Hi no-zombie that’s interesting. I remember for a while Ray Franz was selling a book called Paul’s Idea of Community: The Early Christian House Churches by Robert Banks, which made an argument along the lines you indicate. Some who leave JWs go down that root, which is not only closer to early Christianity, but closer to the early Bible Students too. In some ways the Christadelphians are similar to the early Bible Students in structure. What Christadelphians gain in congregational autonomy they lose in unity and effectiveness. Consider that in the early 1940s there were around 100,000 of both JWs and Christadelphains, and after more than 80 years of tighter control among JWs and maintained autonomy among Christadelphian ecclesias, there are now only around 50,000 Christadelphians worldwide whereas there are nearly 10 million JWs.
On archaeology and early Christianity I recently got the book Studying the New Testament Through Inscriptions: An Introduction by Clint Burnett. Among other things, he argues that 1st century inscriptions indicate that the title “Lord” for Jesus was connected to his claim to the Davidic throne and not the later Trinitarian idea of divinity.
There’s no doubt that the GB make many mistakes but does that disqualify them from being used by God? When you consider the kinds of mistakes that Moses, David, Paul and Peter made, and the problems in the early churches in Corinth and the churches in Revelation, are the problems of modern JWs in many ways not similar to those?