In this episode Trent shares some local lore from his old hometown of San Diego and reveals the failed prophecies of the group who built it.
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about Jehovah’s Witnesses. Oh my gosh, are they already here? Just kidding. But before we do that, I have a quick reminder to please like this video, subscribe to our channel so you don’t miss all of our great content, and don’t forget to support us at trenthornpodcast.com. By the way, if you do become a supporter of trenthornpodcast.com, you get access to my entire Catechism Study Series. I go through the entire Catechism, and at the silver level, you’ll get access to my New Testament Study Series that goes through, you guessed it, the entire New Testament, commentary, apologetics. I think it really like it. Be sure to check out all of that at trenthornpodcast.com. All right, so let’s talk a little bit about Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Trent Horn:
Obviously, they’re not like Catholics or Evangelical Christians, or Eastern Orthodox because they’re not Christian. They are quasi-Christian, they sound Christian, but they reject fundamental elements of Christianity. One of the magazines they publish says they are not Protestants. They’re not Protestant Christians because of this. This is what they say. “Protestant faiths reject certain features of Catholic worship. Reformation leaders retained certain Catholic dogmas, such as belief in the Trinity, hell fire, and the immortality of the human soul.” Jehovah’s Witnesses, however, believe that those doctrines not only contradict the Bible, but also promote a distorted view of God. So, in place of these doctrines, Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are non-Christian, they believe instead that Jesus is not God, he’s actually Michael the Archangel, that the wicked are annihilated instead of being sent to hell. There’s a little dispute among them about how many people go to heaven. A common belief is that only 144,000 people will go to heaven, and they won’t ever be in heaven, they’ll just live on a paradise earth.
Trent Horn:
So they reject things. They also reject a lot of things that Christians normally don’t have a problem with. They don’t celebrate birthdays. They don’t celebrate holidays like Mother’s Day. They also don’t celebrate religious holidays like Christmas or Easter. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t take oaths of office, they don’t salute the flag, and they don’t accept traditional blood transfusions. So this is a lot of interesting beliefs, and the group that leads the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, takes a lot of steps to make sure that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t read books that are critical of Jehovah’s Witness theology, or they tell people not to watch videos like this one, which is interesting because the Jehovah’s Witnesses want me to give their theology a fair hearing, but the Watchtower tells them to void books and other things from my point of view that would show the flaws with being a Jehovah’s Witness.
Trent Horn:
And that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about in this episode today. But first, let me give you a little background on who the Jehovah’s Witnesses are before I talk about some of the more interesting things related to them, especially their apocalyptic predictions, and that would include things like the Apocalypse Mansion. So Jehovah’s Witnesses began in the Northeastern U.S. back in the 1870s, but back then they were called the Bible Students and they were led by a guy named Charles Taze Russell. And this was very common at that time period. We also have Mormonism too. You had people who believe they restored the lost doctrines of the Apostles. They were Restorationists. In 1881, Russell founded a printing company that was moved to Brooklyn, New York that was called the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. So, that’s the leadership office of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and it’s still there. To my knowledge, it’s still in Brooklyn to this day. They are the legal and the ecclesial authority for this religion.
Trent Horn:
And Russell used the press to spread a message. He said the world was going to end in 1914. And so when it didn’t end in 1914, he said, “It’s going to end in 1915.” And then he died in 1916. His successor, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, he became the new President of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. He then wrote a book published by the Watchtower called Millions Now Living Will Never Die. So Rutherford, the President of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, claimed that a lot of the people still alive in 1914, they were going to live to see the end of the world. And he said this was going to happen in 1925. He also said the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would be raised from the dead and God would make the earth a paradise for the patriarchs and for the majority of people, the believers, people who were alive in 1914.
Trent Horn:
So in order to accommodate the resurrected patriarchs Rutherford I think using gifts from other people, but regardless, he built a mansion in San Diego called Beth Sarim, which is Hebrew for the House of the Princes. So the mansion though was built four years after the 1925 prediction, but Rutherford, it’s still going to happen they think. But if the end of the world doesn’t happen yet, he decided to live at Beth Sarim as its caretaker during the Great Depression. Also, in 1931, they changed the name of the group from the Bible Students to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, because there are other Bible student sects that didn’t recognize the Watchtower as having authority. And he taught that God was the ultimate leader of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and that the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society was God’s official administrator, in his words.
Trent Horn:
Now Rutherford died at Beth Sarim in 1942, and he was succeeded by their third President, Nathan Knorr. In 1954, when asked at a trial in Scotland why the property was sold, Frederick William Franz, who was then the Vice President of the Watchtower Society, said, “Because it was there and the prophets had not yet come back to occupy it, they’re 30 years late, to make use of it and the society had no use for it at the time, it was in charge of a caretaker and it was causing expense. And our understanding of the scriptures opened up more and more concerning the princes, which will include those prophets and so the property was sold as serving no present purpose.” The article ends by saying the house is now privately owned and has been designated Historical Landmark Number 474 by the City of San Diego. Anyways, back to the history of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. So Nathan Knorr, the President after Rutherford, he really changed the witnesses to be like what you know them today. He came up with the idea of going door to door with their testimonies.
Trent Horn:
I think the first witnesses played a recording of Nathan Knorr speaking to people on a phonograph. He also commissioned their Bible, the New World Translation. It was published in 1961 because they were trying to deal with the fact that the real Bible translated properly contradicts the Jehovah’s Witness doctrine saying things that Jesus is not God and things like that. And they try to say that it’s just a really literal translation, and it’s not. And several Greek scholars have translated the Jehovah’s Witness Bible, the New World Translation. They’ve criticized it because it’s clearly been tweaked not to get at the original text, but to support Jehovah’s Witness theology. Also, in the mid-1960s, Jehovah’s Witness literature was really hinting strongly that the world would end in 1975. In 1969, their magazine Awake said, “If you are a young person, you also need to face the fact that you will never grow old in this present system of things. Why not? Because all the evidence in fulfillment of Bible prophecy indicates that this corrupt system is due to end in a few years.”
Trent Horn:
Now, despite this failed prediction, Awake magazine continued through the 1980s to print at the top of the magazine’s first page the following. “This magazine builds confidence in the creator’s promise of a peaceful and secure world before the generation that saw the events of 1914 passes away.” According to the Witnesses at that time, the events of 1914 were Jesus’ invisible return. They said this was prophesied to happen 2,520 years after the fall of Jerusalem, which would put it in 1914, which gets the fall of Jerusalem wrong. They think it happened in the 600s when it happened in 587. But the fact of the matter is, they were claiming, even in the 1980s, that the world was going to end and those who were alive in 1914 who saw Jesus’ invisible return, because obviously nothing happened, the world didn’t end in 1914, people who saw Jesus’s invisible return in 1914, in the ’80s or ’90s, they were going to be there when Jesus made his visible return and ushered in the end of the world.
Trent Horn:
Now, of course, the problem is that the number of people alive today who were alive in 1914 is maybe in the hundreds. Fairly soon, there’s going to be nobody left who was alive in 1914. And they saw this a while ago. That’s why in 1995, Awake magazine stopped carrying in the banner the reference to the generation of 1914 who was going to see the end of the world. Instead, it was changed to say a prediction that it is about to replace the present wicked lawless system of things without a date. Now, in response to these failed predictions, the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim they’re not infallible. So they say on their website, “We have had some wrong expectations about the end, but we are more concerned with obeying Jesus and saving lives than with avoiding criticism.” It’s good to obey Jesus, but here’s the problem.
Trent Horn:
Deuteronomy 18 verses 20 through 22 says this, “But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die. And if you say in your heart, how may we know the word which the Lord has not spoken? When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” So Jehovah’s Witnesses, they fail the test of being a profit on two fronts. First, they speak in the name of another God, Jehovah. That’s not the true God because Witnesses say they deny the Trinity. Jehovah is one God. Jesus is not God. Jesus is someone that Jehovah created, but Jesus is not God. And so in that way, Jehovah’s Witnesses fail Deuteronomy 18’s first test, they lead people away from the true God and want people to worship a false God, the God Jehovah.
Trent Horn:
By the way, they call him Jehovah because they combine the vowels for Adonai with the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. So we have Yahweh, the traditionally assumed pronunciation of God, replaced with the vowels for Adonai. In Latin, you get Jehovah. But nobody was saying Jehovah in the time of Jesus or before that. And second, what the Witnesses claimed would happen over and over again did not happen. Now, the witnesses often claim that the Watchtower, it’s not acting as a prophet and the false predictions are just signs that God is giving the Watchtower new light or a new understanding of doctrine. But, first, this contradicts previous documented claims of the Watchtower saying that they are God’s prophet. And that leads to another problem, if the Watchtower is still learning, we’re still trying to figure all this out, why trust anything it teaches now? If God were really guiding the Watchtower, why would he allow what they call themselves, a spirit led organization, why would he allow them to lead so many people into error about when the world is going to end?
Trent Horn:
The simplest answer to these questions is that the Watchtower should not be trusted. The Jehovah’s Witnesses organization should not be trusted because ultimately it is guided by men. It’s not guided by God. And that can be seen in the doctrines they teach that are in variance with the word of God and also the predictions they claim to make, which simply have not come to pass. So, hey, if you guys really enjoyed this episode, if you want to learn more about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I would recommend my booklet, 20 Answers: Jehovah’s Witnesses. You can check that out at shop.catholic.com. I’ll leave a link to it here in the description below. But I hope that this was a helpful one for you. And yeah, it’s neat when you live in places, you don’t realize these historical elements are there in your own backyard. I mean, I don’t live in California anymore, but when I did, it was cool to go and see this stuff.
Trent Horn:
If I do a future episode on Mormonism, another episode on Mormonism, I’ll have to show you the Mormon Battalion Site in Old town, San Diego. It’s a really cool place, actually. Actually, I went there and they asked for my address so missionaries could come and talk to me and I gave them the Catholic Answers address, and I saw them walk up to the building and they turned around. But I enjoy chats with Mormons when they stop by every now and then. I’ll do another episode on that. So many things to do episodes on. But hey, thank you guys for your support that allows us to do all these episodes. And I just hope you have a very blessed day.
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