This category focuses primarily on the history of the Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society, its founders, leaders and major personalities.
The following articles document events, books, teachings and decisions the organization’s founders and their successors made, implemented and enforced. They guided the Watchtower and Jehovah’s Witnesses through the end of the 19th and all of the 20th centuries. While there is very little left of their original teachings and practices, those influences are still felt and frequently referenced. Most modern Jehovah’s Witnesses have little real knowledge of the origins of their religion but still hold many of the founders up as examples of “great and righteous men” who promoted “the truth” and acted “under the influence of Jehovah’s holy spirit.”
In 2001 I requested historical information from the ANCIENT ACCEPTED SCOTTISH RITE OF FREEMASONRY, VALLEY OF PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA. I asked if Charles Taze Russell, his father and his uncle were Pennsylvania Freemasons. This was their answer:
Jehovah’s Witnesses are discouraged from doing extensive personal research into their modern-day history. Such action can cause a truth-seeking Witness
Ever wonder why the name, Watchtower, (one word) is sometimes written, Watch Tower, (two words)? Does it matter? What are
If you were once a Jehovah’s Witness, are you now concerned about worsening world conditions being a sign that soon
An heir to the Coca-Cola fortune, was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. According to William P. Heath, Jr.’s testimony at the
Former Witness and WT critic, Ronald Fry, couldn’t state it any better when he observed: “The pattern or modus operandi
One would think that such prophetic failures would bring an end to speculative date-setting, but it did not. The fact
By the time 1925 rolled in, Rutherford’s backpedaling about his predictions for that year was in high gear when he said in the February 15, 1925 Watch Tower: “No one may safely predict exactly what will take place, even within the next year; but God has given general indications in his Word of many things which are yet to come to pass. He has not specified exactly their chronological order…”
Beginning in 1918 and in the early 1920s, the term, “millions now living will never die” was the slogan that
How can we be sure Rutherford used the 6,000 year theory? Because of the dozens of times he mentioned it