This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Joseph Franklin Rutherford succeeded Charles Taze Russell as president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in 1917, taking charge of the movement that would later become known as Jehovah's Witnesses. He held the presidency through several decades of doctrinal development, reshaping much of the organization's structure and teaching in the years that followed Russell's death.
In 1920 Rutherford published a widely distributed book, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, in which he taught that 1925 would bring the resurrection of faithful figures from before Christ's earthly life, among them Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He presented their expected return as visible evidence that God's kingdom stood near at hand, a specific and dated claim that reached a large readership through the book's wide circulation across the movement's growing following.
The prediction was not offered as a distant hope but as a near term event with a stated year attached to it, a pattern of specific chronological claims that Rutherford's own leadership repeated more than once across his decades in the presidency. Its failure to occur in 1925 did not end his tenure or halt the movement's growth, and Rutherford continued to lead the organization he had reshaped for another seventeen years, until his death in 1942.