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Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Chapter One

 Apparently no one wants to comment. This is the last time I post material for your review.

A bit of SI chapter one for your comment.

Chapter One: Barbour and His Adherents

 

           Remainder of the post is deleted.

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2 comments:

latecomer said...

Admittedly, I was too slow about completing the research for my comment, but I'd like to share what I've been able to formulate to this point.

The excerpt started me thinking about there having perhaps been a lingering tendency towards a sort of secondary, subsidiary sacrifice, in addition to that of Jesus.

That's my preliminary, incomplete understanding of the controversy that led to the schism of Henninges, McPhail, and the New Covenant Believers in 1909.

The one similar example I was able to locate in my research is from the 1963 book "Things in Which It Is Impossible for God to Lie", Chapter 10, page 233, paragraph 33:

"Jesus as a perfect man had a race or offspring unborn in his loins, when he died innocently as a perfect human sacrifice, and this possible human race died with him. He died as an unmarried man who had not raised a family of his own. Jesus' dying as a childless man, his unborn human offspring counterbalanced all the race that Adam has reproduced till now."

I never realized it until now, but that reasoning (in very recent years discredited, by the way) seems to echo the idea, as I understand it, of the Chosen Ones being some sort of subsidiary sacrifice.

The other example, which I've not been able to document, was the idea advanced in a WT study article (maybe in the 1970s?) that the two leavened loaves offered at the Festival of Weeks prefigured the sacrifice of the Chosen, though they were not sinless. That example I'm not as sure of, but I was wondering if all three ideas were somehow interrelated.

Thanks for entertaining this late post. As always, I welcome any clarification or correction.

Andrew Martin

February 3, 2023 at 6:16 PM
Gerry Kaspin said...

I’m disappointed this post has been deleted.

It’s difficult to comment on short a short passage when I don’t know what evidence is to follow, but the terms ‘many’ and ‘few’ are surely relative words which express indefinite numbers. Consequently, one man’s ‘many’ is another man’s ‘few’. To illustrate: in a battle, if I destroy a quarter of my enemies tanks I vainly consider this ‘many’. On the other-hand, my enemy might describe the same event by stating that I only destroyed ‘a few’ of his tanks since, after all, he did retain the majority.

Likely the WT writers in 1955 were unaware that the Herald survived until 1903, but - even so - compared to the previous 76 years the 24 years that the Herald had existed are not these still a comparative ‘few’? Even more so if one looks now at these 24 years beside the ‘many’ years the WT has survived.

It would have been different matter, of course, had WT writers used the word ‘most’ and if you had specific evidence proving this statistically incorrect. It is likely the case that remembrances of the Barbour period vary and are sometimes over simplified and, if one wants to, one could acknowledge this. I take it for granted that the Barbour/Russell fallout inevitably elicited differing interpretations of what occurred and why it had happened, according to which side an individual fell on.

I hope you review your decision to post parts of SI volume 3 on the blog. The first two books were excellent and the third is much needed too.

February 4, 2023 at 12:21 AM

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