Responding to Jehovah's Witnesses

This is a pickaxe argument, not a rake. Anchor on one case, prove it cleanly with primary-source documents, then ask the JW to apply the same test to the others. The Mantey letter is the strongest doorstep payload because it is a written rebuke from a scholar the Watchtower itself trained Witnesses to trust. Bring a printed copy if you can; the letter is reproduced at forananswer.org and bible.ca, and Mantey's signature is on the public record.

1. Open with Mantey only. The letter is dated 11 July 1974 and addressed to the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. Mantey says in his own hand: 'You quoted me out of context.' He requests in writing: 'I herewith request you not to quote the Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament again, which you have been doing for 24 years.' He concludes about John 1:1: 'it is neither scholarly nor reasonable to translate John 1:1 "The Word was a god."' These three sentences are the entire opening — do not embellish them. Mantey was the standard-grammar coauthor the NWT translators themselves cited. He read what they wrote about his work and asked them in writing to stop. The Watchtower kept citing him in reprints for years after the letter.
2. Walk the JW through the specific misuse. The Watchtower invoked Dana-Mantey to argue that an anarthrous predicate noun — theos without the definite article — must be indefinite (hence 'a god'). Mantey's own grammar teaches the opposite: an anarthrous predicate in this construction is qualitative, signifying divine nature, not indefinite. The Watchtower took a section about copulative verbs and conflated it with Colwell's rule on predicate nominatives in the wrong direction. Mantey was responding to that specific misuse, and his published 1973 article 'The Deity of Christ in the New Testament' walks through the grammar himself.
3. Bring Westcott as the second witness. Westcott's commentary on John 1:1 (Cambridge, 1880, on John 1:1c) reads in full: 'The predicate (God) stands emphatically first, as in iv. 24. It is necessarily without the article (theos not ho theos) inasmuch as it describes the nature of the Word and does not identify His Person. It would be pure Sabellianism to say "the Word was ho theos." No idea of inferiority of nature is suggested by the form of expression, which simply affirms the true Deity of the Word.' The Watchtower partial-quotes the first half ('necessarily without the article…') and omits the closing sentence: 'simply affirms the true Deity of the Word.' That single deletion is the textbook example of the tactic. The full commentary is in the Cambridge edition on archive.org; the JW can verify it themselves.
4. Bring Robertson. A.T. Robertson on John 1:1 in Word Pictures in the New Testament writes: 'By exact and careful language John denied Sabellianism by not saying ho theos en ho logos. That would mean that all of God was expressed in ho logos and the terms would be interchangeable, each having the article… So in John 1:1 theos en ho logos the meaning has to be the Logos was God — not God was the Logos.' Robertson's point is precisely opposite the Watchtower's use: the anarthrous predicate refutes Sabellianism, not Arianism. The Watchtower has the construction backwards.
5. Name the pattern, then stop. Three primary cases — Mantey, Westcott, Robertson — establish a pattern, not an isolated oversight. Alford on Romans 9:5, Harner on John 1:1, and Barclay on John 1 all appear in the same booklet and all object to the same kind of selective citation. The point is not to litigate every case at the door. The point is to plant one question: 'If the Watchtower would partial-quote Julius Mantey while telling Witnesses he supports the NWT, what else might they be filtering the sources for?' That question is the seed. Let it sit.
6. Pivot to read-your-own-bible-exposure (260). Mantey's first rule of textual integrity — 'do not quote out of context' — is the same rule Proverbs 18:13 names: 'He who answers a matter before he hears it, this is folly and disgrace to him.' Reading the scholar's full paragraph is the same act as reading the Bible chapter through. The principle scales.

Mantey himself disagreed with that reading of his grammar, in writing, in 1974, sent directly to the Watch Tower Society. In his words: 'You quoted me out of context.' The Watchtower had been citing Dana-Mantey for twenty-four years at that point and continued citing it for years after the letter. Mantey's specific objection was that his grammar was being used to support an indefinite reading of theos in John 1:1 when his actual position was that the anarthrous predicate is qualitative, affirming divine nature. The Watchtower treats this as a grammar question when Mantey treated it as a misrepresentation. The man whose grammar was being cited said the citation was wrong. The Watchtower kept the citation. That is the data point.

The Cambridge 1880 edition of Westcott's commentary is in the public domain on archive.org. The closing sentence 'simply affirms the true Deity of the Word' is in the original printing and in every modern reprint. The Watchtower's Should You Believe in the Trinity? quotes Westcott's sentences before that line and stops. The omission is not a printing variant — it is a selective excerpt. The standard apologetics treatments by James White, Robert Bowman, and Matt Slick all reproduce the full passage with the omitted sentence highlighted. If the Watchtower's reading were the original Westcott's reading, why would they need to remove the sentence that names 'the true Deity of the Word'?

That objection works only if the Watchtower is not citing these scholars in the first place. The Watchtower IS citing them — by name, in print, as supporting evidence — in Should You Believe in the Trinity?, the Kingdom Interlinear, and Reasoning From the Scriptures. The Watchtower's own footnotes claim these are the scholars whose work confirms the NWT. If their bias disqualifies their judgement, the Watchtower must stop citing them. The Watchtower wants it both ways: scholar X is competent enough to be quoted as authority, but not competent enough to be heard when scholar X says the quotation distorted the original. Pick one. And Philip Harner is not strictly Trinitarian — he wrote one of the most-cited papers ever on qualitative anarthrous predicates (JBL 1973), and the Watchtower cites that paper. Harner's conclusion: theos in John 1:1c means 'the Word had the same nature as God,' not 'a god.' That is not bias; it is the literature.

It does mean something different — but the difference is not 'a god.' The anarthrous form in this kind of predicate construction is qualitative. It says the Word shares the nature, the kind, the deity of God; it does not say the Word is a separate inferior deity. That is what Mantey's grammar teaches, what Harner's 1973 paper proves, what Westcott affirms in the closing sentence the Watchtower omits, and what Robertson states explicitly. The Greek pattern in John 1:1 is the same as John 4:24 'pneuma ho theos' — 'God is spirit' — where the anarthrous predicate noun is qualitative (God is of spirit-nature), not indefinite ('God is a spirit'). No competent Greek grammar arrives at 'a god' from theos in John 1:1. The argument from the Greek text stands; it just stands on the opposite side of the question from where the Watchtower has placed it. Argument 011 (john1-polytheism) and argument 245 (colwells-rule-john-1-1) handle the grammar in full.

A reasonable concern. The letter is reproduced at two independent apologetics archives — forananswer.org and bible.ca — and the original was sent in the context of Mantey's correspondence with the Christian Apologetics Research and Information Service (CARIS) of Santa Ana, California. Mantey's own 1973 article 'The Deity of Christ in the New Testament' — published in the Festschrift edited by Hawthorne — covers the same ground in his own voice. If you read Mantey's article first and then read the Watchtower's excerpts from his grammar second, you will see the omission yourself. The point is not to trust the apologetics websites. The point is to read the published Greek scholar whose name appears in the Watchtower's footnote — and to compare his actual paragraph against the Watchtower's excerpt. The data settles it. You do not need to trust me; you do not need to trust the apologetics sites. You need to read Mantey.

Print the Mantey letter from forananswer.org or bible.ca — both reproduce the same primary-source text. Read it slowly. Then open Westcott's Gospel According to St. John on archive.org (the 1880 Cambridge edition is in the public domain) and read the full paragraph on John 1:1c — note where the Watchtower's excerpt starts and where it stops. Finally, read Mantey's 1973 article 'The Deity of Christ in the New Testament' if you can find a copy. The Watchtower asks Witnesses to trust the scholars it cites. The scholars themselves are in print and answer back. Read them in their own books before deciding what to do.