Posted by AF [AF] on November 13, 2000 at 07:08:14 {E683fk4taU8BC/zeHw..daOt1gg/Zk}:
A couple of days ago I posted yet another example of how the Watchtower Society has misrepresented its own history, from the May 1, 1991 Watchtower. This was in connection with its failed claim that Christ had returned in 1874, which since its official abandonment of this date in the 1940s it has often tried to pretend it never taught, and in fact that it predicted that events would happen in 1914 that until the 1940s it taught had already happened in 1874 to 1878. Various Watchtower writers have been a combination of out-and-out liars and thoroughly incompetent purveyors of their own history, even though claiming that their written words are nothing less than "spiritual food in due season" served under divine direction.
Naturally, JWs hate to see examples like this, and so the more dishonest among them, such as our resident false prognosticator and Wannabe Priest-King Bobby You Know, knowing that they cannot defend such out and out lies, resort to all manner of red herrings to try to draw attention away from the Society's lying words. In this post I'll expand on the theme of "how to lie and preserve deniability." Thanks to Tom and Gedanken for the other examples you posted.
The Society really does know the truth about its history, and so any of the Governing Body members and their appointees who are responsible for checking the accuracy of the material they publish in God's name certainly know that the Society's predictions about 1914 failed utterly. They also know that not a jot or tittle of the old teachings about the period 1874 to 1914 remain. Every prediction failed and every "prophetic fulfillment" once declared as "meat in due season" has been abandoned. In particular, all of Charles Taze Russell's teachings about 1874, 1878 and many other dates have been trashed.
In a long series of articles in the 1955 Watchtower the Society published a, shall we say, `massaged' version of its history. It did manage to get quite a few things right, among them the following:
w55 1/1 7-8 Part 1: Early Voices (1870-1878)
In January, 1876, Charles Russell for the first time received a copy of the monthly magazine The Herald of the Morning as published by the Rochester group headed by Nelson H. Barbour. A meeting was soon arranged between Russell and Barbour, since it was discovered that their views were the same concerning Christ's second coming as being invisible. As a result the Pittsburgh Bible group of nearly thirty decided to affiliate with the Rochester group slightly larger in number. Russell became a joint editor along with Barbour for The Herald of the Morning. The Pittsburgh group on Russell's initiative agreed to finance a small printing place in Rochester for the joint printing undertakings. It was also decided to publish a bound book containing their joint views, the work being completed by 1877. The 194-page publication was entitled "Three Worlds or Plan of Redemption," by Barbour and Russell as joint authors. During this time Russell at the age of twenty-five began to sell out his business interests and went full time into the preaching work, going from city to city to talk to various gatherings of the public, on the streets and, Sundays, in Protestant churches, where he could arrange such with the clergy.This book set forth their belief that Christ's second presence began invisibly in the fall of 1874 and thereby commenced a forty-year harvest period. Then, remarkably accurately, they set forth the year 1914 as the end of the Gentile times.-Luke 21:24.
Note carefully that they stated that Christ's "second presence" (which the WTS has also termed "second coming" and "second parousia") had already begun in 1874. This was also set forth in the 1959 book Jehovah's Witnesses in the Divine Purpose, so all WTS writers after this had absolutely no excuse not to know this fact. The notion of Christ's "parousia" beginning in either 1874 or 1914 has always been absolutely fundamental to Watchtower teaching.
Now, almost all languages have ambiguities in their grammar, and English is no exception. English is particularly ambiguous in what I will call the `past ambiguous tense' (grammarians will want to shoot me for this), by which I mean a tense where the speaker is describing a past viewpoint at which another viewpoint was described. The ambiguity is that a listener cannot tell whether the action is before or after this past viewpoint. This is better shown by an example.
Suppose I said, "I told you that the package would be delivered in May." Obviously, I'm describing a past viewpoint (the precise time is unspecified) at which time "I told you" something. Can you tell whether the time at which I told you something was before or after May? No, you can not. If I spoke to you before May, I could have said at that time, "The package is going to be delivered in May." If I spoke to you after May, I could have said, "The package was going to be delivered in May but the delivery company lost it", or I could equally well have said, "The package would have been delivered in May if the delivery company had not lost it." If the latter is what really happened, then my saying that "I told you that the package would be delivered in May" is not strictly correct by formal grammar because it is illogical, but it is correct by usage. In other words, it has become an idiom that competent English speakers understand is ambiguous as a matter of course. This is something like the transition in popular usage from the proper phrase "I couldn't care less" to the completely illogical but presently accepted slang, "I could care less."
How does this apply to the WTS's obfuscation of its wrong teachings about 1874 etc.? About 1875 or so, Charles Russell accepted the idea that Christ's future return was going to be invisible. Also in 1875, Nelson Barbour and his group were trying to figure out why Barbour's 1869 to 1873 predictions that Christ was going to return in 1873 and 1874 had failed, and so they hit upon the clever idea that Christ had indeed returned but invisibly. When Russell read Barbour's ideas about this in early 1876, and then met in person with him later in the year, they clicked and formed a partnership. At that time Russell accepted essentially all of Barbour's ideas on Christ's return and "Bible chronology".
In view of the above, it would be strictly incorrect for anyone to say that Russell and Barbour learned that Christ's return would be invisible, because by the time they "learned" about this event in 1876, it was already two years past. To be strictly correct, a person would have to say that Russell and Barbour learned that Christ's return had been invisible.
Now, one might step to yet another viewpoint - the viewpoint of someone speaking before Christ's supposed return in 1874. From that viewpoint it would proper to speak of someone learning that Christ's yet-future return would be or was going to be invisible. If one did, though, it would be necessary to make that viewpoint clear so as to eliminate any ambiguity. There is a very big difference between saying that Russell learned by 1879 that Christ's return would be invisible and meaning that "Christ's return had been invisible", and meaning "from the viewpoint of someone before 1874 Christ's return was going to be invisible."
With the above points in mind, note how the very next issue of The Watchtower begins obscuring the truth once again:
w55 1/15 45 Part 2: Small Beginnings (1879-1889)
By 1879 they had become sure that Christ's second coming would begin his invisible presence.
This is strictly incorrect, but the ambiguity described above allows for it if an immediate context has been established that resolves the ambiguity. If no such context has been established, then the author is either an incompetent writer, or is deliberately obscuring the facts.
Given the above, the reader can easily see that the author of the May 1, 1991 Watchtower I quoted in my earlier thread has not established a context in which the sort of ambiguity described above is resolved (page 17):
9 Only a small minority of God-fearing people 'put up a hard fight for the faith delivered to the holy ones.' (Jude 3) Where could such believers be found? For centuries, false religion kept the multitudes in spiritual darkness, but God knew those few who had his approval. (2 Timothy 2:19) And then, amid the commercial, industrial, and social changes of the 19th century, there arose voices that stood out from the general babel of false religious confusion. Small groups tried to read the signs of the times and predict Jesus' second coming, but not all spoke the pure language.10 In 1879, however, it became clear which "second coming" voice was being chosen by Jehovah to speak the pure language as his Witnesses. By then a small Bible-study group led by Charles Taze Russell was meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. They had become certain that Jesus' second coming would begin his invisible presence, that a time of world distress was ahead, and that this would be followed by the Thousand Year Reign of Christ that would restore Paradise on earth, with eternal life for obedient humans. In July 1879 these Bible Students began to publish the magazine now known as The Watchtower. Only 6,000 copies were distributed of the first issue. But "the hand of Jehovah" was with those Witnesses, for this journal is now published in 111 languages, with an average printing of over 15,000,000 for each issue.-Compare Acts 11:19-21.
The context for the above bolded statement is simple: Jehovah's Witnesses in general are abysmally ignorant of details of their doctrinal history, and nearly all of them wrongly believed in 1991 that the Watchtower Society had always taught well in advance of 1914 that Christ's return in 1914 was going to be invisible. The writer is either thoroughly incompetent or a liar. The Governing Body members or their appointees who were responsible for checking the accuracy of all printed material in The Watchtower are not that incompetent. Therefore they knowingly let a false statement pass, and therefore they are liars.
The problem for the author of the 1991 Watchtower article in describing Russell's beliefs is simple -- an accurate statement would be: "They had become certain that Jesus' second coming had begun his invisible presence in 1874." Well of course that certainty was completely misplaced because they had begun teaching something that was false. But the author's entire point was that Russell was the one whose "voice was being chosen by Jehovah to speak the pure language as his" witness. Could he reasonably claim that Jehovah had chosen a teacher of falsehood to speak in his name? Hardly. But the author had to go along with the standard false history that was then current among the JW rank & file.
To show that Watchtower writers are quite capable of writing clearly when they want to, such as when describing the false beliefs of others, note how the false expectations of other groups are described in another Watchtower article. Here, the verbs are not ambiguous at all:
w84 12/1 13-14
'Happy Are Those Found Watching'
16 Since "the more established Christian churches" were no longer on the watch for Christ's presence and his receiving Kingdom power, it was left to what those churches called "heretical groups" to do so. In the 19th century, several such groups appeared in lands where the Bible and the means to study it were available to the common people. The mainstream churches, for whom any teaching on the "Last Things" had become meaningless, despisingly called such groups adventists or millennialists, because such groups were on the watch for Christ's second advent and believed that Christ was due to reign for a thousand years. Many of these groups expected Christ to return to earth to establish his millennial Kingdom. Some of them calculated Christ's second advent as due to occur in 1835 (the Irvingites, in England), 1836 (Bengel's followers, in Germany), 1843 (Miller's followers, in the United States) and 1889 (a Mennonite group in Russia).
How often do we find Nelson Barbour's false predictions about 1874 described in WTS literature? We don't find them at all. Why not? Because Barbour's reason - and this almost certainly influenced Russell as well - for coming up with it was to explain away the utter failure of his prediction for Christ's return in 1873/1874. What has been described later WTS literature is this, quoting from an 1894 Zion's Watch Tower:
w55 1/1 7 Part 1: Early Voices (1870-1878)
"[We] soon began to see that we were living somewhere near the close of the Gospel age, and near the time when the Lord had declared that the wise, watching ones of his children should come to a clear knowledge of his plan. . . . We came to see something of the love of God, how it had made provision for all mankind, how all must be awakened from the tomb in order that God's loving plan might be testified to them, and how all who exercise faith in Christ's redemptive work and render obedience in harmony with the knowledge of God's will they will then receive, might then (through Christ's merit) be brought back into full harmony with God, and be granted everlasting life. . . . We came to recognize the difference between our Lord as 'the man who gave himself,' and as the Lord who would come again, a spirit being. We saw that spirit-beings can be present, and yet invisible to men. . . . We felt greatly grieved at the error of Second Adventists who were expecting Christ in the flesh, and teaching that the world and all in it except Second Adventists would be burned up in 1873 or 1874, whose time-settings and disappointments and crude ideas generally of the object and manner of his coming brought more or less reproach upon us and upon all who longed for and proclaimed his coming Kingdom. These wrong views so generally held of both the object and manner of the Lord's return led me to write a pamphlet-The Object and Manner of Our Lord's Return, of which some 50,000 copies were published."
It is evident that Russell himself was the source of the obfuscation in this case. He tried to cover up just what kind of nonsense he had accepted from Barbour, which nonsense was the basis for his entire failed chronological system.
Getting back to obscurantist statements in WTS literature, here is another one:
w73 7/1 395
About January 1876, C. T. Russell came in touch with the journal The Herald of the Morning, published by N. H. Barbour of Rochester, New York. It advocated belief in an invisible presence of Jesus Christ.
The problem is that the average 1973 JW reader had little idea that Barbour's 1876 view was that Christ's "invisible presence" had already begun in 1874, and the WT article makes no effort to clue the reader in.
The above-quoted 1984 Watchtower showed how WTS can be clear when they want to be, but the same article just a few paragraphs later lapses into the usual deceitful obscurantism:
w84 12/1 13-14
20 Russell and his associates quickly understood that Christ's presence would be invisible. They disassociated themselves from other groups and, in 1879, began publishing spiritual food in Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence. From its first year of publication, this magazine pointed forward, by sound Scriptural reckoning, to the date 1914 as an epoch-making date in Bible chronology. So when Christ's invisible presence began in 1914, happy were these Christians to have been found watching! For over a century, this magazine, now called The Watchtower-Announcing Jehovah's Kingdom, has helped an ever-increasing number of true Christians to "keep looking" and "keep awake." (Mark 13:33)
The following quotes are examples of the subtle ambiguity that WTS writers use to misdirect the reader. In each case, one needs to be extremely familiar with details of WTS history in order to see the misdirection. It will be a good exercise for readers interested in this kind of detail to pick it out.
w71 1/1 15
In comparison with many other parts of the earth, Japan had to wait longer to hear the good news of the Kingdom. In the year 1912 the first president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Charles T. Russell, visited Japan as the head of a committee of the International Bible Students Association, investigating the religious field in the Orient. They noticed that the missionaries of orthodox Christianity were considerably discouraged and Pastor Russell concluded that what the Japanese people needed was the gospel of the Kingdom, the announcing of the second coming of Christ and the establishment of his righteous kingdom.w79 7/1 5 Keeping Watch for 100 Years
From the outset, the Watch Tower showed that at Christ's second coming his parousia would be an invisible presence as a mighty spirit person. (Matt. 24:3; 1 Pet. 3:18) Moreover, in keeping watch, this journal's early issues (March and June 1880) pointed to 1914 C.E. as a climactic year. It was to mark the close of the 2,520-year-long Gentile Times, during which non-Jewish nations would rule the earth without interference by any kingdom of God.w71 10/15 620-1 When All Nations Collide, Head On, with God
HOW THE END OF THE GENTILE TIMES WAS MARKED
36 When was this kingdom, symbolized by the stone that was cut out of the universal mountain, really "cut out" by God's hands and set up in power? That was at the end of the Gentile Times in the very year that war broke out on earth over world domination. We all know that year-1914! The kingdom in the hands of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, was set up, not at the site of old Jerusalem in the Middle East, but in the heavens, where the Son of God sits at the right hand of his heavenly Father. The immediate bearing that the close of the Gentile Times had upon the world conditions then was called to the world's attention in the latter part of 1917, even by clergymen of Christendom. Near the time of the capture of old Jerusalem by the British armies on December 9, 1917, Dr. G. Campbell Morgan, Dr. F. B. Meyer, and six other well-known clergymen of England, issued a Manifesto, which was republished throughout the earth and which declared:
37 "(1) That the present crisis points toward the close of the times of the Gentiles. . . . (5) That all human schemes of reconstruction must be subsidiary to the second coming of our Lord, because all nations will then be subject to His rule. . . . "-Current Opinion, for February 1918.
38 For decades in advance, by means of the Watch Tower Society publications, the Christian witnesses of Jehovah were pointing ahead, not to the year 1917, but to 1914 as being the year for the close of "the times of the Gentiles." (Luke 21:24, Authorized Version) The close of the Gentile Times marked the critical time for Jehovah God to issue orders to his enthroned Son in fulfillment of King David's prophecy in Psalm 110:1, 2: "Jehovah saith unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. Jehovah will send forth the rod of thy strength out of Zion: Rule thou in the midst of thine enemies." (American Standard Version) Hence the symbolic "stone," God's kingdom by Christ, did not strike the symbolic "image" of political power in the year 1914. It merely began to rule in the midst of its enemies.w56 12/1 714 Pursuing My Purpose in Life
War or no war my partner and I kept on with our pioneering and had assignments in Scotland and Ireland, operating in connection with the showing of the Photo-Drama of Creation-advertising the motion picture, helping to put it over and then following up the interest. At the conclusion of each exhibition of the Drama two public talks were given: "Pastor Russell's Teachings Examined" and "Christ's Second Coming." Names were handed in and we followed through with the sets of Studies in the Scriptures. The Photo-Drama drew full houses wherever it was shown and we had many really joyful experiences.
The following are examples of blatant falsehoods. Can the reader pick them out?
w70 4/15 250 Questions That People Ask About Jehovah's Witnesses
In modern times Jehovah's witnesses began their activity in the early 1870's. In 1870 Charles Taze Russell, brought up by God-fearing Presbyterian parents, was not satisfied with the sectarian explanations of the Bible given him, so he started a Bible-study class with several of his friends. They discovered many of the Biblical truths that had been hidden by Christendom's traditions. In 1874 they published information to debunk the religious theory of the earth's being destroyed by fire at Christ's second coming. They pointed out that the second coming of Christ would be invisible, as the apostles had long before known.w69 8/15 507 Over Half a Century of Satisfying Service
In 1911 there came to me through a man named Fred Parker a copy of the People's Pulpit and a copy of The Bible Students Monthly, both published by the Bible Students, as Jehovah's witnesses were then known. One told about the condition of the dead and the other intimated that the second coming of Christ Jesus was due.w61 2/1 78
SIGN OF CHRIST'S PRESENCE
4 Yes, it is high time to awake from the gloomy darkness that envelops the old world system, including its religious organizations, and to enjoy the refreshing light of truth. It is already over forty years since the manifold sign of Jesus' second coming began to be observed with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
AF