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Authority and accountability · Claim record

In The Watch Tower of 15 September 1910 Russell told readers that someone who set aside his Studies in the Scriptures and went “to the Bible alone” would, within two years, “go into darkness”, while someone who read the Studies and “not a page of the Bible, as such” would still be in the light.

Claim ID claim-authority-studies-above-bibleConcerns 15 September 1910Explicit statement
Explicit statement · 15 September 1910 Verified

In The Watch Tower of 15 September 1910 Russell told readers that someone who set aside his Studies in the Scriptures and went “to the Bible alone” would, within two years, “go into darkness”, while someone who read the Studies and “not a page of the Bible, as such” would still be in the light. The Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, 15 September 1910

The organisation’s position or later explanation: The same article says the volumes “are not intended to supplant the Bible” and urges readers to test every point against Scripture before accepting it, saying: “I will not take it because these studies say so; I wish to see what the Bible says.”

Show the evidence (1 source)
Primary JW publication Verified

The Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, “Is the Reading of “Scripture Studies” Bible Study?”

15 September 1910 · pp.298-299 · Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society

“if anyone lays the Scripture Studies aside, even after he has used them, after he has become familiar with them, after he has read them for ten years—if he then lays them aside and ignores them and goes to the Bible alone, though he has understood his Bible for ten years, our experience shows that within two years he goes into darkness. On the other hand, if he had merely read the Scripture Studies with their references, and had not read a page of the Bible, as such, he would be in the light at the end of the two years, because he would have the light of the Scriptures.”

The passage sits under the sub-heading “Is the Reading of ‘Scripture Studies’ Bible Study?”. The same page says the six volumes “are not merely comments on the Bible, but they are practically the Bible itself”, and a later paragraph urges readers to test the books against Scripture rather than accept them because “these studies say so”.

Scan of original

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. Read in the Reprints volume for 1910 on the Internet Archive. The issue masthead reads “Vol. XXXI BROOKLYN, N. Y., SEPTEMBER 15, 1910 No. 18” and the running head above the passage reads “[4684] September 15, 1910 THE WATCH TOWER (298-299)”, so the passage stands on magazine pages 298-299 of that issue. Obvious OCR artefacts (broken hyphenation, stray marks) have been repaired; wording is otherwise as printed.

Scan provenance. The Internet Archive item titled “The watch tower and herald of Christ’s presence, 1910” is the Watch Tower Reprints volume for 1910: it reproduces each issue with its masthead, and every page carries a continuous Reprints page number in square brackets together with the original magazine pages in parentheses in the running head. Read in the item’s OCR text file.

Notes. Commonly cited simply as “p. 298”. The magazine's own running head brackets the passage as pages 298-299.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-ctr-wt-1910-0915-scripture-studies

Claim page

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