The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

370 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
If only five percent of the original Babylonian astronomical archive
is preserved today, the scale of the chronological revisions Furuli
thinks Seleucid copyists engaged in becomes apparent. To bring
their whole archive into harmony with their supposed theoretical
chronology, they would have had to redate thousands of tablets
and tens of thousands of observations. Is it likely that they believed
so strongly in a supposed theoretical chronology that they bothered
to redate four centuries’ worth of archives containing thousands of
tablets? The idea is patently absurd, asinine.
We can also ask why the Seleucid scholars would work out a
theoretical chronology for earlier centuries when a reliable
chronology for the whole period back to the middle of the 8th
century could easily be extracted from the extensive astronomical
archive at their disposal. Is it not much more realistic to conclude
that their chronology was exactly the one found in the inherited
archive of tablets, an archive that had been studied and expanded
by successive generations of scholars up to and including their
own?
It should be noted that, to make any claims at all about dates in
his Oslo chronology, Furuli must rely on the dating of the tablets
that the Seleucids supposedly revised. But if one assumes that his
chronology is valid, then so must be the dates recorded on the
tablets — which destroys his claim that the Seleucids revised the
tablets. Thus, Furuli’s argument is internally inconsistent and
cannot be correct.
Another problem is what became of the original pre-Seleucid
tablets. A necessary consequence of Furuli’s theory is that almost
all extant tablets should reflect only the erroneous theoretical
chronology of the Seleucid scholars, not what Furuli regards as the
original and true chronology — the Oslo Chronology. In his view,
therefore, all or almost all extant tablets can only be the late revised
copies of the Seleucid scholars. Thus, on page 64, he claims:
As in the case of the astronomica1 diaries on clay tablets, we do not
have the autographs of the Biblical books, but only copies.
This is certainly true of the Biblical books, but is it true of the
astronomical diaries? Is there any evidence to show that all the
astronomical tablets preserved today are only copies from the
Seleucid era?