Please correct me if I'm wrong here. I remember someone saying that it was under Nath and his side kick Freddie that the religion really began to take off and expanded internationally.
What if Fred Franz had never existed?
by Magnum 40 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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steve2
Children love bright, shiny things. Experiments show that, if given a choice between brightly colored plastic items and paper money kids choose the bright things. It is only when they grow up that they realize appearances can be deceiving when you're young and gullible.
Ditto Fred Franz's impact on the organization. He dazzled largely poorly educated adherents. He did not attract "great" thinkers. He attracted a motley collection of the unlearned - including my grandparents I'm less than proud to admit.
Freddy Franz was NOT a scholar among scholars and would have been laughed out of such company in a heartbeat. Indeed, he was.
He was a "scholar" in a roomful of educationally naïve admirers. He had the gift of the convoluted gab. He reminds me of a male version of Mary Baker Eddy, the bewitching founder of Christian Science. Man, could that woman write and weave complicated webs of reasoning, linking in Scripture, history and - ahem - "science".
She was - and still is - hailed by admirers as an audaciously perceptive and gifted woman. Well - there must be more than a grain of truth in those claims because her influence is still felt in the Christian Science movement over 100 years after she died.
She, like Franz, could weave magic in isolation from other "learned" ones. She thrived in an environment devoted to her kind of bullshit. Freddy Franz did likewise. If there had been no Freddie, any number of others could have stepped forward.
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OnTheWayOut
I typed a long answer about this, but deleted it. It didn't happen, so my speculations are just that.
It seems all these cults need a crazy oracle at one point. Mormons had Joseph Smith, but not really any good ones after that. Scientology had L. Ron Hubbard, but not really any good ones after that. Watchtower had C.T. Russell, then tried to extend their crazy oracle by replacing him with Freddy and his crazy predictions.
So they probably would have found someone else with similar crazy talk.
But then, yeah- no Ray Franz on the GB, no CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE. Who's to say what the nephew of the different oracle would have been like in aiding or hurting the cause?
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Half banana
Good question Magnum!
I agree with you Millie 210 that Jewish scholar friend of Freddie Franz was important grist to his Biblical mill. I saw and heard Franz when in his nineties at close quarters while working as a consultant at UK Bethel. An inoffensive even self deprecating man, his role in influencing the course of the JW org through the 20th century was I believe of prime importance.
He had the role of being the back room theological boffin as I understood from Bethelites. He was the right hand man of the more business minded Knorr who would defer to Franz on points of “learned” doctrine. Remember for example that he told president Knorr that a governing body was not scriptural –as I understand.
So Franz had smatterings of Greek and a fair understanding of the contents of the Bible which he expounded with certainty on the advent of Christ in very specifically his own day. He was baptized around 1914 and he saw his role elevated as God’s spokesman to declare 1975 as the fitting end of the (fictitious) six thousand years of the final seven, with one thousand to go for the final testing. All ideas clearly possible within the jumble of Bible texts.
Like Russell, he felt he was certain about the revelation of his end-times doctrine and along with his connections at the top of the organisation this gave him the authority and platform to fully promote his delusions. For half a century this contributed to the Franz outlook on all things Watchtower.
What Franz had was not logic... he always used non-sequiturs and wild but spiritually credible assumptions. His mindset and even his oratory I think, had echoes of Millerite preaching and date setting methods using faith in the Bible and a language of absolute certainty. If God is right and he cannot lie; therefore such and such. . .
His teachings are now shown to be false and played down by the GB but his oratory style declaring absolute certainties on divine assumptions remains the most effective way of bamboozling the flock.
So without FF who knows! but perhaps someone else would have taken up a similar cues to mislead JWs.
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freddo
The Nathan Knorr/Fred Franz tag team had luck on its side.
On the basis that for 50 years from the early forties to the mid-nineties Fred was in charge of doctrine and Knorr (until the mid-seventies) ran the business.
The current GB and indeed most of the previous GB were of this era.
The "luck" for them was that - even after 1975, certainly up to about the early '90's - "world conditions" could be made to fit JW prophecy. The 1914 time of the end/the generation/King of the North and South/Babylon's waters drying up, all fitted the rhetoric.
Time of the end: WW1/WW2 ever present threat of WW3 (Korea/Cuba/Vietnam)
The Generation: No need to explain this ...
King of South/North: USA/UK vs USSR
Babylon: Lessening interest in Christendom in the West and in the Communist block.
It all seemed to fit - those attracted to it (along with the whackjobs) were solid families/solid wives of unbelieving husbands. Then by the early nineties it all stopped fitting the rhetoric. And in the "west" any JW growth has been at snail's pace since.
The offspring of these families and these women are the CO's and elders who were running the congregations in the Western world from the 70's to the 2000's. Since then they are dying off and passing the mantle to their sons and to the whackjobs/easily deluded.
The stability is going and only the brainwashed remain - with no Armageddon or any new order in sight.
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Finkelstein
I see Franz more as a pretentious fraud who wasn't really an honest and knowledgeable bible scholar but one whom Rutherford weighed responsibility to create doctrines and boost the proliferation of the WTS's literature.
His twice using the 6000 years of mankind's existence (1940's and 1970's is indicative of the that intellectual dishonesty.
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OUTLAW
What if Fred Franz had never existed?
Another WBT$ Crazy would have taken his place..
There would be a different set of beliefs,JW`s no longer believe in..
...........
The Time and Free Labour You Gave The WBT$/JWs..
Would End Up In The Same Place..
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sparky1
Perhaps Clayton Woodworth would have 'stepped up to the plate'. After all, he was a 'second string' minor Watchtower theologian that brought us such great works as: THE FINISHED MYSTERY and the THEOCRATIC CALENDAR! As the editor of both CONSOLATION and THE GOLDEN AGE he warned us of the dangers of vaccines and aluminum and continued to protect our health by recommending medical treatment with Electropathy machines! We would have some real 'doozies' now, that the current Governing Body(tm) would have to dig out from underneath. Poor Sam Van Sipma would have spent the rest of his days still cleaning up Woodworth's blunders.
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Finkelstein
The inherent power and money of the WTS has drawn in all kinds of pseudo bible scholars and pseudo intellectuals. In a environment such as this there is a never ending line of opportunistic men standing at the door willing to take a ride on this elevated stature of power and privilege.
It was there back when Rutherford took over the WTS in 1916 from Russell as it still exists today, who's next to take seat on top of the Watchtower Corporation ? unfortunately many
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Faded
Village Idiot,
Using the logic of the "Adam and Eve gap" he said that if it were to take decades than that would mean that Adam would have been without a mate for that long and that would tempt Adam into bestiality!!!
This is a very disturbing statement seeing it came from a sexually repressed virgin (assuming he lived by the rules of the religion he espoused). Me thinks he had issues