The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

The History of an Interpretation 67
The generally expected Great War finally came in 1914. But
probably none, and in any case not Charles Taze Russell and his
followers, had predicted that it would come that year. The very
different events that he and his associated “Bible Students” had
attached to that date did not occur. Like the predictions of the
many other contemporary millennarian writers, their predictions,
too, were proved “definitely, completely, absolutely, false by the
events.”
To claim afterwards, as the Watch Tower Society repeatedly did
up to 1993, that they and they alone “accurately,” “by God’s holy
spirit,” had predicted the outbreak of the war in 1914 and other
events, and that “all the politicians, religious leaders, and economic
experts” had been “telling the people the opposite,” is
demonstrably an outright lie.
As explained earlier, some of those pretentious claims were
finally, in 1993, withdrawn in the new book Jehovah’s Witnesses—
Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom. The book was introduced at the district
assemblies of Jehovah’s Witnesses that year as a “candid look” at
the history of the movement. The admissions, however, usually are
contextually surrounded by a minimum of background information
which, moreover, is so apologetically slanted and warped that it
often conceals more than it reveals.
True, the Society finally admits that Russell took over his
calculation of the Gentile times from Nelson H. Barbour, who had
published it one year before Russell “in the August, September,
and October 1875 issues of the Herald of the Morning.” 96 In the
preceding paragraph the book even seeks to enlist the 19th-century
expositors of the 2,520-year calculation as supporting the 1914
date. This impression is further enhanced by the bold-typed
statement to the left of the paragraph: “They could see that 1914
was clearly marked by Bible prophecy.” The presentation of the
history, however, is narrowly limited to a few carefully selected
expositors, the calculations of whom are partially obscured,
adjusted and arranged so as to create the impression that the 2,520-
year calculation uniquely pointed forward to 1914. None of the many other
terminal dates arrived at by expositors before Russell are mentioned. Thus,
although John A. Brown is stated to have arrived at the 2,520 years
“as early as 1823,” his particular application of the period is
completely veiled and distorted in the subsequent sentences:
96 Jehovah’s Witnesses—Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom (Brooklyn, New York: Watchtower
Bible & Tract Society, 1993), p. 134.
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