The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

62 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
The 1914 date would most probably have drowned in the sea of
other failed dates and been forgotten by now had it not happened
to be the year of the outbreak of the First World War.
When, back in 1844, E. B. Elliott suggested 1914 as a possible
terminal date for the Gentile times, he reckoned the 2,520 years
from Nebuchadnezzar’s accession-year, which he dated to 606 B.C.E.
N. H. Barbour, however, reckoned the 2,520 years from the
desolation of Jerusalem in Nebuchadnezzar’s 18th regnal year. But
as he dated this event to 606 B.C.E., he, too, in 1875, arrived at
1914 as the terminal date. Since their chronologies not only
conflicted with each other, but also conflicted with the historically
established chronology for Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, their arriving
at the same terminal year was simply a coincidence, demonstrating
how arbitrary and gratuitous their calculations really were.
Barbour’s calculation was accepted by C. T. Russell at their
meeting in 1876. Barbour was then fifty-two years old while Russell
was twenty-four— still very young. Although their ways parted
again in the spring of 1879, Russell stuck to Barbour’s time
calculations, and since that time the 1914 date has been the pivotal
point in prophetic explanations among Russell’s followers.
Supplement to the third and later editions, chapter 1:
The information presented in this chapter has been available to
the Jehovah’s Witnesses since 1983, when the first edition of this
book was published. In addition, the same information was
summarized by Raymond Franz in chapter 7 of his widely known
work, Crisis of Conscience, published in the same year. Thus—after 10
years—in 1993 the Watch Tower Society finally felt compelled to
admit that neither the 2,520-year calculation nor the 1914 date
originated with Charles Taze Russell as it had held until then.
Further, the Society now also admits that the predictions Russell
and his associates attached to 1914 failed.
These admissions are found on pages 134–137 of Jehovah’s
Witnesses—Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom, a book on the history of the
movement published by the Watch Tower Society in 1993. Prior to
1993 the impression given had been that Russell was the first to
publish the 2,520-year calculation pointing to 1914, doing this for
the first time in the October, 1876 issue of George Storrs’
magazine the Bible Examiner. Also, that decades in advance Russell
and his followers foretold the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and
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