Hey everybody, Pastor Steven Anderson here
from Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.
And today I'm gonna talk about how the Jehovah's Witnesses
don't believe that Jesus died on the cross.
They claim that if you go back to the Greek word here,
stavros, they claim that this doesn't really mean cross
and that Jesus actually died on a stake or a torture stake.
And they'll picture Jesus with his hands above his head,
with a nail through his hands, up above his head.
And I'm gonna prove to you from the Bible
beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are wrong
and that Jesus actually died with arms outstretched
on the cross as we all have known and believed.
But I'm gonna prove it to you beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Before I do that,
let me just talk about this word itself, stavros, okay?
Now I'm gonna get into a little bit about the morphology
of this word or where this word comes from.
And I'm gonna start out by talking about the alphabet, okay?
Now the oldest alphabet in the world
is known as the paleo Hebrew alphabet
or the Phoenician alphabet.
And this original oldest alphabet
consisted only of consonants, 22 consonants,
which is where we get the 22 letters
of today's Hebrew alphabet.
This is where the Aramaic alphabet comes from,
the Arabic alphabet,
all the Semitic languages derived from that.
So it started out being like pictographs, okay?
So for example, the letter aleph was like this
because it was supposed to be a picture
of like an ox's head with the horns and so forth.
And today's aleph in Hebrew looks like this, okay?
But originally it was this pictograph looking thing.
And in fact, you can see where we get our letter A
would simply be from just rotating this.
And then we would have our letter A,
of course, without the little tails on the side.
But anyway, you get the picture.
So the Phoenician alphabet or the paleo Hebrew alphabet
consisted of pictographs like that, okay?
Well, the letter T in the paleo Hebrew alphabet
looks like this.
It's basically like our English lowercase T
just cocked onto its side.
So it's basically a cross, there's a picture of a cross.
And guess what this letter is called?
Tav, Tav, okay?
So then this paleo Hebrew letter Tav
evolved into the Greek letter Tav right here,
which is the same as our English T
and then eventually into the lowercase T
that we know today.
So basically the letter T has kind of come full circle
in English back to the way that it started over here.
So this is paleo Hebrew, Greek to English.
And then also this gave rise to the Aramaic alphabet.
So this is Tav in the Aramaic alphabet
and then this would be the later Aramaic alphabet.
So when we think of the Hebrew letter for T,
this is what we think of,
but that's because at the time of Christ,
Hebrew was being written in the Aramaic alphabet.
So the Hebrew letters quote unquote
are actually Aramaic letters.
And this is what would have been originally
the Hebrew letter T, okay?
And also there's another letter T in the alphabet,
which is this one right here.
So here's the paleo Hebrew and notice how similar it is.
It's an X or two lines intersecting
with the circle around it.
And then this basically became the Greek letter Theta
and then our English TH.
And then over here, it became Aramaic Tet.
And then over here, it would look like this, okay?
So basically, if you look at this word itself, Stavros,
look at this right here.
What do you see right in the middle there?
That is the name of the letter T in Greek, Tav.
That is also the name of the letter T in Hebrew.
So this letter is called Tav, okay?
This letter is called Tav
and we see it right there in the word Stavros, okay?
So the word Stavros is connected to the letter T itself,
which is a picture of a cross, okay?
It also comes from the word Istimi,
which means to stand or to stand up.
Now, the objection to this from the Jehovah's Witnesses
would be, well, you know,
if you go into ancient Greek literature,
like back to Homer, around 800 B.C.
or even later writings from Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon,
you'll find that Stavros is just a stick
or just a rod or something like that.
But actually, I looked up
every single one of those references.
It's referenced once in the Iliad.
It's referenced once in the Odyssey.
I looked up both.
And basically, what it's used for in those situations,
it's only used in the plural
and it's basically referring to
in the Iliad and the Odyssey fence posts.
It talks about a yard being fenced in
and they're putting in these stakes into the ground.
Okay, but think about this.
If you're putting stakes into the ground
around a yard to make a fence,
isn't it for sure always gonna have pieces going this way?
Right, I mean, that's how fences work, right?
They have the stakes going this way
and then they have something going this way.
Also, I looked up the references in Xenophon and Herodotus
and it was basically talking about like building a bridge
and putting in an upright piece of wood.
And obviously, when you build a bridge,
there's no bridge in the world
that's just a bunch of vertical pieces of material.
But of course, you have the cross pieces of those pylons.
So those two definitions don't contradict.
But anyway, the Bible wasn't written in 800 BC,
the New Testament that is.
It was written in the first century AD
and starting in around 300 BC,
the word stavros, or we could do the verbal form,
which would be stavrolo, okay?
This word was being used for Roman crucifixion, okay?
And by the way, crucifixion is where we get our word cross,
crux, crux, cross, right?
Even when someone says that something is excruciating,
that comes from the word for the cross, you know,
because it's something that's very painful,
because the cross is very painful, okay?
So basically, this word right here,
starting around 300 BC,
it was used to refer to Roman crucifixion on a cross.
And even intrinsically in the word itself,
the idea of two pieces of wood crossing each other
goes all the way back to the early
paleo Hebrew pictograph of the letter T.
The name of the letter T is in the name of this.
Ancient references involving pieces of wood
that would be crossed by another do not contradict this
simply because we're referring to the stakes
standing in the ground themselves.
Okay, but here's the thing.
Besides all this, let me just prove it to you
beyond a shadow doubt,
because you could say, well, I don't know.
Okay, well, here's the smoking gun, okay?
John chapter 20, verse 25.
The other disciples therefore said unto him,
we have seen the Lord.
This is doubting Thomas.
But he said unto them,
except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails,
and put my finger into the print of the nails,
and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
Now notice what Thomas says.
He says, I want to see in his hands
the print of the nails, nails.
I want to see the print of the nails in his hand.
He didn't say the nail in his hands
because of the fact that if the Jehovah's Witnesses
were right and Jesus were like this, you know,
with his hands above his head like this,
they'd show a picture of it, there's one nail.
Starros, by definition, a wooden stake driven in the ground
used to cause torture or death.
Starros will have someone lie
about the way that someone died.
So who's right here?
Are we gonna believe the Jehovah's Witnesses
with their torture stake, with their one nail?
Or are we gonna believe what the Bible says
in John chapter 20, verse 25,
the print of the nails in his hand?
And then, you know, here it is in the original Greek,
if the Jehovah's Witnesses don't believe me,
since they have their own Bible translation
that changes things, it says right here,
ton tipon don ilon, all right?
So o ilos is the nail, singular.
This would be two ilu if we were talking about one nail.
But instead it says ton tipon, the type or imprint or mark,
ton tipon of the, ton, this is plural, of the nails, plural.
Okay, so the Jehovah's Witness Bible
is not even really worthy to be called a translation
because it just has their agenda
and all their doctrine crammed into it.
It's not faithfully translating
the original Greek and Hebrew text.
It's just a translation made to prop up their cult.
That's why no one outside of their cult
takes their translation seriously.
You know, all kinds of people use the King James
and even scholars in academia
will refer to the King James Bible
and respect the King James Bible as a great translation.
No one, literally no one outside of the Jehovah's Witnesses
would even begin to give the time of day
to the New World Translation.
It is exclusively used by their cult
because any actual linguist would think it's a joke, okay?
And so the King James Bible
and virtually all the other English Bibles
are all translating this as cross
and they are correct.
The proof is in John 20, 25
and it's even in the word, Stavros itself.
God bless you, have a great day.