The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

The History of an Interpretation 43
a “new light” on the chronology, and that the second advent was to
be expected in 1854. Many Millerites joined Cummings, and in
January, 1854, they started a new periodical, the World’s Crisis, in
advocacy of the new date. 37
Other factors besides dates began to play a role in the
composition of the Second Advent movement. Right up to the
present time they appear as distinctive features among a number of
movements that developed from Second Adventism, including the
Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and certain
Church of God denominations. These factors included the
doctrine of conditional—not inherent—immortality of the soul,
with its corollary tenet that the ultimate destiny of those who are
rejected by God is destruction or annihilation, not conscious
torment. The trinitarian belief also became an issue among some
sectors of the Second Adventists. (For further details on these
developments and their effect in contributing to division among
the offshoots of the Millerite movements, see the Appendix for
Chapter One.)
Most of these developments had already taken place by the time
that Charles Taze Russell, still in his teenage years, began the
formation of a Bible study group in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. From
the end of the 1860’s onward, Russell increasingly got into touch
with some of the Second Adventist groups which developed. He
established close connections with certain of their ministers and
read some of their papers, including George Storrs’ Bible Examiner.
Gradually, he and his associates took over many of their central
teachings, including their conditionalist and anti-trinitarian
positions and most of their “age to come” views. Finally, in 1876,
Russell also adopted a revised version of their chronological
system, which implied that the 2,520 years of Gentile times would
expire in 1914. In all essential respects, therefore, Russell’s Bible
Student movement may be described as yet another offshoot of the
Millerite movement.
What, then, was the most direct source of the chronological
system that Russell, the founder of the Watch Tower movement,
adopted, including not only the 2,520 year-period for the Gentile
times, its ending in 1914, but also the year 1874 for the start of an
invisible presence by Christ? That source was a man named Nelson
H. Barbour.
Nelson H. Barbour
37 Isaac C. Wellcome, History of the Second Advent Message (Yarmouth, Maine,
Boston, New York, London, 1874), pp. 594–597.
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