The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

438 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
Strangely, but apparently unknowingly, Furuli accepts this, in contradiction
to his strawman arguments. In the Introduction, he notes that the Ptolemaic
scheme “fits perfectly with the theoretical eclipse scheme of Saros cycles and
intercalary months” (pp. 13, 14), that is, the chronology of the cuneiform
tablets from the Seleucid era (312-64 BCE) that list dates at 18-year intervals for
earlier periods. In a later discussion of a group of such Saros texts, Furuli points
out (p. 97) that the group of tablets he refers to gives an unbroken series of
dates at 18-year intervals from year 31 of Darius I (491 BCE) down into the
Seleucid era. He notes that the chronology of these tablets, if correct, would
rule out his Oslo Chronology (with its Darius/Xerxes co-regency and its 51-
year reign of Artaxerxes I). The chronology of the 18-year texts, Furuli admits,
is the same as that of Ptolemy’s Canon:
“It is quite clear that Ptolemy did not invent his chronology of kings,
but that he built on an already accepted chronology. This chronology
was evidently the one the scribe(s) of the Saros tablets used.” (p. 98)
The question, then, is: Because the chronology of Ptolemy’s Canon for the
Neo-Babylonian and Persian eras existed hundreds of years before Claudius
Ptolemy, how can Furuli claim that “the modern view of the chronology of the
old world builds on the writings of Claudius Ptolemy”? This claim is not true
today, and Furuli knows it. Obviously, Ptolemy inherited his chronology from
earlier generations of scholars, although he might have added to it by updating
it to his own time, as scholars had done before him and as others continued to
do after him. (GTR 4 , p. 94, note 12 with reference) Of course, this fact makes
Furuli’s attempt to bias his readers against Ptolemy’s Canon irrelevant to the
the question of chronology.
When Furuli speaks of “the writings of Claudius Ptolemy” as the basis of
the chronology of the old world, he reveals a remarkable ignorance of the
contents of these writings. Of Ptolemy’s greatest and best known work, for
example, Furuli says,
“his work Almagest (Ptolemy’s canon) has tables showing Assyrian,
Babylonian, Persian and Greek kings together with the years of their
reigns.” (p. 70)
Almagest contains no such things. Strangely, Furuli seems to believe that
Almagest is identical to Ptolemy’s Canon. In Almagest, a work originally published
in 13 volumes, Ptolemy summed up all the astronomical and mathematical
knowledge of his time. How Furuli can confuse Almagest with Ptolemy’s Canon,
a chronological table covering about a page (GTR 4 , Ch. 3, A-2), is puzzling.
True, the dates of events and ancient observations found in Almagest agree
with the chronology of the Canon and, like the Canon, it dates events from the
beginning of the so-called “Nabonassar Era” (747 BCE). But Almagest never
contained the Ptolemaic Canon with its chronological tables. This kinglist was included in
another work by Claudius Ptolemy known as the Handy Tables.
Furuli discusses at length (pp. 70-73) Professor Robert R. Newton’s claim
that Claudius Ptolemy was a fraud, concluding that this is a problem because
“researchers since the Middle ages … have viewed Ptolemy’s historical and