TESTIMONY OF JEHOVAH. — A sect that separated from the Adventists in 1879. It was founded by Charles Taze Russell with the aim of announcing to the world the imminent advent of paradise on earth. Its name at first was “The Watchtower,” and its adherents called themselves “Bible Students.”
Originating in America, the sect spread to Europe in 1930, especially in France. In July 1931, Russell’s disciples decided to adopt the name of Jehovah’s Witnesses. After Russell came a judge, J. F. Rutherford, who codified the sect’s doctrine in numerous publications and died in 1942. At present the leader is Nathan H. Knorr. The sect’s headquarters is in Brooklyn, near New York, where it owns a twelve-story building and a radio transmitter that broadcasts programs for six hours a day.
The doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, set forth in the book Let God Be Recognized as True (distributed in millions of copies), may be summarized in the following points: 1) The end of the world is near. The seven days of creation, in fact, signified that the world must last 49,000 years. Now 48,000 years have already passed. There must be 1,000 years of earthly paradise. Therefore Jesus will soon come to seek his little sheep, who are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and to separate them from the goats, who are all other men; 2) The soul is not immortal. There is neither hell nor purgatory. Jesus is not God, but has merited a “superior position” for his fidelity to Jehovah and received the spirit of God at his baptism in the Jordan; 3) God is not one in three persons, because a three-headed divinity is nothing but a monster. Moreover, God made man in his own image; now man is one-headed, and the Trinity is therefore absurd; 4) Worship consists solely of baptism by immersion, the annual celebration of the death of Jesus Christ on 14 Nisan, and the reading of the Bible; 5) The Jehovah’s Witnesses abhor not only the Catholic Church but the present world in all its expressions.