In what year was the Watchtower organization begun?

Question

Was the organization started by one man or by a group of men?

Answer 1

The sect known today as the Jehovah's Witnesses started out in Pennsylvania in 1870, as a Bible class started by Charles Taze Russell. Russell named his group the "Millennial Dawn Bible Study." Charles T. Russell began writing a series of books he called "The Millennial Dawn," which stretched to six volumes before his death and contained much of the theology Jehovah’s Witnesses now hold. After Russell's death in 1916, Judge J. F. Rutherford, Russell's friend and successor, wrote the seventh and final volume of the "Millennial Dawn" series, "The Finished Mystery," in 1917. The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society was founded in 1886 and quickly became the vehicle through which the "Millennial Dawn" movement began distributing their views to others. The group was known as the “Russellites” until 1931 when, due to a split in the organization, it was renamed the “Jehovah’s Witnesses.” The group from which it split became known as the “Bible students.”

Answer 2

The first issue of the magazine that eventually became "The Watchtower" was published July, 1879.

Zion’s Watch Tower Tract Society was formed on February 16, 1881, with W. H. Conley as president and C. T. Russell as secretary and treasurer. A few years later, the Society formally incorporated as a nonprofit corporation in Pennsylvania with Russell as president, managing with a full slate of executive officers and a board of directors approved by voting members of the Society.

Jehovah's Witnesses consider those godly men to have constituted the first modern Governing Body, although today they better understand that true worship is not dependent on any mere legal entity or human organization.

Learn more:
http://watchtower.org/e/jt/index.htm?article=article_02.htm

Answer 3

Yep...1870. So everyone before that time is lost and are apostates because they were not JW's!! Preposterous! Jesus said the gates of hell would not prevail against His church...and He meant it. To say otherwise, means He failed, and by claiming the status that they do, they contradict Him.

Also, kinda funny they claim this, then fail 6 prophecies! not to mention, for Jesus to have returned in 1874....where's the proof? Thessalonians and revalations describes this as the noisiest event ever to take place and that everyone would know when He returned. There is only ONE second coming. So why doesn't everybody know this? Simple. It is another one of their lies.

Answer 4

The Witnesses claim that it started with Jesus....Wonder where their guidance was from the days of Jesus until the late 1800s god must have been taking a good long nap!

Well the Witnesses came out of the Adventist church and they had occult undertones....Maybe God was there!