The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

402 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
chronology of the Ancient world for more than two decades.
What Furuli does not mention is that he is a Jehovah’s Witness, and that for
a long time he has produced apologetic texts defending Watchtower exegesis
against criticism. His two books on Bible translation are nothing more than
defenses of the Witnesses’ New World Translation of the Bible. He fraudulently
fails to mention that for decades he has tried to defend Watchtower chronology
and that his revised chronology is essentially a defense of the Watchtower
Society’s traditional chronology. He describes his chronology as “a new
chronology,” which he calls “the Oslo Chronology,” (p. 14) when in fact the
607 BCE date for the destruction of Jerusalem is the chronological foundation
for the claims and apocalyptic messages of the Watchtower organization, and
the 455 BCE date for the 20th year of Artaxerxes I is its traditional starting
point for its calculation of the “seventy weeks” of Daniel 9:24-27.
Despite these facts, Furuli nowhere mentions the Watchtower Society or its
chronology. Nor does he mention my detailed refutation of this chronology in
various editions of my book The Gentile Times Reconsidered (GTR; 3rd edition,
Atlanta: Commentary Press, 1998; 1st ed. published in 1983), despite the fact
that in circulated “organized collections of notes” he has tried to refute the
conclusions presented in its earlier editions. (A fourth revised and updated
edition of GTR has been prepared and will be published in 2004.) Furuli’s
silence on GTR is noteworthy because he discusses R. E. Winkle’s 1987 study
which presents mostly the same arguments and conclusions as are found in the
first edition of GTR (1983). As a Jehovah’s Witness, Furuli is forbidden to
interact with former members of his organization. If this is the reason for his
feigned ignorance of my study, he is acting as a loyal Witness—not as a scholar.
Clearly, Furuli has an agenda, and he is hiding it.
The contents of the first four chapters
Chapter 1: Pages 17-37:
In Chapter 1, Furuli claims that the Bible and the astronomical tablets VAT
4956 and Strm Kambys 400 “contradict each other” (pp. 17-28), and he
therefore questions the reliability of astronomical tablets by describing nine
“potential sources of error.” (pp. 28-37)
Chapter 2: Pages 38-46:
In Chapter 2, Furuli claims that the “most acute problem for making an
absolute chronology based on astronomical tablets” is that many, “perhaps
most positions of the heavenly bodies on such tablets, are calculated rather than
observed.” (p. 15)
Chapter 3: Pages 47-65:
In Chapter 3, Furuli makes some general comments on the Sumerian,
Akkadian, and Hebrew languages and describes some “pitfalls” in reading and
translating the ancient documents.