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A House Built in San Diego for Guests Who Never Arrived

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A House Built in San Diego for Guests Who Never Arrived

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When Joseph Franklin Rutherford taught that 1925 would bring the resurrection of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and other faithful figures from before Christ's earthly life, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society acted on that expectation in a concrete way. The Society built a substantial house in San Diego, California, known as Beth Sarim, and deeded it in trust for the returning patriarchs, a structure meant to receive figures the movement expected to walk the earth again within a few years of Rutherford's 1920 book Millions Now Living Will Never Die.

The resurrection Rutherford had predicted did not occur in 1925, and the patriarchs the house was built for never arrived to occupy it. Rather than standing empty or being abandoned as a monument to an unfulfilled date, Beth Sarim instead became Rutherford's own residence, and he lived in the house he had built in trust for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for the remainder of his life as president.

Rutherford died in 1942, still in office after twenty five years leading the movement he had taken over from Charles Taze Russell, and Beth Sarim was sold sometime after his death, closing out the physical remnant of a prediction that had shaped the movement's public preaching but never produced the event it promised. The house's fate, built for guests who never came and inhabited instead by the man who predicted them, stands as the clearest surviving trace of the 1925 claim.

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Sources
Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah's Witnesses
M. James Penton, University of Toronto Press, 2015
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