The Missionary Era · 1870s-1906 · N. America
Jehovah's Witnesses (Bible Students)
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
In the early 1870s a young Pittsburgh clothing merchant named Charles Taze Russell gathered a small circle to study the Bible without reference to inherited denominational teaching, and in 1879 began a magazine, Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence. Around the magazine grew an international network of readers who called themselves Bible Students, distributed Russell's six-volume Studies in the Scriptures by the million, worked door to door as colporteurs, and gathered for annual conventions from 1893. The movement was built on printing and personal distribution from the very start, which is why its record of itself is unusually complete for a body of its size. The name Jehovah's Witnesses, and the tightly centralized organization the movement is known for today, came later — after Russell's death in 1916, under his successor Joseph Franklin Rutherford.
Sources
- Charles Taze Russell, Studies in the Scriptures (6 vols., 1886-1904) and Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence (1879-) (primary) — These are the movement's own foundational texts, in Russell's own words.
- The movement's own life-record: convention reports (from 1893), colporteur and pilgrim records, Memorial statistics, readers' letters in the Watch Tower; the Society's Proclaimers history (1993) (primary) — This includes ordinary adherents' voices within the movement's own publications. The 1993 Proclaimers volume is an official history written retrospectively by the organization itself.
- The hostile and legal record: clergy polemics against 'Russellism'; press attacks; the Maria Russell separation proceedings (1903-08); Russell's replies (A Conspiracy Exposed, 1894) (primary) — This includes both hostile outside criticism and Russell's own legal and polemical replies to it.
- George Chryssides, Jehovah's Witnesses: Continuity and Change (Ashgate, 2016), with M. James Penton, Apocalypse Delayed (Toronto, 1985; 3rd ed. 2015) (secondary) — Chryssides is the current neutral academic standard. Penton is a scholar and former member of the movement, which shapes his perspective.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, ch. 22 'Christian America' and 'Christian Canada' (Noll) (reference) — This reference volume has no dedicated chapter on new religious movements of this kind.