Christ Alone,
You said:
"The Apostles served as the Governing Body in the 1st century. Then the great apostacy set in and true Christianity was largely missing through the ages. There were glimmers of light as individuals attempted to shine truth."
Don't know what has been going on with you since you were counseling Kate82 a few weeks ago - and then our discussion about Daniel. But either you are pulling people's legs or acting very bi-polar. Are you in or out? Or are you trying to get a rise out of people?
As to the "great apostacy", I admit that that is an interesting intellectual concept on which to build a Protestant foundation. But it is nebulous at best, only describing concepts that dissenters of the 18th century English world disagreed with vs. previous generations. Something to trump linkage of ordination and priesthood until they could concoct some of their own such as anointed numbers and governing boards.
In all the idolatry of the Biblical text as it came to that generation, the very notion of a great apostacy also saws away on the limb on which Biblical inerrancy stands - the development of a canon. I suppose there is a year where everything that was in the non-JW bloodline diverged into a futility? Calendar year 99? After Constantine consolidated things? When it comes to events related to Temple wrecking balls, timing is refined to and predicted to the last hair. So this part is comparatively vague and "under-prophesied'. But if is so, then is this really a successful correction, since it is just in time to load a remnant of humanity on a barge to paradise earth after a lightless two millenia no fault of anyone therein born? Or does God really despise all of human kind as much as the guiding lights of the supposed 1919 beauty contest do?
It was one of the greatest early achievements of the era of the great apostacy. The apostates had to sort through the numerous documents with claims of "Yes, I knew your name sake very well, and also the apostle Paul, or I ghost wrote the memoirs of Mary..." And those that would like to condemn every one in the councils who deliberated over these and vetted the documents - the people viewed as agents of Satan... they bought into it. For if there was no continuity and the scripture was in someone else's hands, then what more can be said.
As for missionary work, it was centuries before the Protestant reformation gave it any thought, trailing Dominicans, the Society of Jesus and others. If someone in the non-English speaking world cares a wit about JW views on the Bible and salvation, such missionaries are the ones to thank for ready receptions in South America, Asia or the Pacific - even in parts of the mideast where year books don't even care to admit that the populations any longer exist. As to early Protestant efforts, their successes were smaller and their mistakes were just as calamitous. Ever hear of Prince Phillip's War? Just a native American gathering inferences from your Puritan and Congregational predecessors in the 17th century, having them read the exploits of Joshua in the Promised Land and duly noting that the guys with big belt buckles thought they were in the same. That's the war that my instructors who came to my house gave full endorsement to - whatever Joshua needed to get done. How did they know that was holy? The same way they know Christ invisibly returned in '14. They were told. What will they be told next?
Subsequently when Rutherford publishes his yearbooks of voyages over seas, he is harassing with pamphlets communities that already have Bibles, literacy and institutions. He needed another ten years to figure out doctrines and translations to distinguish his movement from others aside from his notion of importance. And now, thanks to his vision, practically everything I encounter in the present day JW system, I see as almost a perfect analog for the Soviet one of the mid twentieth century. Read the Truth/Pravda, attend the party meetings, march in the rallies, act in the theocratic theatre, inform on and conform to everybody - and take away the party billet and you're dead.
For a while I could laugh, but it isn't funny any more. Just a pathetic cultural bias.
