Talk:Jonadabs

So this group are the JWs who will not enter Heaven? Do they know that they are Jonadabs? --Palnatoke 06:10, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Because they do not know for a certainty that they would enter heaven, therefore they would not say tehy had the heavenly calling, and would by default identify themselves with this group.

This article should be merged with History of Jehovah's Witnesses. Summer Song 15:04, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Sources

The Spirit Watch

1935 marked the final year one could become part of the elect class of "anointed" Christians (who had a heavenly hope). From that point on, all who became Christians - that is, of course, a baptized member of the Witnesses - after 1935 automatically become part of the "Great Crowd," an inferior class of believers subordinate to the "anointed" or "elect class").

After that date these "Jonadabs" who "realized that the spirit of God had not engendered in them the hope of heavenly life" could only now hope only for preservation through Armageddon and the prospect of eternal life on the earth itself. This establishment of two classes of the righteous, one with assurance and the other with conditional salvation based upon their loyalty to the Society, placed an even greater demand upon Witnesses to conform to the dictates of their leaders, thus further strenthening the autocratic control they would come to exert over them in the decades to come.

OBEDIENT SLAVES

The Watchtower Society has defined a two-class system of believers: the anointed class (144,000) and the great crowd (called the Jonadab class).

The Watchtower insists that only the anointed are "born again," and that, technically, Jesus is the mediator for that small group alone. They teach that the great crowd cannot look to Jesus as their mediator (Watchtower, 1 April 1979, p. 31). The vast majority of Jehovah's Witnesses fall into the great crowd category, which is also called the 'other sheep.' They have traditionally been excluded from upper-level leadership and decision making because the Watchtower teaches that they have spiritual handicaps.

More importantly, they are also taught that they are not anointed with the Holy Spirit, nor does God communicate directly with them.. Instead, the average Jehovah's Witness believes that (s)he must "come to Jehovah's organization for salvation" (Watchtower, 15 November 1981, p. 21).

According to the Society, there are two resurrections:

a) One for those of the 144.000 who had died, which allegedly took place on 1918. After 1918, the anointed who die as humans on the earth, are supposedly raised to serve as kings and priests in the heavenly Kingdom of Jehovah under Jesus, to continue serving and living there forever.

b) One for the great crowd after Armageddon. The great crowd have no hope of heaven, but instead have an earthly hope. They will be resurrected after Armageddon; they will then be given a soul, or life, that exactly duplicates their personality in a new body. (What Happens to Us When We Die? p. 26-28). They will be tested as Slaves.

Vfd result

This article survived a Vfd with no real consensus (but a large portion opting for merging). See the full results at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Jonadabs. Garrett^Talk 01:07, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

I was not following the Vfd debate. Had I partaken of it, I would have voted to keep the article separate. If someone hears the term "Jonadab" and decides to look it up in Wikipedia, he or she should find an entry without having to know that the information is contained in the Jehovah's Witnesses article. If we have a separate article which discusses the legal corporations of the JW, we can have a separate article for this. --Bhuck 09:36, 27 July 2005 (UTC)