The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Appendix 381
With respect to the Biblical passages on the 70 years, we have
seen to what extremes Furuli has been forced to go in his attempts
to bring them in agreement with his theory. He has been unable to
prove his repeated claim that the 70-year passages in Daniel and 2
Chronicles unambiguously state that Jerusalem was desolate for 70
years. His linguistic interpretation of 2 Chronicles 36:21 is
misconstrued because he ignores the main clause in verse 20, which
plainly makes the servitude end at the Persian conquest of Babylon
in 539 BCE. Furuli’s linguistic rerenderings of the passages in
Jeremiah are no better. To reconcile Jeremiah 25:11 with his
theory, he admits that he must discard “the most natural
translation” of the verse. And to bring Jeremiah 29:10 into
agreement with his theory, he must reject the near-universal
rendering “for Babylon” in favor of the unsupportable “in
Babylon” or “at Babylon” — translations rejected by all competent
modern Hebraists.
Furuli’s approach, then, is not Biblical as he claims, but sectarian.
As a conservative Jehovah’s Witness scholar, he is prepared to go
to any length to force the Biblical passages and the historical
sources into agreement with the Watchtower Society’s Gentile
times chronology — a chronology that is the foundation
cornerstone of the movement’s claim to God-given authority. As I
have amply documented in this review, this sectarian agenda forces
Furuli to fabulate more wildly than Sheherazade; the legendary
Persian queen and storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights.