I am reading: "Rutherford's Coup" by Rud Persson -- 600+ pages, and much too expensive!

[TrueTomHarley]

1 hour ago, JW Insider said:

At this point it just didn't seem right.

Sure. You just didn’t want to leave Walter stranded high and dry. Old softie.

[JW Insider]

I moved a few more of the posts from here the other topic:

https://www.theworldnewsmedia.org/topic/89872-posts-moved-from-a-recent-topic-about-a-jfrutherford-book/

 

[JW Insider]

Well, I've pretty much completed the book. I still have a few more references to find for myself, and look up. So that might take a while.

I have decided that there really isn't enough interest in the actual topic itself. Most of the interest is just a lot of trying to hold onto previously held opinions, or to prove others wrong, with or without evidence.. And unless someone asks me to, I won't even restart the topic in the Closed Club, where it was suggested it belonged in the first place. There are always plenty of good subjects to discuss and a lot of them are much more important anyway.

I will say that the book was excellent. One can read the whole thing and realize that you are not necessarily being influenced by the opinions of Rud Persson. To a much better degree than expected, you are really just reading evidence, and you are allowed to reach your own conclusions about the preponderance of the evidence. That's the way a book of historical research should be written. Not one that tries to draw conclusions for you.

Since I'm ready to draw a conclusion from the book I will say one "last thing." I have realized that, all in all, even though I thought I had been giving the benefit of the doubt to both sides evenly, I haven't. I knew there would be biases and prejudices both for and against the usual conclusions that we have drawn. But I didn't realize that we can be much more sure about which biases to agree with and which were to be rejected. The overall evidence makes it all too obvious. But I won't elaborate further here. People can get hold of the book for themselves if they wish. But even without the book, all one has to do is get hold of the sources, many of which are freely available on line, but with a lot of searching.

I also went back and corrected a couple of misconceptions I had at first. One was too minor to repeat: I had confused Ohio with Maryland as the place where Rutherford had some business and where he had just met PSLJ. The other is also about PSLJ, but is a more significant error on my part. So I will repeat here the correction I made on a previous page:

[Edited to add: I was wrong on this point about Rutherford not dealing with PSLJ as if he had serious mental problems. Rutherford was actually quick to deal with PSLJ as insane and mentally unbalanced, but Rutherford was inconsistent, and seemed to soften his position toward him. This hadn't made sense to me originally, and I was partly influenced here by the comments of a brother I spoke to at length about this very recently after reading this portion of the book. But Persson's book provides a detail that I take as an obvious clue as to the reason for Rutherford's inconsistency. Persson doesn't appear to draw any conclusion from that detail, but it makes me think that it was not just an absent-minded inconsistency on Rutherford's part. It served a purpose.]

[Anna]

2 hours ago, JW Insider said:

and you are allowed to reach your own conclusions about the preponderance of the evidence. That's the way a book of historical research should be written

Yes!! 

[JW Insider]

Now that I have finished the book in question, I have one more correction to add to my initial opinion. I stated that Rud Persson lets the evidence and documentation speak for itself, rather than try to push his conclusions on the reader. This is still true, right up to the conclusion. In the conclusion, he tries to argue that all of this information is very damaging to the conclusions that we Witnesses currently draw concerning the "faithful and discreet slave." It's true that he can rationalize bringing this up because the identity of the "fds" has been a side topic of all the various Bible Student groups that he discusses, and he does follow the successes and failures of certain doctrinal ideas with the other groups, too.

But, then without much excuse, he also brings up Rutherford's change to the "superior authorities" teaching and the way this change was currently handled among Witnesses in the early 1960s and early 1980s. His last point had almost nothing to do with Witnesses, and was just there to present a little "dig" or cause a little embarrassment. He also throws in some points against the Gentile Times teaching and 1914, which I agree with, but they were not necessary in a conclusion about the aftermath of the Rutherford issue. 

[JW Insider]

I have just moved about 130 more posts from here to the other topic linked here:

https://www.theworldnewsmedia.org/topic/89872-posts-moved-from-a-recent-topic-about-a-jfrutherford-book

Hope this doesn't cause any confusion.

[JW Insider]

On 5/31/2022 at 8:02 PM, WalterPrescott said:

JWI, how does that compare? It seems trivial when, bad explanations have already been made long ago. It seems irrelevant for another apostate to rehash the past, when that apostate only has unsubstantiated info.

You are right that it certainly would be trivial and irrelevant if it was just another book of bad explanations and unsubstantiated info. But you asked how does that compare? I'd have to say that this book is the first one I have read that is literally full of substantiated info. There are times when it defends the Watchtower's (and MacMillan's statements) against those of previous apostates and ex-JWs who have written books with unsubstantiated claims.

On 5/31/2022 at 8:02 PM, WalterPrescott said:

If we are to believe, everything apostates offer as fact, Rutherford, was a drunk, whore chaser, Beth Sarim held his concubines, and he's buried in the garage floor at Beth Sarim.

Persson's book focuses on the events of 1916 through 1919. But you can tell he is trying to do a pretty fair and balanced job of dealing with a lot of these other later claims about Rutherford, too. He has no problem pointing out the "ignorance" of some of these  authors who were too quick to just pick up on anything that sounded negative about Rutherford, but didn't check the facts. He even uses the term "ignorant" when describing conclusions made in some previous apostate books, but only when he can substantiate why they were wrong.

For example, he spends pages presenting some valuable evidence that Carl Olof Jonsson has uncovered that contradicts a lot of the lurid claims about Rutherford's drinking. Jonsson trusts the opinion of this brother who knew Rutherford pretty well, and who claims that he never saw Rutherford publicly drunk.

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, WalterPrescott said:

So, his perception of Rutherford's time from 1916-1919 is NOT substantiated,

I couldn't care less about his perception of Rutherford's time, just the specific (verifiable) details reported. It's the documentation that is substantiated. It's the fact that someone else went to the trouble of culling through hundreds of pages of this documentation and made lists of all the major resources used, and gives us the page numbers in those resources that we can find and look up ourselves. This is something you rarely get from simple biased presentations of any kind of history. These include the resources that are pro-Rutherford and resources that were anti-Rutherford.

Persson's perception of it all might be wrong. But we can make up our own minds because many of his resources are re-printed in full in the books appendixes. Some of these are valuable Watchtower resources were never re-printed in any Watchtower versions of our history. So most of us have never seen some of our own resources.

1 hour ago, WalterPrescott said:

Like you told me, anyone can flip through a book and post just the negative aspects of it. Heed your own words when reading apostate literature. 

Exactly!

1 hour ago, WalterPrescott said:

What all those apostate books do is, recycle old info. 

You gave the impression earlier that because some apostate books are inaccurate that all of them are. If there were 100 apostate books in the world, and half of them were terrible, it doesn't necessarily mean that the other half are just as terrible. It's not possible to generalize this way about "all those apostate books."

Besides, you are quoting above from "apostate" resources, too. Rutherford referred to several of the breakaway groups as "the evil slave." But it didn't mean that ALL of what they said and did was wrong. For example the Standfasters were also considered "the evil slave." Yet they broke away because the Watchtower Society was compromising on political issues, war, war bonds, etc. Yet, the Standfasters, began taking a stand against "flag salute" years before Rutherford began defending this same stance. The Standfasters also came up with an earthly class of non-anointed Christians many years before Rutherford began teaching the existence of such a class. So it's not like everything that apostates said and did must always be rejected. Rutherford himself was able to correctly apostasize from Russellite teachings, so that he had abandoned almost all of Russell's unique teachings before 1930.

(1 Corinthians 11:19) For there will certainly also be sects among you, so that those of you who are approved may also become evident.

[Patiently waiting for Truth]

41 minutes ago, JW Insider said:

The Standfasters also came up with an earthly class of non-anointed Christians many years before Rutherford began teaching the existence of such a class.

This is interesting even though i have no idea who the 'Standfasters' were.  Interesting because JWs here seem to think that the Watchtower leaders were the first to teach many things, because (they say) the W/t leaders are guided by God's Holy spirit. 

It would be nice to know of any other spiritual things that the Watchtower leaders / JW leaders coppied from others. 

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, WalterPrescott said:

Once again, what's the interest?

I could ask you the same, as you appear to have a much stronger interest in all this old past history than I ever will. My interest is not related to tracing the many break-off groups, or worry about what they taught or didn't teach. Or what embarrassing mistakes were made. My interest is to look at whether information we currently teach about our history might have been distorted. I don't want to learn only biased, one-sided information if there is a lot of evidence to consider that I hadn't considered before. I like to learn about all the evidence before I judge something as right, wrong or somewhere in between.

I don't blame anyone, however, for jumping to the conclusion that all books by former Witnesses are going to be worthless. Plenty of them are. And plenty of them appear to discuss material that I have absolutely no interest in. I'm not interested in anecdotes that highlight embarrassments and mistakes of the past. As I said above, my interest is in what we are teaching currently about this time period.

I learned a lot from the book. Not directly from Persson, but from the sources, resources, material and evidence that he presents.

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, WalterPrescott said:

I guess more post will need to be moved!

You are right. This time it was a bit harder, because there were a couple of them that started out more closely related to Bible Student history, but they strayed too far from this topic.

Anyway, they are now over in that same old "other" recent thread: https://www.theworldnewsmedia.org/topic/89872-posts-moved-from-a-recent-topic-about-a-jfrutherford-book/

 

[JW Insider]

1 hour ago, WalterPrescott said:

Another thing JW's should be aware of. It was 1931 when they "openly" declared themselves Jehovah's Witnesses. That was the affirmation, year. That doesn't mean people hadn't being trying to make a change sooner. They started floating the name change since 1922 by variations like Witnesses of Jehovah. It was briefly mentioned in an 1928 convention as well. Therefore, it became a team effort, not just Rutherford.

The Proclaimers book alludes to something like this on page 152-3: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1101993013

Yet, Isaiah 43:10, 12 was never discussed in any detail in The Watch Tower during its first 40 years of publication.

After that, however, their study of the Scriptures directed the attention of Jehovah’s servants to significant new developments. God’s Kingdom with Jesus as Messianic King had been brought to birth in the heavens in 1914. In 1925, the year that this was made clear in The Watch Tower, the prophetic command, in Isaiah chapter 43, to be witnesses of Jehovah was given attention in 11 different issues of the magazine.

In The Watch Tower of January 1, 1926, the principal article featured the challenging question: “Who Will Honor Jehovah?” During the next five years, The Watch Tower discussed some portion of Isaiah 43:10-12 in 46 separate issues and each time made application of it to true Christians.* In 1929 it was pointed out that the outstanding issue facing all intelligent creation involves the honoring of Jehovah’s name. And in connection with the responsibility that Jehovah’s servants have regarding this issue, Isaiah 43:10-12 repeatedly came up for consideration.

Russell had spoken of John the Baptist as having the privilege of being the first of Jehovah God's witnesses of the Light, and had spoken of the Great Pyramid in Egypt as being "Jehovah's 'Witness.'" But, just as the Proclaimer's book stated, Russell had not really discussed the "issue" in Isaiah 43 in much depth. He had referenced Isaiah 43:7 and 43:11, but never dealt with the term "witnesses" the way Isaiah 43:12 does.

The jw.org website says that the name appeared for the very first time in print on July 28, 1931, along with a picture of the paper (The Messenger): https://www.jw.org/en/news/jw/region/global/Ninety-Years-Embracing-the-Name-Jehovahs-Witnesses/

On July 28, 1931, The Messenger, a newspaper produced by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society that reported on convention news, used the name Jehovah’s Witnesses in print for the first time.

I've never seen it credited as a team effort, though. Everywhere in our publications where the name change is discussed, it always seems to be credited to Rutherford and divine providence.

*** jv chap. 11 p. 152 How We Came to Be Known as Jehovah’s Witnesses ***
. . . A. H. Macmillan, an administrative associate of three presidents of the Watch Tower Society, said concerning that announcement by Brother Rutherford: “There is no doubt in my mind—not then nor now—that the Lord guided him in that, and that is the name Jehovah wants us to bear, and we’re very happy and very glad to have it.” Which viewpoint do the facts support? Was the name ‘a stroke of genius’ on the part of Brother Rutherford, or was it the result of divine providence?