The self imposed divine light of CTR.
CLOSE TO INFALLIBLE
The Finished Mystery (1917) was a 608-page book published by the Russellites?the cult that developed into Jehovah?s Witnesses. About 850,000 copies were printed.
The book was allegedly: "of the Lord?prepared under his guidance." (p. 126) It gave a verse by verse interpretation of Revelation and Ezekiel. An ad for the book in The Watch Tower called it: "the true interpretation." (1917, p.334) The Finished Mystery was presented as the posthumous work of Charles Taze Russell?the founder of the cult:
We?re informed:
(The Finished Mystery, p. 125)
Of the Bible we're told: "the Bible is an infallible teacher of the Divine purposes" (p. 66).
The Finished Mystery applies the word "truth", or synonyms thereof such as "Divine light", to Russell?s teachings over 100 times. It also has many insults of Christian ministers such as "yelpings of little men?of the D.D.s of Christendom." (p. 383) D.D.s stands for Dumb Dogs.
People who rejected Russellism the book calls "enemies of truth" (p. 362) and "clerical foes of truth" (p. 383). It says, "the Bible has been perverted" (p. 384) and "the clergy tried to stem the tide of truth" (p. 390).
With the Bible infallible, Russell without theological peer or parallel, and with opposers worthy of insult we?d expect The Finished Mystery itself to be close to infallible. Let?s investigate this:
THE METHOD
I selected 35 pages from The Finished Mystery using the Random Number key of a Scientific Calculator and counted the number of statements that disagree with present-day JW interpretations. The results were:
| PAGE | NUMBER STATEMENTS NOW REJECTED | PAGE | NUMBER STATEMENTS NOW REJECTED |
| 220 | 1 | 327 | 2 |
| 66 | 1 | 524 | 0 |
| 519 | 3 | 61 | 3 |
| 152 | 1 | 412 | 2 |
| 502 | 0 | 479 | 1 |
| 564 | 5 | 29 | 1 |
| 388 | 0 | 501 | 2? |
| 262 | 2 | 535 | 0 |
| 46 | 5 | 318 | 0 |
| 75 | 0 | 302 | 0 |
| 18 | 3 | 424 | 3? |
| 436 | 0 | 52 | 0 |
| 30 | 2 | 198 | 3 |
| 157 | 7 | 563 | 5 |
| 410 | 0 | 505 | 2 |
| 440 | 0 | 106 | 11 |
| 134 | 14 | ||
| 83 | 0 | TOTAL 79 | |
| 425 | 0 | AVERAGE 2.26 |
Two further pages, 258 and 398, are reproduced with this article to illustrate the style of writing in The Finished Mystery.With an average of 2.26 discarded interpretations per page the best single estimate for the whole book is 2.26 x 608pages = 1,372.
This estimates the number of points that an informed JW would recognize as false. Christians and non-Christians would find thousands more falsehoods.
Consider, for example: "the true church?have since 1878 been withdrawing from ecclesiasticism and close to God." (p. 407) A present-day JW would probably agree with this sentence. A more-thoughtful person would disagree because he would doubt that hundreds of mistakes in theology and prophecy could be part of "the true church?close to God." And if we examine how 1878 was obtained and what the date signified that too would be seen as error. This one sentence, therefore, could be regarded as having one, two, three or zero errors depending on whose viewpoint we take. In this case I would count "one" because I?m counting changed or discarded interpretations and the significance of 1878 is now discarded by JWs.
Furthermore The Finished Mystery has several hundred negative descriptions of Christian denominations calling them or their leaders, for example, "enemies of truth", while calling its own theology "light", "truth", etc. Every such statement would be viewed as erroneous by other denominations but my count does not include them since, again, I?m estimating the number of changed/discarded interpretations and not the number of errors.
