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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

A thought ...

It occurs to me that some of my blog readers don't understand that the real history of Zion's Watch Tower has never really been told. I don't mean to diminish the work of others. I benefit from previous research. Some of them are certainly better, more readable writers than I am. The Proclaimers book comes to mind.

But most histories of the era are brief. They're dependant on one Watch Tower article and very little else. So histories that limit themselves to that source and a few other incidentals do not really tell the story. Personalities are left out. You never read about Tavender, Moffitt, or others whose names appear. You never hear what they did to further the work or why they did it. Rachael and I want to tell as much of the complete story as possible.

If you omit significant details, you change the story. What you tell becomes a kind of mythos and not history at all. Oh, it can be historically accurate. But it is incomplete, and it changes one's focus as a result. It's like describing the back side of a retreating horse without ever telling what the front side looked like or was doing.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just found your blog... very interesting. Will be reading to "catch up."

Sherlock(JW1983) said...

Bruce: I have some photos of John Paton if you would like them. One is a portrait side view, the other he is with his family.

B. W. Schulz said...

Yes!

I only have the one photo by Sunderlin. I had to sell my original of that and lost the one good scan of it in a computer crash.

Attach to an email and send to BWSchulz2 @ yahoo. com

Thanks,

Bruce