Still, no serious takers on "They have much right." ?
It's really tough to have that discussion, without biases and personal beliefs as to how their doctrine came about. From what I can tell, what I stated earlier, still stands. Jw doctrine didn't exactly come out of thin air, but rather it was, (originally), an honest attempt of reconciling things that were not explicity taught in scripture. That is, what became the endless circle of changes that could never be taken from reading the scriptures themselves at face value. That is why jw doctrine is so different, from mainsteam Christianity. Yes, they do miss the simple things, such as "love your neighbor". They are too busy always trying to construct, (or re-construct), their theology.
Zico,
To my earlier point, much of our current bible today, (the "accepted" bible), is not based on the earliest of manuscripts. If anything, what was mostly kept in the bible, had more to do with the number of copies that had similarities, as opposed to how old they were. Much of it was "theologized", in the same manner that the wts creates a theology. Certain beliefs were already held to, and scripture was added or changed to make certain arguments hold. A true believer will argue with this surely, but one can peice together the evidence, to get a picture of what probably happened here.
Russell, (among others), attempted to undo this somewhow. That's impossible, if one is going to hold to the theory that the bible is an inspired book.
j