"Alice, watch out! He may well have made extensive study into new Babylonian chronology, but his analyses and conclusions are flawed on the most basic of levels! While on the surface they look scholarly and well-researched - especially to those unknowledgeable about the subject - actually when his claims and 'facts' are checked (and there is a LOT to check) you are faced with numerous, and often astonishing, mistakes and inconsistencies."
Common sense can be used to substantiate the fact that God's Kingdom as a visible organization ended before the foretold messiah appeared in the first century CE. The corruption of the Pharisees and Sadducees indicated they obviously weren't servants of God.
When he caught sight of many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to the baptism, he said to them: “you offspring of vipers, who has intimated to you to flee from the coming wrath? So then produce fruit that befits repentance; and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘As a father we have Abraham. Matthew 3:7-9
Moving forward a bit: During the Dark Ages no one could teach anything outside what was official church doctrine without being burned at the stake or tortured by the Inquisition.
Biblical truth couldn't be revived until sometime after the Church was stripped of its power.
Often referred to as “the morning star of the Reformation,” John Wycliffe (1324 - December 1384) was a Catholic priest and a professor of theology at Oxford, England. Well aware of the abuses in the church, he wrote and preached against such matters as corruption in the monastic orders, papal taxation, the doctrine of transubstantiation (the claim that the bread and wine used in the Mass literally change into the body and blood of Jesus Christ), the confession, and church involvement in temporal affairs.
Wycliffe was particularly outspoken when it came to the church’s neglect in teaching the Bible. Once he declared: “Would to God that every parish church in this land had a good Bible and good expositions on the gospel, and that the priests studied them well, and taught truly the gospel and God’s commands to the people!” To this end, Wycliffe, in the last years of his life, undertook the task of translating the Latin Vulgate Bible into English. With the help of his associates, particularly Nicholas of Hereford, he produced the first complete Bible in the English language.
All of this, of course, did not go unnoticed by the church. The Council of Constance declared Wycliffe (on 4 May 1415) a stiff-necked heretic and under the ban of the Church. Because of his prominence among the ruling and scholarly classes, Wycliffe was allowed to die in peace on the last day of 1384. It was decreed that his books be burned and his remains be exhumed. His followers were less fortunate. During the reign of Henry IV of England, they were branded as heretics, and many of them were imprisoned, tortured, or burned to death.
http://www.exposingchristianity.com/Inquisition.html
Galileo Galilei,the famous Italian astronomer and physicist was one of the most noted victims of the inquisition. A letter in which he attempted to demonstrate the Copernican theory, that the Earth is not the center of the universe, was forwarded by some of his enemies to the inquisitors in Rome. He was tried in 1633 and found guilty of heresy. He was forced to recant (publicly withdraw his statement) and was sentenced to life imprisonment under house arrest.
In 1979, Pope John Paul II declared that the Roman Catholic Church "may have been mistaken in condemning him," and he established a commission to study the case.
In 1993, the Catholic Church "officially" pardoned Galileo. In other words, they forgave him for teaching that the planets revolve around the Sun, not the Earth.
I think it's obvious that truth was/is not their goal. Others have actually gone further in their assessments of medieval churches:
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1676.cfm
THE TRUE FACE OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC INQUISITION -- ROTTEN SPIRITUAL FRUIT FROM THE ABYSS OF HELL
Our precious Savior never ordered anyone to be slaughtered for any reason, especially for hardness of heart against His message, nor for disagreeing with Him on spiritual matters.
As the Inquisition rolled along, demonic spirit swept through the Church and the people carrying out the Inquisition. This spirit was a spirit of absolute, diabolical hatred of mankind, accompanied by a corresponding love of torture.
Therefore, the monstrosity of the Inquisition stands before mankind as the ultimate evidence of the inherent Satanism of the Roman Catholic Church.
For those who have the courage to examine this ultimate "rotten fruit", they will see the truth of the Catholic Church. And do not think Rome has changed, for the Bible tells us that a Leopard does not change its spots [Jeremiah 13:23], and Rome is always bragging that she never changes. A concrete proof of this fact is that Pope Paul VI (1963-1978) restored the Office of the Inquisition, renamed today as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ["Lives of the Popes", by Richard P. McBrien, HarperSanFrancisco, 1997, p. 282, 354].
Today, this nefarious Office of the Inquisition is headed by Cardinal Ratzinger.
It was (outside secular sources) the Age of Enlightenment and constitutional monarchies that put an end to the Dark Ages, not church officials. This paved the way for the restoration of God's visible organization. Using the Bible, secular resources and common sense, the early Bible students pinpointed the end of the gentile times.
“It was in B.C. 606, that God’s kingdom ended, the diadem was removed, and all the earth given up to the Gentiles. 2520 years from B.C. 606, will end in A.D. 1914.” —The Three Worlds, published in 1877, page 83.
It's been well established that secular history does not contain the same interlocking harmony found in the Bible. If a person chooses to allow discrepancies between certain aspects of history and the Bible to obscure the truth found in God's Word, that's a personal choice. The honest thing to do is to establish truth elsewhere before pursuing this course.