is necessarily wrong in itself. It means it is not in the text. And the difference is enormous: what is added by an interpreter must bear the responsibility of having been added, not present itself as if it were already in the verse.

Lens 4 — External sources: "which historians?"

A frequent stylistic trick in the organization's publications is the generic phrase: "Historians agree…" "Scholars have shown…" "Archaeologists confirm…"

Stop, every time. Which historians, by first and last name? Published by which publisher? In what year? With what academic consensus? Is it an isolated voice or is it the dominant position in the scientific community?

A classic example: in the organization's literature one often finds the claim that Jerusalem was destroyed in 607 B.C.E., a key date for the calculation of 1914. But the overwhelming majority of archaeologists and historians of the ancient Near East — including non-Christian scholars, with no theological interest — date the destruction to 587 or 586 B.C.E.. The difference is twenty years. Twenty years that knock down an entire system of calculations.

When The Watchtower writes "scholars," in cases like this, it is actually referring to a very narrow minority, not to the academic community. And it doesn't say so.

What to do: when you find the sentence "historians say…," search for two or three minutes on a neutral search engine. Search "Jerusalem destruction date" in English. Look for the corresponding entry on Britannica, on Encyclopedia Iranica, on university websites (.edu). Compare. And then decide for yourself.

Module exercise — Analyzing a paragraph

Choose one recent Watchtower study article. Take the first paragraph of the longest article. Open your notebook. Divide the page into four columns:

1. Line of text (copy by hand the first four lines).
2. Sandwich layer — emotion, claim, or emotion?
3. If there is a biblical citation, does the context support it? (Open the Bible, read ten verses before and ten after. Write yes/no and one line of explanation.)
4. If there is a source, is it internal or external to the organization?

Do this exercise even just for five minutes. The first time it will be tiring. The second time easier. The fifth time you won't be able to read a Watchtower anymore without noticing its seams. There's no going back, at that point. It's a bit like having learned to swim: you don't unlearn.