Evidence · Case 12 · Jehovah’s Witnesses
Carl Olof Jonsson, “The Gentile Times Reconsidered”
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Jonsson, a former Witness, assembled the fullest case that the 607 date cannot be reconciled with the Babylonian and astronomical evidence, and that the seventy years the Society appeals to are better read as the span of Babylon’s dominance than as an empty land. His work is the standard critique from inside the tradition’s own concerns.
Sources
- Carl Olof Jonsson, “The Gentile Times Reconsidered,” 4th ed. (Commentary Press, 2004). (opens in a new tab)
Detailed argument that 607 BC conflicts with the chronological record.
Objections & responses
- The secular dating could be wrong, and the Bible’s seventy years must be taken seriously. Why trust Babylonian records over Scripture?
The seventy years are in Scripture and should be taken seriously, but Jeremiah ties them to the length of Babylon’s dominance over the nations, not to a period when the land lay empty, and Chronicles and Zechariah can be read the same way. So the Bible does not require 607. It requires a seventy year period, and that fits comfortably inside the standard chronology. The choice is not Scripture against history. It is one disputed reading of the seventy years, kept because 1914 depends on it, against a reading that fits both the text and the record.