Jehovah's Witnesses: A Comprehensive and Selectively Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Religious Studies) [Hardcover]

Jerry Bergman (Compiler)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0313305102 | ISBN-13: 978-0313305108 | Edition: annotated edition

The Watchtower movement has over ten million followers and remains one of the fastest growing religious movements in the world today. Since the movement actively proselytizes throughout the world, many people are aware of Jehovah's Witnesses, but readers may not be aware that the movement has profoundly influenced the constitutional law of many countries, including America and Canada. This volume contains almost 10,000 references on the Watchtower movement and the dozen or so major schisms that have occurred since its founding in 1879. An introductory chapter reviews the history, major events, and doctrinal changes of the Jehovah's Witnesses. Books, book chapters, booklets, dissertations, journal articles, and book sections that examine the Watchtower movement are referenced in English and other langauges such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish. Selectively annotated, the entries are grouped in five major sections for easy reference. Scholars and researchers will appreciate the comprehensive list the author has provided of all literature published by the Watchtower movement throughout its history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Long established as one of the major scholars in this field for his histories of the movement and for editing reprints of important early Witness publications, Bergman describes every known item associated with the Witnesses, both source and secondary material.... The sections covering the various offshoots in the movement are a major bibliographic contribution. No one knows this literature so well as Bergman. Recommended for all colleges supporting US religious history.”–Choice

“A valuable tool for scholars and researchers.”–American Reference Books Annual

About the Author

JERRY BERGMAN is Professor in General Studies at Northwest State College.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Greenwood Press; annotated edition edition (February 28, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0313305102
• ISBN-13: 978-0313305108
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,033,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology at the college level for over 30 years. He has 9 degrees, including 7 graduate degrees, and has authored over 800 publications. He is the author of The Dark Side of Charles Darwin and the co-author of In Six Days and Persuaded by the Evidence.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kudos to Dr. Bergman, January 10, 2001

By 

Donald L. Nelson (Sonora, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jehovah's Witnesses: A Comprehensive and Selectively Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Religious Studies) (Hardcover)

To paraphrase with parenthesis the author of Ecclesiastes: 'to the making of books (by and about Jehovah's Witnesses) there is no end". A bewildering array of literature exists, for and against this extremely active religious organization. And now, thanks to Dr. Bergman, it has been almost exhaustively catalogued. His bibliography includes publications as diverse as "The Truth That Leads to Everlasting Life" (possibly the third most published book in the world) and "Judge Rutherford Uncovers the Fifth Column", which hardly anyone has ever heard of. Both have rolled off the impressive presses at the Watchtower's Brooklyn plant and bear the imprimateur of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. This thorough bibliography would be of immense help for any serious student of the Watchtower that desires to grasp the extraordinary diversity of doctrinal and chronological modifications that have taken place in that organization over the years since its inception. There is even a listing of splinter groups that have formed during periods of upheaval and internecine controversy, along with their esoteric doctrines. The breadth of Dr.Bergman's book is remarkable and easily surpasses anything heretofore published. As a former student at University of California, Berkeley, who dropped out in 1952 to become one of Jehovah's Witnesses (ultimately graduating from the Watchtower Bible School, Gilead, and later becoming a circuit overseer in both Pennsylvania and Brazil), I can vouch for its overall accuracy and fairness of presentation. My own library of Watchtower-related material is quite extensive and from the vantage point of a serious student of Watchtower history, I can enthusiastically endorse and heartily recommend this splendid bibliography.

13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive although subjective, May 20, 2000

By 

richard singelenberg (Utrecht, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jehovah's Witnesses: A Comprehensive and Selectively Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Religious Studies) (Hardcover)

Recently, Rodney Stark and Lawrence Iannaccone advised social scientists of religion to spend more time studying the Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs). They accused their colleagues of systematically neglecting the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (WBTS) and its adherents. The membership of this more than 100-year-old religious movement may be highly visible in daily life, but it is practically ignored in journals and textbooks.

Whatever the reason may be, a lack of written sources can hardly be a valid explanation for this alleged indifference by the scientific community. In his second bibliography about the JWs, American psychologist Bergman compiles approximately 5000 titles of printed material by and about the WBTS and its membership. The author divides this work into five categories: official literature by the WBTS (chapter 1); material associated with the movement's genesis and early development (chapter 2); sources from outside observers such as books and newsletters (chapter 3) and magazine and journal articles (chapter 4). and, finally, material from the organization's offshoots (chapters 5 and 6). Only chapter 4 is arranged by separate subjects like court cases involving the JWs, the blood transfusion doctrine, the flag salute issue, and sociological and psychological studies. A name index concludes the book.

Though the bulk of the publications are in English, Bergman also presents many sources from Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia. Italian, Spanish, French, and Russian references are sparse while material in other languages is minimal. The time span covers more than a century and a half: from the 1840s - sources that, according to Bergman, were highly influential in the development of the views of founder Russell - until 1997. With regard to the amount of sociological research, a quick count yields approximately 20 Ph.D. dissertations and 50 articles in professional journals. If these numbers indicate "systematic neglect" as asserted by Stark and Iannaccone, one wonders what amount is required for "systematic attention."

This bibliography is a reasonably easy reference book for specialists. One may conclude that, with one exception, most of what any researcher on this religious movement will require is here. Particularly the final chapters that deal with the organization's many schisms offer interesting details. Social scientists may pay too little attention to the JWs; the offshoots of the WBTS are a virtual terra incognita.

Unfortunately, the bibliography's comprehensiveness is the only positive characteristic of this work. The annotations suffer from subjective usage, unfounded or incomplete evaluations, and tabloid irrelevance. Partially, these problems can be explained by the compiler's former religious allegiance; Bergman is an ex-JW and notorious adversary of the WBTS. The uninformed reader, however, is left in the dark about these facts. "He has been researching and writing about the Jehovah's Witness movement for nearly four decades," is the only biographical information provided. From the annotations, however, his present position and sentiments become clear.

He describes the organization as "corrupted," "inhuman," and "dishonest" while its various teachings, such as the blood transfusion doctrine and the prophetic year 1914, are evaluated as "tragic," "erroneous," and "wrong" (pp. 95, 98, 100, 111 ). Next, Bergman qualifies hundreds of sources including some of his own (p. 119) - as "excellent" without providing any argument for this appraisal. This applies to a Swedish treatise ("excellent review") that makes a stand against the movement's transfusion prohibition (p. 100) and a Dutch book that contains "much excellent information found nowhere else" (p. 109). How does he know? Has he mastered these languages? From the writer's acknowledgments, it seems that many opinions probably originate from foreign associates who contributed much of the nonEnglish material (p. ix).

Some annotations are painfully incomplete or embarrassingly void. A plain blunder is the comment on a publication commissioned by the former East German Secret Service with the specific intention to discredit the WBTS. Surely, Bergman labels the book "an Anti-Witness work," but he leaves out the vital (and well-known) information that the Stasi was behind its production (p. 97). Also, the pioneering studies of Bryan Wilson on the JWs are devoid of any comment (p. 256); and when the reader's interest may have been aroused by an obscure but unique experimental study on personality traits among German JWs, no details but the minimally required bibliographical data are provided (p. 101 ). In contrast, the author's comments on the seminal study of the JWs persecution in Nazi-Germany by historian Garbe are limited to the gratuitous remark that the movement's own historiography is "not always very accurate," rather than showing the theoretical merits of this work (p. 97). Further, Bergman overlooks numerous German (case) studies published since the early 90s about the fate of the JWs during the Hitter-regime. A separate section on this specific issue would have been appropriate.

An inclination to outright sensationalism can be detected in annotations about the alleged relationship between WBTS membership and adverse behavior. What does the author suggest with the comment "About the skinhead murder by three boys all of which were raised Witnesses" (p. 107)? So far, any significant association between upbringing in this religious milieu and criminal activities has not been demonstrated. The same goes for a JW lawyer who swindled his fellow believers (p. 241). These are unfortunate events, but by emphasizing these and similar isolated incidents it is unclear what information the writer wants to convey to the reader other than the negative stigmatization of a religious minority.

Concerning Bergman's classification criteria, one may wonder if grouping the socalled "human interest" category under the heading of "sociological and psychological studies" is advisable. Thus, articles in Sociological Analysis and Acta Psychiatrica Belgica alternate with a Penthouse interview with singer and JW-raised Patti Smith and an expose about a converted television star in Woman's Day (pp. 249-256). Finally, the observation that the non-English entries are saturated with language errors points to sloppy - if at all - final editing, the sophisticated external care of the book aside. The best advice to the reader would be to concentrate on the titles and ignore the annotations.

Richard Singelenberg

4.0 out of 5 stars Indispensible reference tool on Jehovah's Witnesses!, January 10, 2001

By 

Carl Olof Jonsson (Göteborg, Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jehovah's Witnesses: A Comprehensive and Selectively Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Religious Studies) (Hardcover)

Dr. Jerry Bergman's work, Jehovah's Witnesses. A Comprehensive and Selectively Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 1999), is, as the title indicates, a bibliography on the background, origin, and history of the Watchtower movement. The book contains nearly 10,000 references, and it is very well done. It is, in fact, a goldmine for researchers. This holds true especially of the literature in English, which is truly comprehensive.

Bergman was himself a Witness until the early 1980's, and he knows the Watchtower movement thoroughly from within. He has spent decades on researching, writing, and collecting material on it, and owns himself almost every piece of material listed in the book. It can safely be said that very few persons in the world has such an extensive library on the Witnesses at hand.

The bibliography is "selectively annotated", that is, it contains brief descriptions of the content of many of the publications. These are usually informative, although in some cases they may seem too brief. Many, if not most of the publications about the Witnesses are of very poor quality, and for this reason Bergman often calls attention to the exceptions, denoting them as "well written," "interesting," "excellent," etc. Such evaluations, although of necessity subjective, are certainly legitimate and helpful.

Many publications about the Watchtower organization are aimed at "exposing" the faults of its teachings and policies. The notes on the contents of such "anti-witness" publications do not necessarily reflect Bergman's own views (although they sometimes do), as I was led to believe when I first read Singelenberg's review, but primarily the negative evaluations of the authors of these publications. The same holds true, or course, of the notes on the Watchtower publications. When, for example, the entry on a booklet published in 1983 is followed by the comment, "The need to accept Watchtower teachings; directed at Muslims" (p. 48), this, of course, describes the contents of the booklet, not the view of Bergman.

The work is not just an annotated bibliography, but it also gives very valuable and interesting background information on the movement. Thus the Introduction presents a most valuable historical overview of the movement's background in the Second Advent groups that branched off from the Millerites after the failure of their 1844 date. Brief biographical notes are given on George Storrs, John H. Paton, Maria F. Russell, the Edgar brothers, Walter Salter, and others. Some of the most interesting and valuable chapters are the last two (5 and 6) dealing with the offshoots of the Watchtower Society, which contain important historical notes on the major groups. Few if any scholar has gathered so much information and literature on these offshoots as has Jerry Bergman.

As stated, the main focus is on publications in English. A selection of publications in a number other languages are also listed, although these are far from complete. Unfortunately, for some of these languages (including the Scandinavian languages) the entries had not been proof-read and therefore contain many errors, particularly spelling errors. These, and some other errors I have noticed should be corrected in the next edition. However, most of these errors are trifles compared to the enormous amount of sources that are made available to scholars through this book.

Researchers and writers on Jehovah's Witnesses will find this work to be an indispensible reference tool, as it will save them years of work in searching for relevant sources. And anyone interested in the Watchtower movement will find the historical information added at various places in the book of great interest.