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 In his book, Year of Doom 1975. the former Jehovah’s Witness,
Mr. W. C. Stevenson, explains how the J.W.s arrive at their date— and how they may slip out of it— come 1976,——
or ’77.
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“In the October 8, 1966 issue of AWAKE! the basis of this prediction is explained. Since the Witnesses
believe that the creative days of Genesis are 7,000 years in length, for reasons which I outlined at the beginning
of this chapter, and since man was created at the close of the sixth day, ‘in the autumn of the year 4026 B.C.’,
as this article precisely puts it, it follows that ‘we are nearing the end of the first six thousand years
of man’s existence’. If the date of the creation of man (4026 BC) is also the date of the beginning of the seventh
creative day or sabbath, it is therefore calculated that the end of the first 6,000 years of this 7,000—year—long
day will take place in the year 1975. Since the last thousand years of this seventh day are to be occupied
entirely by the millennial reign of Christ, it follows that the year 1975 will witness the Battle of Armageddon
and the ushering in of the long-awaited new world under the King Jesus Christ....” (p.85. )
But
things are not so certain. (rt) “If we turn further back into the Society’s literature to the February 1, 1955,
issue of The Watchtower the confusion and contradiction worsen
considerably, for we read on page 95: ‘The very fact that, as part of Jehovah’s secret, no one today is able to
find out how much time Adam and later Eve lived during the closing days of the sixth creative period
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so no one can now determine when six thousand years of Jehovah’s
present rest day come to an end. Obviously, whatever amount of Adam’s 930 years was lived before the beginning
of that seventh day rest of Jehovah, that unknown amount would have to be added to the 1976 date.’ (Pp. 86—87)
The date
1976 is not a misprint for 1975. It is because the Society has on several occasions changed its mind about the
date of Adam’s creation. In the book The Truth
Shall Make You Free (1943) it is given as
BC. In 1944, in the book The Kingdom
Is At Hand it is given as 4026 BC. But in 1953 in the book New Heavens
and a New Earth it was altered to 4025 BC. Hence
in the above quotation, counting from 4025 BC. forward 6,000 years, we arrive at 1976. Since then of course the
date of Adam’s creation has been altered yet again and so we are now fixed on 1975 as the potential year of doom.”
Oddly enough, in 1963 the Society, published All Scripture
Is Inspired Of God and Beneficial, in which they say, “Whatever time elapsed between Adam’s creation and the end of the “sixth day”
must be subtracted from the 5,988 years in order to give the actual length of time from the beginning of
the “seventh day” until now. It does no good to use Bible chronology for speculating on dates that are still future
in the stream of time.”
It seems
to me the Society would do well to accept its own advice, and stop this absurd mathematics.
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