What follows is only my opinion. It isn't carved in marble anywhere.
For 90% of the rank and file members of Jehovah's Witnesses the actual Theology and Orthodoxy of dates and chronologies are like a 401K sitting in an account somewhere that they can retire on. By doing their little bit here and there they pay into it and it grows until such time they will retire and it will be waiting for them.
In other words, belief for Jehovah's Witnesses is not an intellectual coming to terms with rational explanations and proofs. It is mostly an agreement to accept a Mystical Body of elite leaders who channel Truth into that 401K for them.
It isn't really important for them to KNOW how things work. It is only necessary to know it is there somewhere and that somebody can explain it.
This is worse than intellectual dishonesty. It is vapidity and derelection of intelligence. Worse still, these same persons (active JW's) go so far as to insist that others buy in to the same Trust Fund and risk their retirement on missing funds!
When I was my most active in the J Dubs I spent hours memorizing dates from the Babylon the Great book and practicing explaining the arithmetic from 607 B.C.E to 1914 A.D.
Guess what? Nobody cared! Especially householders whose faces grew slack with stupefying drool at the merest mention of it all.
The smartest brothers in my Kingdom Hall would, if baited (by me) attempt a bumfuzzled recitation of Daniel's prophecy and "day for a year" litany until they sputtered out in a miasma of torpidity.
The CHRONOLOGY of JW's is a leftover from the Adventist roots and the lugubrations of the twice-humbled William Miller. C.T.Russell bought the best tom-foolery he could pay for and linked them together with Pyramidology and his wife, Maria's inventive Faithful and Wise Servant doctrine to jump-start the Bible Students splinter group hijacked (after his death) by the redoubtable contrarian, Judge Rutherford.
This religion, I repeat, is only about the Mystic authenticity of the Governing Body and their mind-control fetishes.
Christianity at large has only one intermediary between God and man: Jesus Christ.
Jehovah's Witnesses have two: Governing Body first, Jesus second.
