Posts by kepler

13

Wheels within wheels of celestial chariot? this FEATURE is discovered in our galaxy

by prologos in

jw
friends

in today's 'astronomy picture of the day' are clearly shown rotating rings that move at 90 degrees and through each other.

it is celestial, mysterious, entirely possible, and physical.

luminous.

kepler

Thanks for digging this one up. It's an interesting image.

But when you look at it closely, you have to wonder whether it is in this galaxy ( e.g., a planetary nebula) or another galaxy. I went back back to the APOD site and it turns out that is another galaxy. NGC 2625 according to its catalog name, 40 million light years away and about 50,000 light years across. In Ursa Major, it should be visible off to the north somewhere near or within the Big Dipper.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

As to why there should be two spiral pattern? A merger of two galaxies? There is some discussion at the web page, but the spiral patterns are so clear it is tempting to think that one galactic image is imposed on top of the other - whereas in contact you would expect more disruption.

Probably have to stay tuned...

5

Sherlock Holmes predicted WWII - I saw it in a film

by kepler in

it was either "hound of the baskervilles" or "adventures of sherlock holmes" where sherlock himself, played by basil rathbone, after wrapping up the case with dr. watson and friends turned to the audience in the theater and urged them to fight on against the threat that menaced europe, the empire and the blessed isles alluding to hitler and mussolini.. since sherlock holmes lived in victorian times this must have been a revelation from god.. no doubt about it.

there is no other way that this could have happened.

and sherlock holmes wrote the story himself.. we studied sherlock holmes short stories attributed to arthur conan doyle in english class.

kepler

It was either "Hound of the Baskervilles" or "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" where Sherlock himself, played by Basil Rathbone, after wrapping up the case with Dr. Watson and friends turned to the audience in the theater and urged them to fight on against the threat that menaced Europe, the Empire and the Blessed Isles alluding to Hitler and Mussolini.

Since Sherlock Holmes lived in Victorian times this must have been a revelation from God.

No doubt about it. There is no other way that this could have happened. And Sherlock Holmes wrote the story himself.

We studied Sherlock Holmes short stories attributed to Arthur Conan Doyle in English class. English is our sacred mother tongue and it's ancient.

God spoke in that tongue in the King James Version of the Bible which all the disciples carried with them everywhere and every land.

It is also the ancient language of King Arthur's court and the Knights of the Round Table. They discovered the Holy Grail.

If you don't believe this, then you will never achieve salvation. In fact, you will die with the rest of them...

If you don't go door to door telling other people that this is true, you are going to be in trouble too.

If you don't meet your monthly quotas telling people about this, then that's another problem.

Do not associate with anyone who does not believe this. Or even think that it might not be true.

You will receive more instructions and commentaries about these and similar phenomenally glad tidings in a bi-weekly leaflet. The opinions of our leader will be explained in anonymous editorial content. He is president of our corporate body - or a governing board.

You will receive extra copies. Distribute them.

Now about your selections in attire...

11

March of the world powers in DANIEL 2. Proof the Bible is the inspired word of God. Wadda ya think?

by punkofnice in

.

how would you answer the jw that says that the vision of daniel predicting world powers into the future (where the toes have no significance according to the wbt$), is proof of the inspired prophecy in the bible?.

could it be that the 'powers' are not actually named and can be interpreted any way you want?.

kepler

Daniel 2:1

"In the second year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar had a series of dreams, he was perturbed by this and sleep deserted him."

So this means Daniel was already in the service of Nebuchadnezzar before any of the Jerusalem sieges.

Later:

At this, King Nebuchadnezzar fell prostrate before Daniel; he gave orders for Daniel to be offered an oblatin and a fragrant sacrifice. The king said to Daniel: "Your god is indeed the God of God, the Master of kings, and the Revealer of Mysteries..."

But Nebuchadnezzar goes off to besiege and capture Jerusalem and, eventually leveling it entirely, desecrates its temple. So why are we informed of his declaration. Either it was empty or it never occurred. When all of Daniel is read, you have to wonder if there is any historicity to it.

Question:

Is there any evidence that Babylonian kings were described as divine? Now how about Antiochus IV - Epiphanes?

Chapter II concludes with Shadrach, Meshach and AbedNego appointed to provincial rulers.

In chapter III, the King builds a golden statue of himself, confounding the lesson he supposedly learned in the previous chapter and threatens to burn the trio to death in an oven. In calling high officials to admire and worship the statue, he includes "Satraps" - a Persian Empire official ( an Empire yet to be invented). People "heard the sound of "horn, pipe, lyre, zither, harp, bagpipe and other instruments."

Strange? Not only he desecrate the temple of the God he acknowledged, but claims he himself is divine to boot amid anachronistic descriptions.

If you want to consider two empires encountering each other, study in detail how the Romans displace the Seleucids that ruled Palestine in the mid second century BC. Antiochus III ("the Great") was defeated by the Romans in Asia minor in 190 BC. Rolled back. The Greek mainland sought Rome's protection. The Romans spread around the Mediterranean and then (drawing from sources):

---------------------

...In 168 BC Antiochus IV Epiphanes led a second attack on Egypt and also sent a fleet to capture Cyprus. Before reaching Alexandria, his path was blocked by a single, old Roman ambassador named Gaius Popilliu Laenas, who delivered a message from the Roman Senate directing Antiochus to withdraw his armies from Egypt and Cyprus, or consider themselves in a state of war with the Roman Republic. Antiochus said he would discuss it with his council, whereupon the Roman envoy drew a line in the sand around him and said, "Before you cross this circle I want you to give me a reply for the Roman Senate" – implying that Rome would declare war if the King stepped out of the circle without committing to leave Egypt immediately. Weighing his options, Antiochus IV Epiphanes decided to withdraw. Only then did Popillius agree to shake hands with him.

While Antiochus was busy in Egypt, a rumor spread that he had been killed and The High Priest appointed by Antiochus, Menelaus, was forced to flee Jerusalem during a riot. On the King's return from Egypt in 167 BC enraged by his defeat, he attacked Jerusalem and restored Menelaus, then executed many Jews.

"When these happenings were reported to the king, thought that Judea was in revolt. Raging like a wild animal, he set out from Egypt and took Jerusalem by storm. He ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy those whom they met and to slay those who took refuge in their houses. There was a massacre of young and old, a killing of women and children, a slaughter of virgins and infants. In the space of three days, eighty thousand were lost, forty thousand meeting a violent death, and the same number being sold into slavery." - 2 Maccabees 5:11-14

To consolidate his empire and strengthen his hold over the region, Antiochus decided to side with the Hellenized Jews by outlawing religious rites and traditions kept by observant Jews and by ordering the worship of Zeus as the supreme god (2 Maccabees 6:1–12). This was anathema to the Jews and when they refused, Antiochus sent an army to enforce his decree. Because of the resistance, the city was destroyed, many were slaughtered, and a military Greek citadel called the Acra was established...

------------

The book of Daniel is NOT history of Babylonia. For further evidence, compare Daniel Chapter 4 and Dead Sea Scroll 4Q242"The Healing of King Nabonidus".

"I Nabonidus wsa smitten with a severe inflammation lasting seven years ... I was thus changed becoming like a beast. I prayed to the Most High and he forgave my sins. An exorcist, a Jew, in fact, a member of the community of exiles, ..."

Daniel is un-named in the scroll, but Nabonidus is. As recounted by the editor of the DSS, "the name was changed not to protect the innocent, but to implicate guilty ... who had sacked Jerusalem, burned the Temple and carried the people into exile in 586 BCE." Repeat: 586 BCE.

Any resemblance here to Antiochus IV?

Curiously enough, events in chapter 5 pick up the Nabonidus story again, without using his name, when Cyrus acquires the city for the Persian Empire.

It seems to me that ,the more people talk about how Daniel seems to concern the present day, the less they seem to dwell on Daniel in context. ...But this could go on forever.

6

Why Do Some People Still Disagree With Special Relativity?

by DT in

jw
friends

i have to admit that i feel poorly equipped to address this subject.

i'm more interested in the feedback of others than in trying to persuade others of my opinions.

i should also point out that although this topic is specifically about special relativity, much of what is said could also apply to general relativity.. special relativity has had a profound effect on both science and modern culture.

kepler

DT,

This is a challenging writing topic, but I'll give it a try. Not my specialty, but I have had exposure as well...

When I first scanned your introduction, my knee jerk reaction was to respond and somehow say something in support of relativity theory being a theoretical answer to physical observation. But then when I look more closely at what you said, I don't think that would be necessary. It sounds like you've been examining the subject for yourself and find it plausible enough to defend in argument yourself.

To others I would say that special relativity arrived on the scene because there was an odd discrepancy in physical observations: No matter what motion was observed in a source of light, arriving light seem to be moving at the same speed. And if the speed always remained the same, then maybe time was not absolute... The physical and geometrical implications are included in college introductory physics courses, but the philosophical implications are left to the student. Special relativity was the camel's nose of this initial observation. General relativity gave us a concept of space and time that made time another dimension which was warped by mass - or as the saying goes:"Space time tells matter how to move, matter tells space-time how to curve." In the space of 10 years from 1905 to 1915 Einstein and some correspondents worked out most of the deep implications of this theory, derived from the initial observations...

And continually confirmed by subsequent experimental observations ( residual movements in celestial space of Mercury's perihelion, the bending of light in neighborhood of stars about twice what Newtonian theory would predict...) and practical applications (GPS satellite programming includes corrections for relativistic effects).

Speaking of Newton's theory, celestial mechanics for centuries and present day space navigation have done very well without Einstein, save for:

- such small discrepancies in the solar system

- and much larger effects elsewhere in the universe where there are objects where motions often approach light speeds

- or in the laboratory with particle accelerators

All these regions depart from newtonian mechanics. But what's more. Newton never had an explanation for why matter attracted other matter. Einstein's GR does. Matter warps the shape of space. And energy has an equivalence to matter ( e= mc^2) - so that means a sphere of energy would alter the path of passing matter as well - just by being intensely "hot".

And in describing the physical world - all this seems to work.

That's about where special and general relativity theory stand. Explanation. But as edifices of human thought, they are as excellent as anything ever produced.

Is there no argument about either in the science community?

I wouldn't say that. There have been periods of neglect between 1915 and the current day, because GR seemed to be removed from practical application other than an explanation for stellar evolution or making bombs. But there have been controversies within it.

In recent years my e-mail box has been stuffed with arguments about the nature of GR and the discussions have been heated. One that is easier to characterize than most is the issue of inertia and Mach's contribution to Einstein's thought. Since Einstein explained attraction of bodies there was still the question of where does inertia or centrifugal force come from? If a bar bell with two masses were rotated in space, an inhabitant on one of the ( balanced ) pair would feel accelerations. He might become dizzy as he watched the spin of the fixed stars. Mach attributes this effect to the fixed stars, the entire mass of the universe causing a resistance....

OK. Now what if there weren't any? You wouldn't be able to tell if you were spinning or not. What if there were fewer or farther away? Would the acceleration be less. There are arguments pro or con or whether the effect is attributable to the total mass ( and energy) at all. But would either answer overthrow GR? Hardly.

Researching this question I found that Mach was a proponent of positivism. Which is to say that he did not believe in atomistic theory since there was no "observational" evidence for them in the 19th century. So he advised Einstein accordingly. Einstein at first adhered to his general advice, but broke with him later. On the other hand, Thompson in England attributed experimental results to a particle he named the "electron". Kaufman in Germany with better instruments and procedures saw the same phenomena more clearly, but discovered nothing. He was a positivist.

I gotta go...

11

Egyptian Timeline Research

by konceptual99 in

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23947820.

it is suggesting that the accepted dates for the egyptian timelines need to change.

does anyone have a more informed and scholarly view on this?.

kepler

Wow!

I used to think that the Egyptian timeline discrepancy with JW beliefs was simply that they were about 300 years off in the events during the New Kingdom, the time when Moses and Joshua were supposedly on the move. But then, when you add all the Flood and Tower of Babel inferences from the Society, you can see no matter of subtlety left here. Tthis is the realm of the looney bin.

Five years ago, when it might have made a difference, when I was watching someone jump back into this, I wish I had been aware of all this.

Thanks for digging this up.

24

is there any biblical event that has a universally accepted date on which it occurred?

by jeremiah18:5-10 in

i'm intrigued by the whole "bible chronology" topic, but have never really dug into it because to put any of it together you need a historically reliable starting point.

this wasn't a problem as a practicing jw because you just assumed their dates were right.

i would like for someone to give me one event described in the bible that is universally established and accepted historically that i can use as a reliable starting point.

kepler

I don't think anyone mentioned Sennacherib's siege of Jerusalem recounted in Isaiah chapter 39 and 2nd Kings. Sennacherib gave his own account and his mishaps dealing with Egypt on his own obelisk. Our Biblical accounts have less provenance when you consider that Isaiah and 2nd Kings are almost the same, word for word. Did Isaiah write Kings, or did the chronicles of write Isaiah? No big deal except if you believe Isaiah wrote everything in Isaiah because that's its title.

Books I and II of Maccabees describe numerous events correlated by Josephus in his account of the Jewish War describing the siege and destruction of Jerusalem ( 70 AD) already mentioned. Seleucid King Antiochus IV Epiphanes lived, reigned, desecrated the Temple and put down a Jewish rebellion in the 160s BC. Re-examining it, the writing is clear, blunt and devoid of mystery or miracle - save for the lamps and their oil burning for days and instituting millenia of Channuka observances.

The issue, of course, is what constitutes an historical event written in the Bible. Many of the Bibles compiled throughout the world, which included for some time KJV, included Maccabees I & II under the title of deutero-canonical. Others no longer retain them, as well as other chapters that throw spanners into the works of theological sand castles. For example, the 14th chapter of Daniel: "When King Astyages joined his ancestors Cyrus of Persia succeeded him. Daniel was very close to the king, who respected more than any of his other friends..."

Well, forget for a moment about whether or not Daniel served more rulers of Babylon than Talleyrand did with Parisian kings and Emperors or whether he was any more than a fictional hero.

Who was Astyages?

According to Herodotus and other sources, the King of the Medes.

Once again. Who succeeded him?

Cyrus the Persian.

What about Darius the Mede?

Read a good translation of Thucydides and ask yourself who was king when the Greeks fended off at Marathon an invading force they characterized as "Medes".

Then tell me all about 2520 days.

49

JW. org: "No, we are not a cult. We do not look to any human as our leader."

by Faithful Witness in

i know this has been rehashed, time and again, but i saw this interesting blip on jw.org last night, and did a little thinking about it.... jw.

org answers the important question that so many have... are jehovah's witnesses a cult?.

jehovah's witnesses do not look to any human as their leader.

kepler

Question:

"How many Jehovah's Witnesses does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Answer:

"I don't know. What does the WatchTower say?

Acceptable alternative:

"I don't know. But I can go to the Kingdom Hall, do some research for you and find out."

Some other questions:

"I appreciate this opportunity to join an Organization that promises me that I will be able to see all my dead relatives again. It's as inviting as an offer the Unification Church once gave me. But my relatives who passed on weren't JWs either. How will I get to see them if I understand this organization correctly?

And if they didn't have to join under pain of death, then why do I?

Why do I have to distribute a magazine that I am not allowed to comment on except to say that it's God's word and explains God's word better than God's word itself?

If I look to a printing press full of anonymous, spiteful and deceitful articles, instead of an individual human leader, will that make me less a member of a cult?

If I belong to an organization that throws away its previous human leaders such as Russell and Rutherford much the same way that Soviet Marxism threw away Lenin and Stalin in exchange for more shadowy bureaucrats or theocrats, will that make me less a member of a cult?

How is this viewpoint different, say, from scientology or the black muslims?

Am I a little hard on the organization?

Yes. For personal reasons.

54

1914 - "A Turning Point In History"?

by Bobcat in

the february 2014 public wt has a cover series of articles dealing with world war i, and by inference 1914. the articles describe wwi as 'causing the world to be changed' and as "a turning point in history.".

setting the wt's defective 1914 chronology aside for a minute, how do these statements about wwi coincide with the view of the nt?.

certainly wwi was a big war.

kepler

Bobcat:

Much in the spirit of discussion over coffee, I respond.

Even as I write, on the radio they are debating this winter's US weather in the context of climate or environmental change. Admittedly, climate change or global warming are beyond the scope of this topic - save for one point: Did Russell, Rutherford or the Bible Students even suggest that that was on the table? I remember them writing of anarchy, socialists and destruction of churches, and somewhere of Russell claiming that the Earth was warming in advent of it becoming a more habitable paradaisical place... And I'm not sure if it even comes up now in the roll of doom enumerated each year. But let's consider it for a moment.

CO2 is a marker for Greenhouse capabilities of the atmosphere. I have a circa 1978 text which had the trends from Hawaii and Antarctica with seasonal variations - you can straight line it to the present 400ppm concentration in the atmosphere - and do the same back way into the 19th century. Beside that we have ice sample atmospheric concentrations from all over the world and back millenia.

There is no sudden discontinuity in 1914.

At the turn of the century (19th to 20th) in the US the Passenger Pigeon and the bison were just about wiped out.

The last passenger pigeon died off in 1913.

The buffalo recovered enough that you can buy a burger for a little more than one made from beef cattle.

Global and local variations of climate and environment vary. The Cuyahuga River in Cleveland hasn't caught fire from emissions since the early 1970s if I remember right or spelled it correctly. A lot of other rivers have been cleaned up under a Clean Water Act. We don't use fluorocarbons for spray cans anymore...And that seems to help on ozone. On the other hand, moving all our smokestack industries to China or elsewhere helps local environment here but not there and global environment not at all. But it does give Chinese an opportunity to live better than they do in the countryside. So are things just getting worse, or perhaps they are not getting as bad as they could be?

But saying that, and if I were Chinese liking in Peking and in any measure aware of my own nation's history, how would I greet the news of someone knocking on my door with a pamphlet "What the Bible Really Teaches"? Had the pioneer heard of the year 1912, or the year of the end of the Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic? The Rape of Nanking? The year 1949 and the end of the Long March? Events since the death of Mao? All these events affected a quarter of the population of the world directly.

What's the proposition in this derivative little red book, riding on claims of interpreting the works of others?

I second Phizzy's notion about Tom Holland's (or others ) books. I had read not read Rubicon, but I did read "In the Shadow of the Sword". In its pages recounting the reverses and struggles of the 4th to 7th centuries, there is plenty of room to reflect on how the prophecies we re-cycle today were used to justify or predict events then. The plague of Justinian (circa 580 AD - bubonic) is just about forgotten. A third of the civilized Mediterranean, Christian world died. Just after it was all united ( pushed back the Zoroastrian Persians, suppressed Samaritans and Jews) under an absolute, orthodox THEOCRACY, the Arab invasions swept it all away.

Makes you really want to worship a runaway Brooklyn printing press.

Best regards,

Kepler

54

1914 - "A Turning Point In History"?

by Bobcat in

the february 2014 public wt has a cover series of articles dealing with world war i, and by inference 1914. the articles describe wwi as 'causing the world to be changed' and as "a turning point in history.".

setting the wt's defective 1914 chronology aside for a minute, how do these statements about wwi coincide with the view of the nt?.

certainly wwi was a big war.

kepler

Bobcat,

Good to see your posts once in a while. I get the feeling you live your life trying to make lemonade out of the basket of lemons delivered to your door. And may you succeed. But since you brought the proposition up, allow me to ruminate.

From my perspective, I am not an historian, but I enjoy looking at history and analyzing it. It seems like every time I pick up a used book in a bookstore I discover another segment of history that I had never noticed before. Lately, it's been a combination of reading Gibbon and some of the writers that parallel his work. And then coming up from submersion once in a while, I re-acquaint myself with people still trying to extract cult meaning out of 1914- October to be exact, only the guy who came up with this apocalyptic General Relativity is discredited by his own organization...

Einstein and Russell, I get images confused. He's lecturing at a blackboard about history and then someone comes in with a telegram to announce in October, 1914 that his calculations about 1914 are confirmed. This knowlegde came via an occultation of a star by the sun (was it Alcyone in the Pleiades?) or repeated re-measurement of Great Pyramid passage lengths, - or possibly even the Bible based on references to "this generation".

Is it needless to say that 1914 seems like just another event in what Gibbon described of history as "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind?"

Well, OK. So what's a turning point of history? What is a color in the rainbow? And how many are there? My boxes of crayons used to have eight; six minus black and white? Is that the right answer? But they also made bigger boxes with more colors...

How many dimensions does history have? And how many ways can it turn?

I'd say that WWI was pretty rough on monarchy, the European playground and on those that had an opportunity to participate in it directly. Then again, you have events like 1812 and 1941 which were experienced by Russia - and the United States. Each had their own perspective on these. Napoleon was the possible anti-Christ to Lev Tolstoy's characters in War and Peace from the start ( it kept Tolstoy ruminating on history's mechanisms throughout - interesting, by the way), but in the United States Napoleon was the guy who sold the Louisiana Territory to the country at bargain basement rates - and in 1812, Russia's ally England had just burned down the capital just like Napoleon did to Moscow. Or did it catch on fire? Well.

I attended a Memorial one time, and someone in the Congregation got up to explain how the world was getting much worse all the time, reading a list of statistics. I guess it better be getting worse, because that individual certainly had a vested interest in it. It didn't end the last time or the time before that, but maybe this time. And if anyone tries to improve the world, that would be interfering with history, right? The divine plan?

And just in passing, if I actually were to accept all this "and live forever here on paradise earth and see all my old dead friends and relatives"...

What if they weren't Jehovah's Witnesses either? How would that affect things?

27

Could Jehovah's Witnesses Have Conquered the Roman Empire with the WTS Message?

by RottenRiley in

christians were known to show love to everyone, they beat down the pagan empire though a life devoted to loving kindness.

where do jehovah's witnesses stand on feeding the poor, helping slaves get out of slavery and donating funds to help orphanges and hospitals?

christians from various churches donate to help africa combat aids, get clean water, heating stoves to help cook their food.

kepler

Hello, Phizzy, ( and RR).

A week or two back we had crossed paths on another topic discussing Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the RE" - and I noticed elsewhere that you mentioned you were about to sit down and read Tom Holland's book, "In the Shadow of the Sword". As it turned out, I ran into the same book in a used bookstore and read it as well. Both are pretty good backgrounds for this discussion.

As for myself, I had hit Holland's book right about chapter 40 in Gibbon. Gibbon was discussing events in Justinian's reign and then the abridged paperback edition I had omitted the chapters about Belisarius reconquering the lands lost in the west and kicking the Goths out of Italy and Rome. What the ...?? As I had mentioned, all of Gibbon's text is available on line - so whatever he said can be found - but I digress - save that Holland's account probably goes into more detail about several things than does Gibbon's account:

1. The devastations of the bubonic plague on the Mediterranean basin and Persia.

2. The continuing military campaigns in the West and in Persia by Justinian and Heraklius. The Persians actually seized Jerusalem, Syria and Egypt and the Constantinople based Roman Empire had to seize it all back.

3. Arab auxiliaries in the East were near as common as "barbarian" legions in the west - and when the plague hit. the Roman regulars were outnumbered and outgunned.

The same was true for the Persian Empire in the 600s. Cities were depopulated, survivors did not fully recover. Estimates of about 1/3 of the world's urban population had died in the wake of 580s sweep of the plague. Very apocalyptic when compared with 1914.

Now, here's a kicker. Holland and others are sceptical that the first wave of Arabic conquests was Moslem per se; and a number of commanders might even have been Christian or as open to it as Constantine. Parenthetically, it should be noted that Aryan and Orthodox dominance shifted back and forth all over the Roman Empire map, from Emperors, to invaders from beyond the frontiers being evangelized by Aryans or vice versa. It was the same with Arabs, but with a difference. Because...

Notice how Abraham's seed was promised a domain that stretched from Egypt to the Two Rivers? Well, let's see, who has been in charge of those areas? Not the descendants of Isaac, but the illegitimate side of the family, so to speak. The 7th century Arabs happened to notice their case for probate via Hagar and they ran with it all the way to Tours beyond the Pyranees (732 AD) and farther into Asia than Alexander ever got.

And as for 95% of the Promised Land they have stayed there for about as many centuries as it was promised before the NT.

Prophecy and exegesis are fascinating, aren't they.

As to the JW movement conquering the RE, the contention of the JW movement was that the RE coopted Christianity - and they are somehow mysteriously getting belief back on its track - by distributing endless commentaries by anonymous authors from a mysterious printing press in Brooklyn:

I have trouble imagining how this was supposed to work in the first century or a couple centuries thereafter since Christianity did not have a canon for centuries. And it established its foundations for one only after this presumed co-opting by the Roman state. We essentially subscribe to the collection of book and letters that Athanasius, the archbishop or patriarch of Alexandria recommended decades after Constantine later in the 4th century - 367 AD. Aside from the Torah and TaNakh, the WTBTS society would have to wait for Paul to write his epistles and wait decades later for the Gospel writers to print something as well. Futher complicated by the absence of a faithful and discreet slave, since the phrase and parable from which the notion was derived had not yet been penned - nor had Rutherford yet appeared on earth to conduct a purge of his counsel Moyle after he had already slammed the door on his way out.

But then again, having the WT is somewhat akin to having communities of rabbis in Mesopotamia writing commentary on the Torah and TaNaKh and writing themselves into the ancient text. Was it by accident or design?

Admittedly, many things Holland suggests, I am sceptical of myself. But things he simply mentions in passing are eye openers.