JWS AND PSEUDOHISTORY

Honesty

You forgot to add numerology and occultism to the list.

james_woods

Well of course they do, and it is about as far out as the Heaven's Gate starship hiding behind the Hale Bopp comet.

Example? All human history is encompassed in around 6000 years. All CREATION (meaning all history of life on the planet, cosmology, and geology) are about 48000 years or so. Also the sun and all the stars are in that time frame.

Neanderthal man is a hoax. All man spoke the same language before Babylon built the tower. There was a huge undefinable water canopy over all earth before the flood, and it protected everybody from harmful radiation. That is why people could literally live 900 years or more.

Then it fell in the flood and covered up all mountains; including K2 and Everest. Somehow it then just drained away and left dry land.

Jesus Christ came back in 1874. No, he really came back in 1914. No, he really DID - you just can't see it because he came back invisibly (and apparantly has done nothing for us since except build up the WTS).

and so on, ad absurdum...

James

Narkissos

The so-called "historical books" of the Bible offer great examples of pseudo-history.

In a modern context (i.e. against the modern sense of historicity), the way most JWs picture the history of their movement (cf. unclebruce's thread on "Old Lie vs. New Lie") is a testimony to the effectiveness of pseudo-history.

MuadDib

Pseudohistory is a claim about the past meant to describe actual fact but which departs from standard methodological practice to produce conclusions at odds with mainstream scholarly consensus on history. The entire Daniel's Prophecy book qualifies as pseudohistory by that standard since it takes established historical fact (like the diplomatic, political, and military history of the Hellenistic Empires) and attempts to show that its real outworking involves centuries of Biblical prophecy instead of the mundane dynastic squabbles of long-gone societies. Anybody who believes in the literal truth of the Old Testament narrative believes in pseudohistory as well. The JW teaching on 607 BC, I would say, isn't so much pseudohistory as an outright fabrication since it has absolutely no documentary or material evidence to support it.

By the by, I've always found it very interesting how the Daniel's Prophecy book goes out of its way to emphasize that the Book of Daniel was written during the Exile, and not in the Hellenistic Period where most scholars place it - and the most detailed "historical" discussion in the book involves the complex relationship between the Ptolemies and Seleucids, during the Hellenistic Period. Gee, do you think Daniel might have been so well-acquainted with that history because he lived during it? Or because Jehovah really felt that which Seleucid monarchs divorced which Ptolemaic monarchs was really relevant to the outworking of his universal purposes?

Leolaia

By the by, I've always found it very interesting how the Daniel's Prophecy book goes out of its way to emphasize that the Book of Daniel was written during the Exile, and not in the Hellenistic Period where most scholars place it - and the most detailed "historical" discussion in the book involves the complex relationship between the Ptolemies and Seleucids, during the Hellenistic Period. Gee, do you think Daniel might have been so well-acquainted with that history because he lived during it?

Hee hee, you might like my upcoming thread on this subject....

greendawn

They do distort their own history a lot to purge things that could damage their image with the current membership, I noticed that they never clearly stated that the 1914 date was taken from the adventists, more specifically from Barfour, and at least up to the early 1990's they were talking about Russell and Barfour in a way implying that Russell was the teacher of Barfour. It was the other way round.

Other distortions: claiming Rutherford's take over of the WTS was according to Russell's will, the 1914 date was from the JW beginning believed to be the start of the last generation, that both the 1925 and 1975 end of the world hysteria were started by irresponsible R&F members.