"Intelligent JW Apologist"? Certainly on matters such as the finer points of Koine Greek, rather a mythical creature, I would have thought! This is not at all surprizing, though, given the WTS's anti-education hard line.
To justify their date of 1914 does require a goodly measure of creative accounting. In particular, notice that Russell did not arrive at the date 1914 from counting forward "Seven Times" from 607 BCE:
- rather, it was the other way around!
This date of 1914 was borrowed from Nelson H. Barbour's Second Adventists - who arrived at it by a particularly nebulous bit of creative accounting, after their prophecy of 1873/1874 being the date for Armegeddon failed. Then, the psuedo-science of Pyramidology appeared to support this date.
Bill.