The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

478 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
that is, ‘at’ in English, which means that the other sixty-four had something
else, presumably ‘for’ or a similar wording. Why this didn’t give him pause is
difficult to understand -- how can he prefer six renderings to sixty-four?
Unfortunately, he identifies only the six he prefers, and not a single one of the
majority, the sixty-four with which he disagrees, a fact which only adds to the
evidence for his marked prejudice. Of course, NWT is really not a good
witness, for the false dogmas of the Watchtower translators undoubtedly
caused them to use this rendering. As for the KJV, we have already seen why
that old and really outdated version is to be disregarded in this context, and the
same may be said about the other English ones as well, e.g. Harkavy’s Hebrew-
English edition from 1939, in which the English translation is actually taken
directly from the KJV! Lamsa’s slightly newer version (from 1957) is no better,
as it is heavily influenced by the KJV, and one needs only a short survey of
Helen Spurrell’s A Translation of the Old Testament from the Original Hebrew
(London 1885) to see that her rendering is clearly patterned on the old KJV,
even though it is certainly not a mere copy - to the contrary, she has many
renderings which are clear improvements on KJV, such as using JEHOVAH
instad of ‘the LORD’. Interestingly, in her Preface she made a special claim
about the text from which she made her translation:
It seems scarcely necessary to mention that the translation is made from the
unpointed Hebrew; that being the Original Hebrew.
Actually, it would have been strange for her not to have copied the pattern of
the old KJV, which had held the field as the ‘Authorized Version’ for centuries;
indeed, to have abandoned it entirely might well have impaired the acceptance
of Miss Spurrell’s version, which she claimed had ‘almost entirely occupied her
time for many years past.’ It is an interesting coincidence that her translation
was published in London in 1885, in the very same year in which the Old
Testament part of The Revised Version was issued, a fact, however, which
precludes her having had access to this new edition, in which the ‘at’ in
Jeremiah 29:10 had been replaced by ‘for’.
Now, of course the Swedish Church Bible of 1917 does not have the English
‘at’ or some particle directly representing it, as e.g. ‘på, vid, hos’, but it has ‘i’
(‘in’) which doesn’t prove a thing because, as stated above, the ‘seventy years’
which had been decided ‘for’ Babylon’s dominion, would also pass ‘in’ or ‘at’
Babylon, as well as in all the lands mentioned, in Judah as well as among the
Gentiles. Also, this old Swedish version has now been replaced by no less than
two new ones (in 1998 and 2000) which both correctly read ‘for Babylon’ in
Jeremiah 29:10. Actually, since all the faulty supports of RF have now fallen by
the wayside, he ought to accept defeat and start using the correct renderings of
the other sixty-four! And since he has begun to look at the Scandinavian Bibles,
he might check the NW-Bible in Danish which has had ‘for Babylon’ in
Jeremiah 29:10 ever since the first edition was printed in 1985, and it is
unchanged in the large study edition of 1993!
The words of Zechariah
This section will not be treated here, since the verses used by RF have no
relation to the subject under discussion, cf. C.O. Jonsson, The Gentile Times
Reconsidered, 4th ed., Atlanta 2004, pp. 225-229.