Is the New World Translation accurate?

Not where it matters most. The New World Translation, produced by the Watchtower (Jehovah's Witnesses), is a real, formal translation that reads ordinarily enough in neutral passages - but wherever the deity of Christ is at stake, its signature renderings bend the Greek to fit Watchtower doctrine, and that is where accuracy breaks down.

The flagship is John 1:1: 'the Word was a god.' The reasoning leans on the missing Greek article before theos. But scholars of Greek grammar - Philip Harner's 1973 study, Daniel Wallace's standard grammar - showed the construction there is qualitative: it describes the Word's nature as fully divine, not as one 'god' among others. 'A god' would make John, a strict monotheist, a polytheist. Bruce Metzger, the dean of twentieth-century textual scholarship, called the rendering 'a frightful mistranslation.' Tellingly, the NWT itself declines to render the very similar anarthrous theos in John 1:18 as 'a god.'

The clearest tell is Colossians 1:16-17. To keep Christ a creature while Paul says 'by him all things were created,' the NWT inserts the word 'other' four times - 'all other things' - so that Christ creates everything except himself. But 'other' (Greek alla) simply isn't in the Greek at those points, as the Watchtower's own Kingdom Interlinear shows in its word-for-word column. A word had to be added to move Christ back inside the category of created things; the unaltered text places him outside it.

None of this is a reason to look down on the sincere person at the door. It is a reason to invite them to read the texts they love one chapter at a time - and to let Thomas's unedited confession, 'My Lord and my God' (John 20:28), ask its question.