Another reason why 1914 is WRONG

by EdenOne 36 Replies latest jw friends

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  DATA-DOG

  Rule #1 ) Never get involved in date calculations/end times prophecies.

  Rule #2 ) Run away from anyone who claims to have figured one out.
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  JWOP

  EdenOne, you are mistaken:

  A lunar year is 354.37 days long. The year you are speaking of is actually a prophetic year.

  But the prophetic year measure is just as wrong, because it puts the date off by about 34 years.
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  EdenOne

  JWOP

  I stand corrected. "prophetic year" is indeed more accurate than "lunar year". But the end result, as you agreed, is just as wrong.

  Eden
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  J. Hofer

  i favor the expression "lunatic year".
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  Jeffro

  EdenOne:

  So, has anything relevant thing happened in 1878? Or in 1896? [By the way, just on a curious note, if you would consider the year zero as one extra year, you would arrive to ... July 1879, the month when Zion's Watchtower began to be published.]

  To postulate something special for those years would be as pointless as 1914. The Jewish calendar is luni-solar, with intercalary months to occasionally re-synchronise with the solar year, so there's some wiggle room for apologists there. But there are other more significant problems.

  1. 607 BCE is just plain wrong.
  2. There is no basis for applying the '7 times' to anything other than Nebuchadnezzar's alleged 7 years of madness.
  3. There is no reason to apply 'a day for a year' (and they don't use the same 'rule' for the other 'times' in the book of Daniel).
  4. 'Removing the turban' (Ezekiel 21:26) applied to Israel, not Judah.
  5. The original text of Luke 21:24 doesn't allow for the 'Gentile Times' to start prior to 70 CE.

  As a general rule, if you have a chronology that 'needs' to fit any hypothetical religious event, you're probably doing it wrong.
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  DT

  A possible objection that a JW might come up with is that a time is 360 days while a year is 365.25 days. I was under that impression when I was a Witness. Actually a time just stands for a period of time. It could be a year, a month, a day or some other time period. I can't see any indication that the times mentioned would even have to be years. It would make a lot more sense if Nebuchadnezer was insane for seven days or seven months instead of seven years. Otherwise, it seems pretty strange that he could be gone from his throne for that long without it being mentioned in historical records or without his Kingdom being taken over by someone else.

  If you accept that it was actually years, it would only make sense that the kind of year be consistent. You could use years of 360 days for both if you allow for extra leap months. Since seven periods of 360 days differs from seven solar years by more than a month. You would have to add one or two extra months for either 2,550 or 2,580 days. 3 and a 1/2 times might equal 1,260 days, but it could also equal 1,290 days if there is a leap month, a time period that is also mentioned in the Bible. 7 times, however, would have to have at least one leap month.

  There is a precedent for the Bible to mention the number of days in a period of times when it is important, since you wouldn't know otherwise. Since the Bible doesn't mention the number of days in the seven times, it is reasonable to conclude that it doesn't matter.

  I would love to try to get a JW to explain why two different types of years are used in the same prophecy. I think this could be more effective than concentrating on the 607 verses 587 debate.
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  Roberta804

  I'm sorry, but even as a born in I could not bring myself to do all the mental gymnastics the Printing Company requested to come up with 1914 or any other dates. It is all BS anyway and trying to proved or disprove BS is BS.
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  soft+gentle

  roberta804 - me too - I tried many times to work it out - always came up with a wrong date.

  the way I see it - Russell and co were at least trying to be scientifically modern in their day in applying the latest popular interest in numerology to discover profound hidden truths from the bible (and the pyramids) that had been obscured by culprits like superstition and of course catholicism!!!! old supersitition became the new science and for this we can applaud them.

  I wish modern day jws would dig into these issues as you are doing edenOne and get some elohim going.
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  EdenOne

  Jeffro,

  You're right in your statements. I'm not so clear about n.4, but I'll give it a look.

  Roberta,

  Even more ridiculous is to say that the trumpets of Revelation correspond to District conventions of the Bible Students in the 1920's. How IMPORTANT are we in the grand scheme of things huh?

  Eden
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  Jeffro

  EdenOne:

  You're right in your statements. I'm not so clear about n.4, but I'll give it a look.

  The Society teaches that the period of 'removing the turban' (Ezekiel 21:25-27) began when Zedekiah was removed as king of Judah. However, those verses refer to Israel, not Judah. At that time, Israel and Judah were distinct from one another; this is confirmed by Ezekiel 37:15-23, which indicates that Israel and Judah would become one nation at a future time. JWs argue that because the 10-tribe kingdom had been destroyed many years earlier, ‘Israel’ is used in a generic sense to refer to Judah, however Ezekiel 4:5 indicates that the judgement of the 10-tribe kingdom was ongoing up until the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.