The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

A theological attempt ...
Sham Scholarship 479
Thus far it has been a very disappointing experience to go through RF’s twisted
and contorted attempts to ‘prove’ his outlandish views about the length of the
devastation of Jerusalem and Judah and the exile of the Judeans, but this
section testifies to a stubbornness in the matter of doctrine on RF’s part which
is hard to comprehend. Here he deals with a two-part article by an Adventist
scholar named Ross E. Winkle who has gone through all the relevant material
about this topic and written a well-researched and well-formulated piece which
by dint of its careful scholarship and its sober style outshines RF’s ‘fuzzy’ and
‘muddled’ product by far.
He quite correctly sees Winkle’s conclusion as the opposite of his own: ‘There
is no passage in the Bible which definitely says that Jerusalem and Judah should
be desolate for 70 years while the people were exiles in Babylon!’ What RF does
not concede, however, in the face of the overwhelming Biblical and linguistic
evidence for Winkle’s conclusion, is that it is correct! In fact, Winkle proves his
point in a very careful and methodical way, far removed from RF’s prolix and
clumsy attempts to pervert the clear and incontrovertible truth of God’s Word.
Actually, despite his lengthy and confused efforts, RF does not prove one single
point of his Watchtower-inspired theory, for the very simple reason that it is
not true!
Some of his arguments in this part are nothing less than ludicrous: he does not
like that ‘Winkle seems to assume that what the Bible says is true’, (indeed, what
is wrong with that? Doesn’t the Watchtower people reason in the same way as
Winkle?) and neither does he like Winkle’s acceptance of ‘the traditional
chronology’ - but here Winkle stands on firm ground: the Bible is God’s own
inspired word, truthful and inerrant, and what RF calls ‘traditional chronology’
is certainly not based on ‘circular arguments’ but on many years of diligent
research by serious and competent scholars! Of course, mistakes have been
made over the years, especially in the infancy of this science, but in time they
have ben corrected whenever new evidence came to light, and today the ancient
history and chronology of the Middle East for the first millennium B.C.E. is
well-established and trustworthy in practically all aspects, notwithstanding RF’s
contrary claims and his unproven pet theories.
RF truly feels unhappy about Winkle’s beginning from Jeremiah’s testimony
and his going on from there to Daniel and the Chronicler, while he himself
starts with Daniel and the Chronicler and then goes back to Jeremiah; however,
in a situation like this the ideal method is actually to begin from the beginning,
which naturally means to take Jeremiah’s prophecies first and then, having
familiarized oneself with their message, to move on chronologically to the later
reactions to these early prophecies and their fulfilment, going first to Daniel
and then to the somewhat later Chronicler. In this way the true picture of the
events of those times emerges clearly, and that is evidently what Winkle tries to
do even though he takes the Chronicler before Daniel, probably because he
wants to handle the matter of the ‘sabbath rest’ for the land properly, without
getting it mixed up with the message of Jeremiah’s prophecies, and this he does
very well indeed.