In what year did they become "Jehovah's Witnesses"? (page 2)

slimboyfat

Are you asking when they changed it from Jehovah's witnesses (lower case) to Jehovah's Witnesses (upper case)? I think that was in the 1970s.

slimboyfat

Yeah I wrote that before I read Fark.

I am going to guess it was 1973!

From what I can see it's in early 1976. Perhaps it was one of the first items of the newly developed Writing Committe of the Governing Body that was set up in January of 1976. But, that's just a guess. I do remember it leaping off the printed page when I first read it in a Watchtower publication. I had just left Watchtower Farms and was riding on a bus.

slimboyfat

I noticed this change when I read a book called Trumpet of Prophecy: A Sociological Study of Jehovah's Witnesses by James Beckford.

Beckford explained in the book that although "Jehovah's witnesses" insist on the lower case in their name he would refer to them as "Jehovah's Witnesses" in his study because they are a religious body and giving them a capital makes sense in an academic text. No sooner was his book published (1975 I think) and the Witnesses had changed the name to a capital anyway.

cabasilas

From the March 8, 1976 Awake!:

Both Ella and Monika followed a somewhat similar course. Ella began sharing in the Bible educational work of Jehovah’s witnesses.

From the April 1, 1976 Watchtower:

SHORTLY after an article on the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Malawi was published in the Gull Lake Advance newspaper, a woman telephoned a Witness family living thirty-five miles away in Swift Current, Canada.

Somewhere about then.

blondie

*** jv chap. 11 p. 152 How We Came to Be Known as Jehovah’s Witnesses ***It was not only "The Watch Tower" that pointed out from the Bible that Jehovah would have witnesses on the earth. As an example, H. A. Ironside, in the book "Lectures on Daniel the Prophet" (first published in 1911), referred to those toward whom the precious promises of Isaiah chapter 43 would be fulfilled and said: "These shall be Jehovah’s witnesses, testifying to the power and glory of the one true God, when apostate Christendom shall have been given up to the strong delusion to believe the lie of the Antichrist."

cabasilas

Do a search for "Jehovah's witnesses" in Google Book Search and you'll find a "great multitude" of hits using "Jehovah's witnesses" in religious literature way before 1931!

slimboyfat

Do a search for "Jehovah's witnesses" in Google Book Search and you'll find a "great multitude" of hits in religious literature way before 1931!

Yeah like I said... goes back to Abel.

blondie

I thought we were talking about "Jehovah's Witnesses" not "great multitude". Did I miss a comment?

RR

Actually the Term "Jehovah's witnesses" had ONLY applied to the anointed ones. early conventions were advertised as "Jehovah's witnesses and their companions". It was under Knorr's leadership that the term was applied to ALL, anointed and non-anointed.

RR

In what year did they become "Jehovah's Witnesses"?

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