The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

368 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
his library tablet, to the effect that the tablet he was making would
contain wrong data of regnal years:’ (Furuli,p.41)
Furuli indicates that not only the dates on the lunar and
planetary tablets but also the dates on the diaries might have been
tampered with by the Seleucid scholars in the same way. Referring
again to the fact that the earliest extant diaries are copies, he says:
But what about the regnal year(s) of a king that are written on such
tablets? Have they been calibrated to fit an incorrect theoretical
chronological scheme, or have they been copied correctly? (Furuli, p. 42)
Furuli realizes, of course, that his Oslo Chronology is
thoroughly contradicted by the Babylonian astronomical tablets.
That is the reason he proposes, as a last frantic resort, the theory
that these tablets might have been redated by Seleucid scholars to
bring them into agreement with their own supposed theoretical
chronology for earlier times. Is this scenario likely? What does it
imply?
(C-4) The scale of the supposed Seleucid chronological
revisions
To what extent does Furuli’s Oslo Chronology differ from the
traditional chronology? In a chronological table on pages 219–225
covering the 208 years of the Persian era (539–331 BCE), Furuli
shows, reign by reign, the difference between his chronology and
the traditional one. It turns out that the only agreement between
the two is the dating of the reigns of Cyrus and Cambyses — the
period from the fall of Babylon (539 BCE) to 522 BCE, a period of
17 years. By giving the usurper Bardiya one full year of reign after
Cambyses, Furuli moves the whole 36-year reign of Darius I one
year forward. Then he moves the reigns of Darius’ successors
Xerxes and Artaxerxes I 10 years backward by adding 10 years to
the reign of the latter, creating a coregency of 11 years between
Darius I and Xerxes.
But Furuli also assigns a one-year reign to the usurper Sogdianus
between Artaxerxes I and his successor Darius II. The effect of this
is that the remaining reigns up to 331 BCE are all moved one year
forward. The end result is that Furuli’s Oslo Chronology is at
variance with the traditional chronology for the Persian era for 191
of its 208 years, or for 92 percent of the period.
But this is not all. As mentioned in the introduction, Furuli
wants to add 20 extra years to the Neo-Babylonian period
somewhere after the reign of Nebuchadnezzar — between 562
and 539 BCE. The effect of this — what Furuli calls the “domino