Monday, December 29, 2025

Answers to unanswerable questions

Recently I was presented with a video of ten questions that Jehovah’s Witnesses allegedly cannot answer.

I noticed that questions 3, 4 and 8 were really poor and easily answered.

Question 3: If Thomas called Jesus “my Lord and my God,” why don’t you?

It was claimed that Jesus never offered a rebuttal to being called that. However, the questioner had to then dishonestly conceal John’s comment at John 20:31. Jesus is not his Father. Thus, Thomas’s famous exclamation does not mean what this questioner wants you to believe. This is very bad Trinitarian apologetics. This has been previously addressed: Question 4: If only God is good... then is Jesus good?

Jesus denied being “good,” so that question is deceptive and unscriptural. See:
  • Matthew 19:17
    “Why are you asking Me about what is good? There is only One who is good.”
  • Mark 10:18
    “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.”
  • Luke 18:19
    “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.”
  • When Jesus said “No one is good except God alone”?
Question 8: If God’s name was removed from Scripture, can we trust the Bible?
(The questioner’s comments following this question show that what was meant by “Scripture” and “Bible” was really the New Testament only. The way this question is worded then is sadly quite dishonest, as well as profoundly ignorant.)

My response is:
This question indicates a lack of familiarity with New Testament textual criticism. The removal of the Tetragrammaton would no more invalidate (or remove trust in) the New Testament than the portion now in John 7:53-8:11 that has been inserted in Luke and John, or the insertion of other spurious texts. See:
  • NET Bible footnote:
    This entire section, 7:53-8:11, traditionally known as the pericope adulterae, is not contained in the earliest and best MSS and was almost certainly not an original part of the Gospel of John.
  • Insight book: John, Good News According to:
    The Spurious Passage at John 7:53–8:11. These 12 verses have obviously been added to the original text of John’s Gospel. They are not found in the Sinaitic Manuscript or the Vatican Manuscript No. 1209, though they do appear in the fifth-century Codex Bezae and later Greek manuscripts. They are omitted, however, by most of the early versions. It is evident that they are not part of John’s Gospel. One group of Greek manuscripts places this passage at the end of John’s Gospel; another group puts it after Luke 21:38, supporting the conclusion that it is a spurious and uninspired text.
With the New Testament, textual manipulation is a cold reality, with a potentially spurious text inserted haphazardly into the Gospel narratives.

To say that the removal of the Divine Name would undermine our trust in the New Testament is to say that the haphazard insertion of a potentially spurious text into the Gospel narratives would also undermine our trust in the New Testament. We have to present a fair treatment of the consequences.

These three questions is all I will address here. If others want to hunt down that video and check out the other questions, more power to them.

I hate the company of liars, and I refuse to associate with them.
Psalm 26:5 paraphrased by me

See also:

posted by JimSpace at 9:37 AM