Nathan Natas
We all know that since the year zero (on the FredFranzian calendar) the WTB&TS has defied archaeology and insisted that Jerusalem was destroyed in 607 BCE, even though the physical evidence shows that 587 BCE is a more likely date. In fact, the book "The Gentile Times Reconsidered: Have Jehovah's Witnesses Been Wrong All Along About 607 BCE?" by Carl Olof Jonsson and Rud Persson made this conversation public
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Celebrated WT scholars have long championed the date 607 BCE for the destruction of Jerusalem since 1944 whereas previous to that time it was 606 BCE based on sound Biblical Chronology. Scholars especially from the time of Edwin Thiele in 1944 published research that purports to prove that 586 BCE was the date for the Fall (of Jerusalem) late some scholars proposed 587 BCE as an alternative based on the consideration as to the use of Neb's 18th or 19 the year based on the words of Jeremiah the Prophet which debate remains to this day a point of major scholarly contention.
Thus, it can be positively stated that scholars to date and including Carl Jonsson and his devotees do not know the precise date for the Fall of Jerusalem whereas JW 's do know the precise date being proved to be 607 BCE based on the secular and biblical evidence centred around the Exilic period of 70 years again based on the words of Jeremiah the Prophet.
Carl Olof Jonsson in GTR with its many editions claims to prove using' seventeen different lines of evidence' the length of the Neo-Babylonian period which would falsify WT Bible Chronology and its date of 607 BCE (GTR, 2004, 4th edn. p.88; GTR, 2021, 4th edn. p.88). This research which began in the late sixties and concluded in the mid seventies was simply a rehash of scholarship from the fifties from SDA researchers in Australia so there were no surprises here!!!
Such SDA scholars including Jonsson have as with all of the scholars of Christendom stumbled over an interpretation of Jeremiah's seventy years failing to provide a consistent interpretation of not only its chronology but its very nature which remains a source of vexation to this very day.
So, the joke is not on WT scholars and the Witnesses who have publicly proclaimed the validity of 1914 CE but is on worldly scholarship which has demonstrated its contempt for Bible prophecy its loyal Witnesses and God's inspired Word. They should hang their heads in shame.
scholar JW