Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, “Germany”
“Although the Pharisees and priests then claimed to represent Jehovah God Jesus told them that they were in fact the representatives of Satan the Devil.”
The sentence closes the Declaration’s quotation of John 8:43-45. Its subject is “the Pharisees and priests” who opposed Jesus, whom the preceding paragraph calls “the Jewish clergy”; the next paragraph begins “We have no fight with any persons or religious teachers”.
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Provenance and verification note for Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, Germany
Confidence note. Read on the page image of p. 133 (leaf 129) on 19 September 2026, whose own running head reads “Year Book 133”, and confirmed word for word. The printed text carries no comma after “Jehovah God”; the sentence is given here exactly as printed.
Scan provenance. Scan of the 1934 Year Book of Jehovah’s Witnesses held by the Internet Archive as item “1934-JwYearbook”. The item was uploaded to the Internet Archive in January 2012 by a private account; its “creator” field reads “watchtower”, but the upload is not by the publisher and the Internet Archive is not the publisher. The scanned title page names the corporate publishers as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Peoples Pulpit Association and International Bible Students Association, Brooklyn, New York, and carries the notice “Copyright 1933”. The volume is the Year Book for 1934: it carries the branch reports for the 1933 service year, and it is dated here by its edition year, the form in which the organisation’s own publications cite it (“1934 Yearbook, pp. 127-146”, The Watchtower, 1 August 1955, footnote h).
Notes. On the page the subject of the sentence is the first-century religious leadership described in the preceding paragraph — “the Jewish clergy, that is to say, the Pharisees and priests” who opposed Jesus — and not the Jews as a people.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-de33-yb34-satan-representatives