Is 1914 Based on Measurements of Pyramids? (Working on)

There are many false statements being made about Russell, 1914, and his study of God's Witness in Egypt. There are those who are spreading the idea that the date 1914 was not obtained from the Bible, but rather from measuring the passageways of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Some do not mention the Great Pyramid and claim that Russell obtained the date from "pyramids" or "pyramidology". Usually, these claims are made along with many other false claims. We will not here address all these various associated false claims  in this study, but will focus on this one claim. (Most of the other claims are discussed elsewhere.) Here are afew statements we have gleaned from various sites on the internet regarding this.

"Do Jehovah's Witnesses know that Russell arrived at the date 1914 by measuring the passage ways of the Giza Pyramid?" "Did you know that 1914 was calculated by measuring a pyramid?" "He took measurements from Egypt pyramid and he got 1914." "Their [referring to the Jehovah's Witnesses] end-time prophecies were based on the internal measurements of the Great Pyramid." "The year 1914 came about when Russell measured the Great Pyramid!" "They [referring to the Jehovah's Witnesses] even admit that the 1914 claim was based on measuring a pyramid." "The year 1914 was first calculated by measuring the inches inside of a pyramid in Egypt."

We could probably find many more similar statements being made.

The truth is, however, that Charles Taze Russell, who was never a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, did not arrive at the date 1914 by measuring the passageways of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Russell, himself, never measured any of those passageways. He depended mostly on the measurements provided by Piazzi Smythe. The only exception I know of was the floor of the lower part of the descending passageway, which was filled with debris, and thus the floor could not at the time be measured.

As best as we can determine the first person to point to the date 1914 as a possible end of the Gentile Times was Edward B. Elliott, in his 1844 edition of *Horae Apocalypticae*, Volume 3, page 1429. Elliot made no use of any of the measurements from the Great Pyramid.

Later, Nelson Barbour and his associates came up with other methods of arriving at the date 1914. Charles Taze Russell adopted Barbour's conclusions in 1876. As a result, Russell presented several Biblical prophetic methods of arriving at the date 1914 in his books, The Time is At Hand and Thy Kingdom Come. After presenting the scriptural methods of arriving at the various dates, the last study in Thy Kingdom Come presents corroboration of those dates by measurements from the Great Pyramid: God's Witness in Egypt. All the Biblical methods presented by Russell, however, are no longer used by the Jehovah's Witnesses today, except for the "seven times" of Daniel 4. This leaves the JWs with much narrower basis for 1914 than Russell presented, although evidently most JWs seem to believe the authority claims of the JW leadership, and thus for them the real basis for believing that 1914 is the end to the Gentile Times is simply because their leadership says that it is. 

After Russell died, Rutherford wanted to use many of the time prophecies evidently to bolster his "Jehovah's visible organization" claims, and thus he began to reassign almost all of those prophecies to dates he deemed important to the "organization." This, of course, destroys the symmetry of the chronology as Russell presented.

The measurements of the Great Pyramid do not corroborate the dates Rutherford came up with, so Rutherford obviously wanted to turn his followers away from that pyramid. This he did with a lot of claims in 1928. He claimed that the Great Pyramid measurements are from the devil. This claim actually would mean that Satan knew what was going to be in the Bible before the Bible was written, including when Jesus was to die. At any rate, Rutherford did not, nor has the JW leadership ever actually addressed the tremendous amount of evidence that shows that the Great Pyramid is God's Witness in Egypt.

Bible Students around the world, however, disagreed with Rutherford's claims concerning the Great Pyramid. Rutherford mostly ignored the vast amount of evidence that indicates that the Great Pyramid is God's Witness in Egypt and focused on his claims that all of this is of Satan. Some Bible Students, however, wrote refutations regarding Rutherford's claims. One of these was Morton Edgar, who published his refutation in his 1929 Discourse on the Great Pyramid. This discourse is still included in editions of Edgar's Great Pyramid Passages book (available from Amazon and some other sources online). See an excerpt from this discourse at: Morton Edgar's Response to Rutherford's Great Pyramid Claims.