The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Furuli’s First Book 427
Astronomy and Celestial Divination, London: The MIT Press, 1999, p. 82;
emphasis added)
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 absurd.
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 astronomical 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?
Are all extant tablets late copies from the Seleucid era?
It is certainly true that some of the earliest diaries, including VAT 4956, are
later copies. They frequently reflect the struggle of the copyist to understand
the ancient documents they were copying, some of which were broken or
otherwise damaged. Twice in the text of VAT 4956, for example, the copyist
added the comment “broken off,” indicating he was unable to decipher some
word in the original. Often the documents used archaic terminology that the
copyists tried to modernize. What about diaries from later times?
As an example, there are about 25 diaries from the reign of Artaxerxes II
(404-358 BCE), 11 of which not only preserve the dates (year, month, day) but
also the name of the king. (Sachs/Hunger, ADT, Vol. I, pp. 66-141) Some of