Jehovah’s Witness | History, Beliefs & Facts (2024)

Jehovah’s Witness, member of a millennialist denomination that developed within the larger 19th-century Adventist movement in the United States and has since spread worldwide. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are an outgrowth of the International Bible Students Association, which was founded in 1872 in Pittsburgh by Charles Taze Russell.

History

The Adventist movement emerged in the 1830s around the predictions of William Miller, who proclaimed that Jesus Christ would return in 1843 or 1844. When Christ did not return as Miller prophecied, Adventists divided into a number of factions. During the 1870s, Charles Taze Russell established himself as an independent and controversial Adventist teacher. He rejected belief in hell as a place of eternal torment and adopted a non-Trinitarian theology that denied the divinity of Jesus. He also interpreted the Second Coming in accordance with the literal translation of the original Greek term, parousia (“presence”), suggesting that Christ would come as an invisible presence and that the Parousia, or “Millennial Dawn,” already had occurred, in 1874. The coming of Christ’s invisible presence signaled the end of the current order of society and would be followed by his visible presence and the establishment of the millennial kingdom on earth in 1914. Although the kingdom did not come, Russell’s teachings motivated a number of volunteers to circulate his many books and pamphlets and a periodical, The Watchtower, and to recalculate the time of the Parousia.

In addition to the International Bible Students Association, Russell formed the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania (1884), with himself as president. In 1909 he transferred the headquarters of the movement to Brooklyn.

Russell was succeeded as president in 1917 by Joseph Franklin Rutherford (Judge Rutherford; 1869–1942), who changed the group’s name to Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931 to emphasize its members’ belief that Jehovah, or Yahweh, is the true God and that the Witnesses were his specially chosen followers. Rutherford molded the Witnesses into a cadre of dedicated evangelists, even equipping members with portable phonographs to play his “sermonettes” on street corners and in the living rooms of prospective converts. Under Rutherford’s leadership, Russell’s group became a tightly knit organization.

Rutherford’s successor, Nathan Homer Knorr (1905–77), assumed the presidency in 1942 and continued and expanded Rutherford’s policies. He established the Watch Tower Bible School of Gilead (South Lansing, New York) to train missionaries and leaders, decreed that all the society’s books and articles were to be published anonymously, and set up adult lay-education programs to train Witnesses to teach prospective converts. Under Knorr’s direction, a group of Witnesses produced a new translation of the Bible. Knorr was followed as president of the Jehovah’s Witnesses by Frederick W. Franz (1893–1992) in 1978 and then by Milton G. Henschel in 1992 (1920–2003). In 2000 Henschel stepped down in a reorganization of the leadership and was replaced by Don A. Adams. The movement’s headquarters were transferred to Warwick, New York, in 2016.