AlanF

Exactly. Up to about 1980, WTS writers were parroting Young-Earth Creationist writings including their so-called Flood Geology. These included the crackpot SDA writer George McCready Price and the founder of modern "Scientific Creationism" Henry Morris. Another interesting crackpot they used was Ivan Sanderson, who was one of their main sources of nonsense about "frozen mammoths" and such. Another was Henry Howorth, a mostly crackpot armchair explorer of the late 19th century who wrote the book "The Mammoth and the Flood", as well as other ridiculous works.
A temperature of several hundred degrees below zero would have been required. Ivan Sanderson wrote about such nonsense in an early 1960s Saturday Evening Post article, which WTS writers quickly picked up on.
All of this garbage is contradicted by actual discoveries of frozen animals, which were NOT "quick frozen". A 1970s discovery in Alaska permafrost was of an extinct bison that was killed and partly eaten by lions. One lion broke off a piece of molar in the frozen flesh.
Recent discoveries in Siberia show how the freezing process worked: the summer sun melted potholes in the permafrost, leaving holes filled with cold water and mud, and often covered by thin vegetation. An animal would step on the surface, plunge into the mud/water, get stuck, then die and eventually freeze. Nothing particularly surprising.
The famous Berezovka mammoth excavated by Russian scientists in the early 1900s is a good case in point: its remains indicated that it fell and broke a leg, then drowned, and gradually froze. WTS writers largely ignored the details and then used it as a prime example of "quick freezing".
Good points!

As physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said: "It's not even wrong!"

Clueless. 🙄
Influenza A/H1N1 (Spanish 'flu was a strain of this) still exists. The Spanish 'flu virus just evolved and diversified into other strains of H1N1, most notably that which caused the 'Swine 'Flu' pandemic of 2009. A lot of us are even vaccinated against this 2009 distant descendant of the 1918 strain every year. (Source.)
And many mutations are beneficial or harmless to the organism (look at the success of viruses, for example!). 

Of course he did. That's why so many of his debate opponents call him a fake, a charlatan and a liar.
What ScholarJW Pretendus does is as Mommy Watchtower does -- use references to real scholars dishonestly to pretend that they support the Writer's claims.

Arauna, as usual, is clueless, but from time to time, like a stopped clock, accidentally gets something right.

Thank you. Yes it was, and this is what I, AlanF, and JW Insider have been trying to get into Neil's stubborn skull. 

The babylonian empire fell - if you know the entire book of Daniel well - you will  know it gives us a summary of the march of world powers one after another.  The four beasts mentioned  are Babylon, medea-persia, Greece and Rome. 
The 70 years was the end of babylonian dominion - Babylon would NEVER have set Israel free so jehovah replaced them with medea-persia at the right time he had determined before. 70 years to be exact - to release Israel to go back.. 
Tyre suffered a blow under Babylon but its island was not destroyed - that only came later when Alexander the great destroyed it.  Babylon only became a wilderness much later when the salt deposits made the land infertile. 
You guys like to argue over the silliest details because you want to be right at all costs - to satisfy your egos. This has nothing to do with God or the bible....... you want to humiliate Jehovahs people who believe in him only and associate with his people.  
Your institutions - from whom you receive your mothers milk - will not save you.....  Only jehovah can save ...... and you have taken sides against him in favor of secular knowledge.   I prefer to drink His milk than your skewed secular interpretations of the bible. 

Nonsense. You are twisting Jeremiah's words. The Babylonian king was not 'called to account' two years after the 70 years ended.
No, this is what I encouraged you to do, Neil - to read Jer. 51:37 in context. You're swinging this around again, lol.
Thus, you cannot tell me when in Babylon's history certain key elements of Jeremiah 51 were fulfilled, i.e. when,
Media and its allies reduced Babylon to rubble, There was a bloody battle with said invaders, resulting in the Babylonian army being slain, God's people had to run for their lives from the city. So no, Jer. 51:37 was not fulfilled with the city's gradual, centuries'-long decline culminating in its final abandonment in the 4th c. CE. To use this as support for your back-to-front argument about Jer. 25:12 is a prime example of cherry-picking! 🙄

I do not believe scholars have any acceptance of the bible...... it is about being credible to peers who do not accept the bible.

OK. It's 2021 now, I will move on to the second part of your answer, which is even more incorrect.
I asked:
Outside of the Watchtower publications, JWs or Adventists who defend an inherited chronology, can you give me a reference for any "Exilic scholar" who thinks it was more than 50 years between Jerusalem's destruction and Babylon's downfall by Cyrus? Can you show any "exilic scholar" who thinks that Jerusalem was destroyed within 2 years of 607? Can you show any "exilic scholar" who thinks that Jerusalem was NOT destroyed within 2 years of 587?
You answered:
JSTOR gives me a couple of references that show you are wrong. The first is : https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.15699/jbl.1371.2018.222705
The End of Exile: The Reception of Jeremiah's Prediction of a Seventy-Year Exile Author(s): Steven M. Bryan Source: Journal of Biblical Literature , Vol. 137, No. 1 (Spring 2018), pp. 107-126
I quote from page 108, where Bryan shows no problem with the following date for the destruction of Jerusalem:
". . . the destruction of Jerusalem in 587/86" (p.108)
He is also aware that some scholars have made a point about the 70 year period from the (second exile and) destruction of the temple by Babylon (587/6) to the reconstruction in 516/515 since this also is a 70-year period (which he does not accept as the period referenced by Jeremiah, which he says had already been recognized as fulfilled.) [Note that C.F.Whitley, another example from Niles' "Appendix C" is a proponent of 586 BCE to 516 BCE, with full knowledge that 586 BCE refers to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and 516 to the reconstruction under Haggai/Zerubbabel.]
So your reference to Steven M Bryan is a failure.
Now to Rainer Albertz. Without looking, I have already come to trust that this was also just an empty claim.
So, here it is. Not surprisingly, you failed at this one too. Here is his chronology from the book:
Israel in Exile --The History and Literature of the Sixth Century B.C.E. by Rainer Albertz · 2003

Note: "conquest of Jerusalem, 2d deportation (July / August 587)." He sees that the Bible chronology fits the standard archaeological foundation for the chronology. These dates are also 20 years off from the ones promoted by the Watchtower publications.
Of course, I'm sure you already knew both of these attempts were failures before you even provided them.

Niles, himself gives an overview of many past scholars, and he is not confused at all by the scholarship. First, of course, here are the dates he accepts, as seen in Appendix C. This applies to the second question, of course, as he is also an "Exilic" scholar, too. He apparently understands exactly how the standard dates align with the Bible chronology.

Now you mentioned Appendix A, where Nles gives an idea of the broad range of views from scholars and Bible commentators, past and present. I don't see any of them confused about the chronology of those 70 years of Babylonian domination between about 609 to 539 (plus or minus a couple of years). Most of them chose that very chronology as the interpretation of Jeremiah's 70 years. Apparently every single one of them understood that chronology to be able to place the destruction of Jerusalem in 587-586 BCE, or the larger exile (e.g. Ezekiel, et al) from 598-597 BCE. Everyone has a right to their set of Biblical interpretations for the varying uses of the term "70 years" whether literal, close, symbolic, an approximation, or even believing (as Niles himself does) that various Bible writers may have used it to refer to multiple periods. But this does not imply any confusion about the chronology.
Every one of them understood the chronology of the time of Babylonian domination, or they could not have all consistently put dates like the ones pictured above, on all the Judean events. I will repeat again: Apparently 100% of them used the date 587 or 586 for the destruction of Jerusalem. No confusion about the chronology, just different interpretations of which start and end dates to use within that fixed chronology. For those who don't know, I'll reproduce the columns from the first 3 pages:



Did I mention this? Every one of the above accepts a chronology within a couple years of the standard chronology, and every one of the above accepts a chronology that is about 20 years different from the "special chronology" that the WTS promotes.
(I add that last part about the 20-years difference, because there are people who think that 605 BCE, above, is only 2 years different from the WTS chronology of 607. It's actually 18 years different. Because the WTS publications present the above 605 date as 625 BCE.)
The last 8 listed scholars from the final two pages (not included above) discuss variations of Biblical interpretation about the 70 years, but they are not at all confused about the chronology of the period of Babylonian years of domination in the region. I'll just pick any one of them to see what they say about the period of Babylonian domination:
The first one, Anneli Aejmelaeus, we don't have to look up, because Niles already tells us she understands the significance of 587 BCE (Jeremiah 25) and 597 BCE.
So I'll pick another and then look up whether Bryan and Albertz fit the criteria of dating the destruction of Jerusalem more than two years different than 587 BCE.
Maybe next year, though. This should be my last post of 2020.
 

True Tom Harley said:
You should call up Fred Franz on the earth-heaven phone and instruct him that the dozens of books and magazines that discussed them at length should never have been published.
The Publications Indexes contain dozens of references, such as "confirmation", which purport to use science to support the idea of an earthwide Flood. For example: w68 7/15 "Was There an Earthwide Flood?"
For a thorough disproof of the Flood, and copious references to Watchtower material, see https://critiquesonthewatchtower.org/old-articles/2006/02/part-1-general-description-of-flood.html
By your 'logic', Watchtower writers were not Bible teachers until about 1980. 
 

True Tom Harley said:
Nonsense.
Of course they were. Any JW who dared to dispute these "never laws" would have been disfellowshipped. I know, because I was threatened with that when I brought up such things with elders. "Apostasy!" they said.
But it's still on the books. Therefore, it's still "present truth".
Ah, Behe. The Society used him as an authority until it figured out that Behe actually accepts evolution -- but a divinely guided sort.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Complete nonsense. The God-guided sort of evolution of Behe and many other Christians is anathema to Watchtower leaders. They've expressly rejected such ideas in several publications.
LOL! Bullying? What do you think disfellowshipping for simply disagreeing with WTS leaders is? Hypocrite!
By your 'logic' Jesus was a bully.

True Tom Harley said:
 
Nonsense. Tell us please: in what publication did the Society announce that it was abandoning Flood Geology? Or the ridiculous notion of a "vapor canopy"? Or admit that the "7,000-year creative days" were actually several hundred million years long (of course, the Genesis days are entirely out of sync with the fossil evidence, so the notion of a "creative day" is completely wrongheaded). Where did they openly explain why they changed "7,000 years" to "millennia" in some publications after 1985?
A total misapplication of Proverbs. The passage has nothing to do with increasing "spiritual light". I doubt you're even aware that it was the Adventist community that first began misapplying Proverbs to excuse the failed predictions of William Miller.
As for "tacking", it was GB member Karl Klein who originated the concept in a mid-1980s Watchtower article. Many Bethelites actually laughed at him.
Of course -- which proves that God has nothing to do with them. At least, no more than with the Pope.
Wrong. Critics like me are concerned with truth. We tend to get bent out of shape at anyone who falsely claims divine guidance, divine knowledge, and so forth. It's called "righteous anger", something that Jesus is said to have displayed toward similar charlatans two thousand years ago.

Someone named RR(?) was selling a book on eBay while making a claim it came from Tom Cabeen, implying it might have been printed on WT materials. I thought it was nearly impossible, having been there from 76 to 82. I got Cabeen's number through contact with his son (who went to college with my son). Cabeen was sure he had never seen the book before.
Anyway, I asked Cabeen if he knew how COJ was doing healthwise. Cabeen didn't know for sure, but told me how sad it was that COJ only tried to do the right thing when one of his Bible Study "RV's" asked him about why the WTS uses this special chronology. COJ was sure it could be defended and did his best, but, of course, discovered what anyone would discover if they were being honest and thorough. I told Cabeen that when I was tagging along with Brother Schroeder's "entourage" for an International Convention tour in 1978 that I had to stay in Athens for some extra time while Bert Schroeder went to Wiesbaden. When I was supposed to catch up with him in Wiesbaden, I was told he had alread gone to Hamburg/Copenhagen/Stockholm for some meetings (no conventions) and without any of his small entourage. The rumor was that this was about the COJ manuscript, although I couldn't know absolutely for sure. We caught up again when he came back to Hamburg then on back to London and Brooklyn. 
I told Cabeen this, and he already knew about part of it. I understand Cabeen might be biased, but he said that Schroeder had already determined to get COJ disfellowshiped several months before that convention trip. So I can believe that something like this happened with Gerard Gertoux. Gertoux seemed willing to discuss anything except 587 BCE, which made him suddenly clam up. 

Ann O'Maly said:
To a certain extent, yes, but before about 1965 most Watchtower comments tended to follow Isaac Newton Vail's so-called Annular Theory of the Flood, Velikovsky, Ivan Sanderson, George McCready Price, and a few other crackpots.
It was published in 1961 and to a large extent followed the ideas of George McCready Price, a Seventh-Day Adventist whose main purpose in life, since about 1900, was to defend the young-earth creationism of SDA founder Ellen White. Apparently the Watchtower (I'm guessing Fred Franz) got hold of the book and ran with it in terms of publishing defenses of the Flood. The Society even quoted from it as if it were a real science textbook. The main author, Henry Morris, went on to found the Institute for Creation Research, which published dozens of books and other materials advocating Morris' version of YECism, including Flood Geology and so-called "Scientific Creationism". Later, that spun off Answers in Genesis and other crackpot outfits such as Walter Brown's Center for Scientific Creation. Brown is so far out in left field that the other YECs will have nothing to do with him. These are Arauna's sources.
One critical author called him "the very model of a crank".

🤣 Love it!

I don't believe any true scholars are confused about the 70 years of Babylonian domination. The evidence is too clear and overwhelming to leave any room for such confusion by any true scholar. You apparently think they are confused but that's a reflection on you, not them. You make haughty claims without evidence, but you haven't been able to honestly deal with any of the evidence so far.
Outside of the Watchtower publications, JWs or Adventists who defend an inherited chronology, can you give me a reference for any "Exilic scholar" who thinks it was more than 50 years between Jerusalem's destruction and Babylon's downfall by Cyrus? Can you show any "exilic scholar" who thinks that Jerusalem was destroyed within 2 years of 607? Can you show any "exilic scholar" who thinks that Jerusalem was NOT destroyed within 2 years of 587?
If you can't, then this is just another empty claim.

CC, You keep dragging me (and @Arauna ) into this. Arauna is right. We should be able to explain complex things with simple words and simple sentences. So here goes:
Ann O'maly commented on a paper written by Gerard Gertoux. In her comments, O'maly happened to make mention of a mistake that might have just been a typo. Gertoux's "typo" indicated that 360/12=15, instead of 360/12=30. No big deal. Chavez (CC) sarys Gertoux is right about 15 degrees, and O'maly must be stupid. For evidence CC posts content saying that 360/12=30 and that 360/24=15 and that 30/2=15. CC apparently doesn't realize that all CC has done is prove that O'maly was right. That's the whole story: CC has tried to prove O'maly wrong, but all his evidence directly shows she was right. His evidence blew up in his face. That's the whole story, except that Arauna has sided with the idea that 360/12=15, without even knowing, probably, that this was the entire argument. It's EXACTLY as if:
O'maly said 2+2=4 CC told her she was stupid, because 2+2=5 CC "proves" it by loading up a lot of Googled sites that prove that 2+2=4 CC claims his superiority and O'maly's stupidity, by misreading his evidence that "proved" to him that 2+2=5 Arauna places her bets on the side of 2+2=5 and criticizes O'maly for believing that 2+2=4. But why go to so much trouble to defend a typo in the first place? Why the need to pretend O'maly is stupid and wrong and incompetent just because she caught a simple mistake? That was not even the point of O'maly's comments. 
I think it only goes to prove a more general point we have seen on this thread. Hatred of people interferes with good judgment. And conversely, if people think someone else (like a Furuli, a Gertoux) is on the side of 1914, then it doesn't matter if they are making ludicrous claims. 99.9% of Witnesses apparently aren't really going to test them anyway. It's easier to just say they must be right, and Witnesses should defend them. For people who do not wish to look into the facts, it becomes an 'us versus them' proposition.
But there's another way I can tell that it doesn't matter what the evidence shows, and this is only about assumptions, and not real study or research:
It's because Gerard Gertoux has agreed with  the same date that Carl Olof Jonsson gives for the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. I have even communicated with Gerard Gertoux to find out why.
 

Irrelevant scripture. Try Jer. 25:12, 27:7.
You'll never get the point if you can't manage to read the proper scriptures. So I'll help you. Jer. 25:12:
<< But when 70 years have been fulfilled, I will call to account the king of Babylon and that nation for their error,’ declares Jehovah, ‘and I will make the land of the Chal·deʹans a desolate wasteland for all time. >>
According to ScholarJW Pretendus, the beginning of this "desolation" began when the Jews returned to Judah in 537 BCE -- a completely nonsensical idea. My point is that there was no such desolation for another ~1,200 years.
Note that the scripture says nothing about either the city of Babylon or about the Babylonian empire, but about "the land of the Chaldeans". The "land" comprises more than the empire; the empire is a political entity, but the land is a physical entity. The political entity ceased to exist in 539 BCE. In the course of time, the physical entity fell into ruins and became "a desolate wasteland". Capiche?
 

Arauna appears stuck in the pre-1980 Watchtower world, when the Society was promoting its version of Young-Earth Creationism (more properly, bits of normal YECism mixed with Russellism) and YEC Flood Geology. About 1980 the Writing Dept. abandoned much of this nonsense and mostly quit trying to justify Noah's Flood, and gradually began referring to the "creative days" as being "millennia long" rather than 7,000 years. Stuck-in-the-mud JWs like Arauna never noticed -- which was exactly why the Society never announced these changes. It would have been a bit too much for the old ones to give up on a century of Russell's nonsense.
These topics are rarely discussed by JWs today, to the extent that ones under about 45 usually know nothing about the 7,000 years nonsense, much less Watchtowerish Flood Geology. Most of the younger JWs have no problem accepting normal geological dating, such as 66 million years ago for the Cretaceous Extinction of the dinosaurs. Only dinosaurs like Arauna have trouble with such dating.

Arauna said:
Rather, be ashamed of it.
Recognizable humans have existed as such for more than 2 million years. Their ancestors have existed for about three times that. A great deal of evidence indicates that a variety of human species have existed just in Europe and Asia during the last 60 thousand years and more -- Neanderthals, Denisovans, probably one other similar to them, and others more distantly related like Homo floriensis and perhaps even Homo erectus. The DNA of the first three is found in all non-Africans today, in percentages ranging from 1% to 5%. All of this is impossible within the Watchtower's 6,000 year timeframe for humanity.
Archaeological remains abound. Gobekli Tepi in Turkey is something like 12,000 years old and is obviously far older than 6,000 years, even to non-archaeologists. Some 74,000 years ago the giant volcano Toba in Sumatra erupted and killed perhaps all but a few thousand humans on earth due to drastic cooling of climate. Above the ash layers in India have been found human artifacts that indicate that another wave of migration out of Africa occurred within some 15,000 years of the eruption. On and on goes the evidence of humans living in Africa, Europe and Asia for tens of thousands of years, and in the Americas for at least 15,000 years.
The Bible and the Watchtower Society are out of sync with reality.

Arauna appears stuck in the pre-1980 Watchtower world, when the Society was promoting its version of Young-Earth Creationism (more properly, bits of normal YECism mixed with Russellism) and YEC Flood Geology. About 1980 the Writing Dept. abandoned much of this nonsense and mostly quit trying to justify Noah's Flood, and gradually began referring to the "creative days" as being "millennia long" rather than 7,000 years. Stuck-in-the-mud JWs like Arauna never noticed -- which was exactly why the Society never announced these changes. It would have been a bit too much for the old ones to give up on a century of Russell's nonsense.
These topics are rarely discussed by JWs today, to the extent that ones under about 45 usually know nothing about the 7,000 years nonsense, much less Watchtowerish Flood Geology. Most of the younger JWs have no problem accepting normal geological dating, such as 66 million years ago for the Cretaceous Extinction of the dinosaurs. Only dinosaurs like Arauna have trouble with such dating.

Arauna appears stuck in the pre-1980 Watchtower world, when the Society was promoting its version of Young-Earth Creationism (more properly, bits of normal YECism mixed with Russellism) and YEC Flood Geology. About 1980 the Writing Dept. abandoned much of this nonsense and mostly quit trying to justify Noah's Flood, and gradually began referring to the "creative days" as being "millennia long" rather than 7,000 years. Stuck-in-the-mud JWs like Arauna never noticed -- which was exactly why the Society never announced these changes. It would have been a bit too much for the old ones to give up on a century of Russell's nonsense.
These topics are rarely discussed by JWs today, to the extent that ones under about 45 usually know nothing about the 7,000 years nonsense, much less Watchtowerish Flood Geology. Most of the younger JWs have no problem accepting normal geological dating, such as 66 million years ago for the Cretaceous Extinction of the dinosaurs. Only dinosaurs like Arauna have trouble with such dating.

You're right. From here on I won't respond to Arauna's ignorant off-topic rants.