After conversing with a few folks on this board, it came to my attention that a lot of what I've been writing sounds very foreign to a lot of people. The reason is simple, really.
After talking with some of you here, I have come to realize that I am really from a very different era of the Watchtower than a lot of you are. I have much to learn from you guys (like I still can't figure out how anyone got that overlapping-generation fluff to pass-in my day we probably would have burned as a witch anyone who even dared suggest such a thing as "true doctrine" among the Witnesses).
Some have mentioned to me how what I've written about sounds "foreign" or even fabricated...that is until they look it up for themselves. A lot has happened on the religion/Bible translation front, especially at the end of the 20th century that a lot of you missed if you were in the dark depths of the Watchtower at the time. A lot of this is due to almost the half-century study on the scrolls found at Qumran and Masada since their discovery, and the impact this has had on matters at a time when the Witnesses themselves were facing a turning point with the coming of the new millennium.
But there is far more than just what has been learned by looking at old manuscripts that changed history at that same time. I will start offer just three such here, maybe discuss some more later if these go over well, because as I've learned from talking to other ex-JWs, taken alone these events are hard to swallow.
So if you recently came out of the Watchtower after 2000, here's what you may have missed:
1. The conflict that began the Protestant Reformation came to a formal end in 1999 with the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. The Holy See (the Roman Catholic Church) in association with the Lutheran World Foundation, after a few decades of talks and study, came to a historical agreement, and now both religious bodies official share the same doctrinal beliefs regarding salvation, namely that people are saved by God's grace through faith in Christ. The ecumenical pact has also been adopted by the World Methodist Council. Since then several other official religious bodies have also aligned themselves with, though not necessarily formally adopted, this declaration.
2. It was discovered in the late 1980s that the Council of Jamnia, which according to many was a Jewish council that officially formalized the Hebrew canon (or "Old Testament") in the first century C.E., never took place. The origins of the council stem from an ancient hypothesis, such as the Q sources of the gospels, that was used to explain how the "Writings" got included among the Jewish holy books. Some later shaped the hypothesis for anti-Christian and later anti-Catholic propaganda purposes, all of which were called into question at the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Since the council never took place, neither did the so-called rejection of the Alexandrian Septuagint which includes the Deuterocanonical books accepted by Roman Catholics (the claim that none of these "Catholic" books were written in Hebrew was proven false when all but the additions to Esther were found in Hebrew-Aramaic among the scrolls of Qumran). And the so-called "Jewish curse on the Minim" also never took place.
3. The dating of the composition of the gospel of Matthew has gone through dramatic changes in the past 20 years. Scholars went from rejecting the traditional view of Matthew as the first gospel account to be written, to being very adamant that it had to have followed Mark (due to a hypothesis that since Mark's account is shorter that the Matthew account was written to add more information). Research now has current opinion shifting dramatically to either the traditional dating or a "simultaneous" composition date with Mark's work. The reason is two-fold: 1) there is now serious reason to doubt that the hypothetical Q source approach is weighty enough to counter the empirical data which continues to mount in support of the traditional view (while no empirical evidence exists of Q) and 2) there is evidence to suggest that the reason this gospel is attributed to Matthew is due to the fact that it bears the earmarks of a composite based on the oral witness or testimony of that apostle (and likely the church community he founded).
You should look up more information on these things and perhaps do more than just an Internet search to get the best understanding of these matters. Depending on where you are in your journey from the darkness of the Tower, you may go through the stages of indifference, to shock and denial, to having an overwhelming desire to counter what is written here, to confusion on where that no puts you (since it may shatter a lot of what you have believed up to now), to being cool with it and being able to move on.
I personally went through all stages, even though I saw all these occurring from the standpoint of someone who had already left the JWs, so be forewarned. And the reason to post these is not to present myself as a know-it-all but to highlight how blind the Watchtower machine makes its people, and how it can sometimes make us deny actual light for a while until we get accustomed to what the world is really like outside of the Governing Body's Land of Make-Believe.
P.S.--I kind of see my time spent in the religion of JWs as spending time in an amusement park. You can get so closed in and involved in that world that you can really forget that the outside world is still going on. Maybe as part of a completely different thread, folks can share their idea of "rides" offered in the GB Land of Make-Believe.