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Authority and accountability · Claim record

No report of the Hamilton prosecution appears in The Watch Tower for 1912 or 1913. The name Ross occurs once in the two years, in a reprinted newspaper item about a Toronto Baptist debate on communion, and the phrases “Hamilton, Ont”, “criminal libel” and “no bill” do not occur at all. Writing on 26 May 1913, Ross complained that Russell had still said nothing about the case in his journal.

Claim ID claim-authority-watch-tower-silence-on-rossConcerns 1913Context
Context · 1913 Supported

No report of the Hamilton prosecution appears in The Watch Tower for 1912 or 1913. The name Ross occurs once in the two years, in a reprinted newspaper item about a Toronto Baptist debate on communion, and the phrases “Hamilton, Ont”, “criminal libel” and “no bill” do not occur at all. Writing on 26 May 1913, Ross complained that Russell had still said nothing about the case in his journal. The Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, 1913Some Facts and More Facts About the Self-Styled “Pastor” Charles T. Russell (of Millennial Dawn Fame), 1913

Show the evidence (2 sources)
Primary JW publication Supported

The Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, “Bound volumes for 1912 and 1913 (complete years)”

1913 · Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society

Searched in full for any report of the Hamilton, Ontario prosecution. The only occurrence of the name Ross in the 1912 volume is a reprinted newspaper item about a Baptist debate on communion; the 1913 volume contains no occurrence of the name at all, and neither volume contains the phrases “Hamilton, Ont”, “criminal libel” or “no bill”.

Scan of original

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. Both OCR texts were downloaded and searched, and the searches were repeated independently on 19 September 2026 with the same result: one occurrence of “Ross” in the 1912 volume (a reprinted newspaper report of a Toronto Baptist debate on communion at which “the Rev. J. J. Ross” spoke), none in 1913, and no occurrence in either volume of “Hamilton, Ont”, “criminal libel” or “no bill”. This is a search of optical character recognition, not of the printed page, so a misread word could in principle be missed.

Scan provenance. Watch Tower Reprints volumes for 1912 and 1913 on the Internet Archive; OCR text files downloaded in full and searched.

Notes. A negative finding, recorded because the absence of any Watch Tower report is itself part of the record.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-ctr-wt-1912-1913-bound-volumes

Discovery source only Supported

Some Facts and More Facts About the Self-Styled “Pastor” Charles T. Russell (of Millennial Dawn Fame), “Pamphlet, sub-titled ‘The history of the Libel Case: “Pastor” Russell before the Courts’”

1913 · pp.18-19 · Rev. J. J. Ross · Book Department, Philadelphia School of the Bible

““Do you know the Greek”? Asked the Attorney. “Oh, yes,” was Russell’s reply. Here he was handed a copy of the New Testament in Greek, by Westcott & Hort, and asked to read the letters of the alphabet as they appear on the top of page 447. He did not know the alphabet. “Now,” asked Mr. Staunton, “Are you familiar with the Greek language?” “No,” said Mr. Russell, without a blush.”

Ross, a Baptist minister in Hamilton, Ontario, was prosecuted by Russell for defamatory libel over a leaflet Ross had published in June 1912. This pamphlet is Ross’s own account of the proceedings, published after they ended, and the passage above is his narrative of the examination of 17 March 1913 with snatches of dialogue quoted inside it — not a transcript. Elsewhere in the same pamphlet Ross does print question-and-answer material, which he says he holds as certified transcripts.

Scan of original

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. Both separately digitised printings were opened and the passage read; the wording is the same in each, so it is not an artefact of one scan. In both printings this is the only place in the pamphlet where the words “alphabet” or “447” occur, and the tidy question-and-answer version that circulates online appears in neither. What cannot be confirmed is the content: this is the defendant in Russell’s own prosecution writing about his own case, and no court record, official transcript or contemporary newspaper report of the Hamilton examination was located. It is not the court record, and it is not evidence of what was said in court.

Scan provenance. Two separately digitised printings were opened: the “Forty-sixth Thousand” (Philadelphia School of the Bible) at archive.org/details/SomeFactsAndMoreFactsAboutCharlesTazeRussell, and the “Thirteenth Thousand” (North-West Bible and Tract Depot, Winnipeg) filmed by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions at archive.org/details/cihm_87677.

Notes. The same pamphlet reproduces, in question-and-answer form, passages of Maria Russell’s sworn direct examination in the Pennsylvania Common Pleas trial, which Ross says he holds as a transcript certified by the official court reporter Alexander Callow. Ross also records that “the jury found absolutely no ground for libel and handed down the verdict ‘no bill’” (page 15), and, writing on 26 May 1913, that this was “on the 1st ult.”, that is 1 April 1913. The pamphlet’s reliability is limited on its face: the leaflet of June 1912 that it reprints states that Russell’s wife “divorced him a few years ago on the ground of cruelty and of having wrong relations with other women” and that “In court, she proved improprieties between her husband and one Rose Ball” — both of which the record in this ledger contradicts.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-ctr-ross-1913-some-facts-more-facts

Claim page

A direct link to this claim is https://jwtruth.org/evidence/claim-authority-watch-tower-silence-on-ross/. Every source above opens the original document or the best available copy. If you believe the wording, date or context is wrong, report an error.