Sometime prior to April of this year (2019) a Jehovah’s Witness leaflet was distributed in this area (maybe nationwide). It’s about half the size of a legal sheet of paper with friendly folks shaking hands on page one. Underneath the picture, it proclaims: “You Are Welcome to Attend!” Page two has little printed on it. It begins with “On the night before he died, Jesus told his followers to commemorate his death. He said: ‘Keep doing this in remembrance of me.’ – Luke 22:19.” This formatting is theirs. They do not capitalize pronouns when referring to Jesus or place parentheses around Scripture references.
They try to be different in just about every way from anyone else. Toward that end they have their own Bible translation, which was put together by men who did not know Hebrew at all and very little Greek. The New World Translation is not to be trusted. Sometimes their errors are serious and will lead those who read it to eternal destruction. At other times, they are simply inept. They mishandled the verb in Luke 22:19. Jesus did not say, “Keep doing this”; He said, “Do this.” According to Bagster, the Greek word, poiete, is a second person, plural, present indicative, and imperative active. An imperative is a command and is correctly translated the way every major translation renders it—do this! “Keep doing this,” is incorrect.
But that’s not the main point. They go on (page 3) to invite all to join them “for the annual commemoration of the death of Jesus Christ.” Does anyone see anything incongruous about this? They mistranslated Jesus’ words to “keep doing this,” and they expect that people will understand that He was only referring to an annual event? Who does that? If someone says, “Keep up the good work,” are they referring to an annual burst of efficiency on the part of an employee? The church remembers Jesus the first day of each week (Acts 20:7). If Jehovah’s Witnesses want to have an annual event commemorating the Lord’s death, why don’t they provide a Scripture that it should be done that way?
They cannot call this event an Easter celebration because they know that was a pagan observance. Hmm. What to do? They have the “annual” non-Easter event on Good Friday (which is another unauthorized tradition of men), although they don’t call it that. As the song says: “Don’t you love farce?” So, in this tract, Jehovah’s Witnesses mistranslate Luke 22:19 to make it sound like Jesus wants His death remembered frequently (which He does)—and then they have an annual event instead on Good Friday, a day they do not observe. Hah! How much easier would it be to respond to Jesus Biblically by observing His death each week and ignoring entirely the traditions of men.