I found the answer to this 1874 date in the
God’s
Kingdom of a Thousand Years Has Approached
book, published 1973 page 209, para 55, which says:
In the year 1943 the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society published the book “The Truth Shall Make You Free.” In its chapter 11, entitled “The Count of Time,” it did away with the insertion of 100 years into the period of the Judges and went according to the oldest and most authentic reading of Acts 13:20, and accepted the spelled-out numbers of the Hebrew Scriptures. This moved forward the end of six thousand years of man’s existence into the decade of the 1970’s. Naturally this did away with the year 1874 C.E. as the date of return of the Lord Jesus Christ and the beginning of his invisible presence or parousia...
Page 324 of the above book positively says: “The King’s presence or parousia began in 1914.”
So there it is. Before the year 1943, the official teaching was that Christ’s invisible presence began in the year 1874, NOT 1914! Also: The Proclaimers book (1993) pg 631-632 says: ” Based on the premise that events of the first century might find parallels in related events later, they also concluded that if Jesus’ baptism and anointing in the autumn of 29 C.E. paralleled the beginning of an invisible presence in 1874, then his riding into Jerusalem as King in the spring of 33 C.E. would point to the spring of 1878 as the time when he would assume his power as heavenly King. They also thought they would be given their heavenly reward at that time”. Then the next page admits why these earlier dates had been misleading, “Later on, during the years from 1935 through 1944, a review of the overall framework of Bible chronology revealed that a poor translation of Acts 13:19, 20 in the King James Version, along with certain other factors, had thrown off the chronology by over a century” Footnote Says: See “The Truth Shall Make You Free,” chapter XI; “The Kingdom Is at Hand,” pages 171-5; also The Golden Age, March 27, 1935, pages 391, 412. In the light of these corrected tables of Bible chronology, it could be seen that previous use of the dates 1873 and 1878, as well as related dates derived from these on the basis of parallels with first-century events, were based on misunderstandings”.
