The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Secondary and tertiary sources
Furuli’s First Book 433
Furuli’s presentation of the secondary and tertiary sources for the Neo-
Babylonian chronology seems to be based mainly on the surveys of R. P.
Dougherty in Nabonidus and Belshazzar (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1929, pp. 7-10) and Ronald. H. Sack in Neriglissar—King of Babylon (Neukirchen–
Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1994, pp. 1-22). Most of the ancient authors that
Furuli mentions lived hundreds of years after the Neo-Babylonian era, and their
writings, which are preserved only in very late copies, often give distorted royal
names and regnal years. Most of these sources, therefore, are useless for
chronological purposes. (See GTR 4 , Ch. 3, A). This can be seen in Furuli’s table
on page 74, in which he lists the concordant chronology for the Neo-
Babylonian era given by Berossus (3rd century BCE) and Ptolemy’s Royal
Canon, together with the conflicting figures of Polyhistor (1st century BCE),
Josephus (1st century CE), the Talmud (5th century CE), Syncellus (c. 800 CE),
and, strangely, a totally corrupt kinglist from 1498 CE. Putting such distorted
sources in the same table with Berossus and the Ptolemaic Canon—the two
most reliable chronological sources for the Neo-Babylonian era next to the
cuneiform documents themselves—suggests that the sources are equally
unreliable and should not be trusted. That this is the purpose of the table is
obvious from Furuli’s comments on its conflicting figures:
“The spread of numbers in the table shows that different
chronologies regarding the New Babylonian kings existed from old times,”
and “that there were many different traditions describing the New Babylonian
chronology.” (pp. 74, 75; emphasis added)
But this is not really what Furuli’s table shows. Rather, it demonstrates to
what extent figures can change through time and can be distorted by being
quoted and copied time and again by various authors and copyists over a period
of nearly 2000 years.
Furuli starts by stating that “the modern model of the New Babylonian and
Persian chronology was not constructed on the basis of Babylonian sources,
but rather on the basis of secondary or tertiary sources from other places.” (p.
66) But this statement is a distortion because it suggests that the new
foundation of chronology is the same as the old one. Furuli should have added
that, in the latter half of the 19th century, the thousands of Babylonian
cuneiform documents found in Mesopotamia that became available to scholars
enabled them to construct a new foundation for Neo-Babylonian chronology
directly on primary sources. Furuli has committed the fallacy known as
“suppressed evidence” because his argument fails to consider relevant facts.
Berossus on the Neo-Babylonian reigns
Berossus’ Neo-Babylonian chronology, says Sack, “most closely
corresponds to that of the cuneiform documents.” (Sack, op. cit., p. 7) Furuli
quotes this statement on page 67, but on the next page he mentions some of
the mythological material and errors in Berossus’ discussion of earlier
Babylonian periods. The obvious purpose of this is to call into question
Berossus’ statements about Neo-Babylonian chronology. This is a form of ad
hominem argument called “poisoning the well,” in which someone presents