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No, we aren’t. Though other religions believe in modern-day gifts of prophecy or infallibility, we do not.
People in general connect the word “prophet” with predictions of the future. Though prophets in the Bible usually proclaimed predictions about the future, the Scriptural definition of a prophet is wider: a prophet is a person who receives specific messages from God by supernatural means (such as visions, dreams, the visit of an angel) and proclaims those messages.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that miraculous gifts, including the gift of prophecy, dissappeared after the days of the apostles.
Two typical criticisms related to this:
People in general connect the word “prophet” with predictions of the future. Though prophets in the Bible usually proclaimed predictions about the future, the Scriptural definition of a prophet is wider: a prophet is a person who receives specific messages from God by supernatural means (such as visions, dreams, the visit of an angel) and proclaims those messages.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that miraculous gifts, including the gift of prophecy, dissappeared after the days of the apostles.
M’Clintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia Vol. VI, p. 320 states that it is “an uncontested statement that during the first hundred years after the death of the apostles we hear little or nothing of the working of miracles by the early Christians.”“Love never fails. But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away with; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away with.” (1 Cor 13:8).
Two typical criticisms related to this:
- Some people say we are false prophets because we suppossedly have prophesied things that didn’t happen. Although it is true that we have made mistakes, those mistakes were not original, supernatural revelations or prophecies; they were wrong interpretations of Bible prophecies.
- Some people say we do believe we are prophets because they have read a quote somewhere that says so. Actually, it is an article in a 1972 Watchtower issue (one of the 24 issues that year). It would be a little odd that such an important doctrine were only mentioned once in an article that most JWs today haven’t read or even heard about. If you check the article, you can notice that we are compared with “prophets” (in inverted commas, mind you) metaphorically, because we publicly proclaim God’s message. Only that that message is the one in the Bible, not a personal divine revelation.
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