The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

456 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
choose the understanding of Jeremiah 25 and 29 which accords with the words
of Daniel and the Chronicler: the traditional chronology is not taken into
account at all.” (p. 90) Furuli then makes some comments about Winkle’s
analysis of 2 Chronicles 36:20-22, concluding that it is “forced” and
“unnatural” because his basis “is a faith in the traditional chronology.” (p. 91)
This is not a fair description of either Winkle’s approach or of Furuli’s own.
In this review of the first four chapters of Furuli’s book, we have seen a
number of insurmountable difficulties that his Oslo Chronology creates not
only with respect to the extra-Biblical historical sources but also with the Bible
itself.
The amount of evidence against Furuli’s revised chronology provided by the
cuneiform documents—in particular the astronomical tablets—is enormous.
Furuli’s attempts to explain away this evidence are of no avail. His idea that
most, if not all, of the astronomical data recorded on the tablets might have
been retrocalculated in a later period is demonstrably false. Furuli’s final,
desperate theory that the Seleucid astronomers—and there were many—
systematically redated almost the whole astronomical archive inherited from
earlier generations of scholars is divorced from reality.
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 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 invent
incredible explanations of the relevant sources, Biblical as well as extra-
Biblical.