Thursday, 13 October 2011
Back in the late 1970s, a Witness named Carl Jonsson wrote to the Watchtower Society regarding some discrepancies he found regarding the Society’s teaching that Jerusalem fell in 607BC and the overwhelming evidence that it did not.
The Watchtower Society gets many things wrong, and most of them are not that big of a deal. You might think that simply messing up the year in which a city was destroyed 2,600 years ago shouldn’t be a big deal either. But in this case, it is. The Society uses that date (607BC) to support their claim that we are now living in the last days (it’s a ridiculously complicated back-flip of logic that I won’t get into here). So…if 607 is wrong, so is their claim that the Last Days began in 1914. And more!
Anyways…
Carl wrote back and forth to the Watchtower Society. They were initially receptive to Carl’s research, but when it became clear he REALLY had studied the issue, they became defensive, encouraged him to back down, and refused to discuss the matter, especially as this would have revealed they had no evidence for their claim, but were maintaining it as a matter of tradition.
Carl’s correspondence with the Watchtower Society is AT THIS LINK.
As a consequence of Carl’s research, the Watchtower Society revisited their ‘support’ for 607, including publishing a new book titled Let Your Kingdom Come. More recently, they wrote another series of articles trying to defend their position, like THIS ONE. As you can see, there is, once again no evidence, unless you count “because it fits with our theology” as evidence.
I just discovered today that Carl has posted a critique of some of the Watchtower’s more recent articles on the issue. THAT CRITIQUE IS FOUND HERE. I’m not gonna mince words: it’s very dry reading. But it is fascinating, and I love how, by doing the very research the Watchtower Society recommends, you can’t but help come to the conclusion that they’re wrong about things. Like 607. And the Flood.
Good job, Carl! Keep up the good work.