Three Worlds

Three Worlds, and the Harvest of This World is a 194-page religious book published in 1877 by American Adventist preacher Nelson H. Barbour and Charles Taze Russell, who later founded the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. Overview The book used elements of elaborate Bible chronology, prophetic speculation and eschatology to promote the belief that one could determine God's timetable for Jesus Christ's second coming, the rapture of the saints and the restoration of the earth to a paradise-like Eden. Though it bore the names of both Barbour and Russell as publishers, the book was written entirely by Barbour, a former Millerite, who used some of preacher William Miller's teachings as its basis. Barbour’s writings were highly influential in the development of Russell’s later teachings, which led to the formation of the Bible Student movement and later, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Its computations of the length of the "times of the Gentiles" mentioned at Luke 21:24, calculated as 2,520 years from 606 BC used an interpretation that is still adhered to by Jehovah's Witnesses. It used the year-day system of interpreting prophecies, presented the idea of a 360-day "prophetic year" and a historicist interpretation of the book of Revelation. It drew on the millenarian studies of 19th-century writers in formulating a system that demonstrated remarkable biblical-mathematical "correspondencies" and modified Bishop James Ussher's chronological calculation to declare that 6,000 years of human history had ended in the autumn of 1873 and that a "morning of joy" was about to begin for humankind.