Charles Taze Russell

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

Charles Taze Russell, born in 1852 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, now part of Pittsburgh, founded the Bible Student movement in Pittsburgh in the 1870s, a Bible study organization that grew out of his own independent reading of scripture rather than any inherited denominational structure. The movement he built was later organized formally as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, giving his independent Bible classes a lasting institutional form.

Russell's teaching developed a specific chronological claim beginning with the second volume of his Studies in the Scriptures, published in 1889. Building on Daniel's Gentile Times, reckoned from the fall of Jerusalem, Russell calculated that this chronology would reach its end in 1914, an event he and his followers read as marking the close of the present order and the invisible establishment of Christ's heavenly kingdom, a specific date named decades before it arrived.

The organization Russell built around that Bible study and its chronological framework would, after his death, become the direct ancestor of Jehovah's Witnesses, a lineage that traces back to the Pittsburgh Bible classes he began in the 1870s rather than to any later reorganization, carrying forward both his organizational structure and the chronological method his 1914 calculation had established.

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 the First World War broke out in 1914, the same year Charles Taze Russell's Gentile Times chronology had named, Russell and his followers did not treat the war as a failure of the prediction. They took the war itself, rather than the invisible heavenly event they had also anticipated for that year, as striking confirmation that the underlying chronology was sound, reading the outbreak of global conflict as evidence their calculation had been correct all along.

That reading let the movement absorb a year that might otherwise have produced the kind of open disappointment other date bound movements experienced when an expected event failed to appear in any visible form. The war supplied a visible, world historical event to point to in place of the invisible kingdom establishment the chronology had originally predicted.

Russell died in 1916, two years after the date his own calculation had named, having lived just long enough to see the war he read as confirmation but not to see the movement's longer development. Leadership passed to his successor, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, under whom the movement continued producing new chronological expectations in the years that followed.