IW:
: If anyone were to make a good argument against Jonsson's presentation, would you acknowledge it?
Of course. They key concept is: good argument.
The problem that morons like "scholar", Furuli and other Watchtower apologists have is multi-fold. First, if Watchtower chronology is correct, it would overthrow a tremendous amount of good scholarship and invalidate much of what we know about ancient history. That ain't gonna happen, any more than Newton's Laws are going to be overthrown. Second, the Bible itself clearly kills the basics of Watchtower chronology. This fact is known by the people mentioned above, and is why they won't touch the subject of 2 Chronicles 36:20 with a ten foot pole. Why do you think it's not even mentioned in any Watchtower publications? Third, time and again they have proven themselves to be fundamentally dishonest in scholarship because their first loyalty is not to the facts, but to the Watchtower. Such scholastically dishonest people are not likely to present good arguments, much less come up with correct conclusions from a huge mass of data.
As an example, just think about the Watchtower's evolution on the subject of geology. Until at least the mid-1950s, they taught a version of the pseudoscientific theory of Isaac Newton Vail concerning Noah's Flood and how the earth's geological features came to be. In 1961 Henry Morris and John Whitcomb published the seminal The Genesis Flood, which became the basis for the modern-day young-earth creationist movement. By 1965 the Watchtower had adopted all of the nonsense in this book except that they retained C. T. Russell's belief that the creative days were not literal 24-hour ones, but 7,000-year ones. They argued strongly that well-attested geological events like multiple ice ages never happened. But around 1980 that changed again, and they quietly jettisoned all pretensions of young-earth creationist ideas. Since then they've been pretty silent on these things, to the extent that no one seems to be able to get any definite statements out of them about things that were basic to you and me, like what is the present teaching on the length of creative days? But has the Watchtower ever actually explained the reason behind the changes? Of course not, because it would expose the previous ones as stupid. My point is that Watchtower is chock full of pseudo-scholars too prideful to admit their mistakes, and too dishonest to admit that something as basic as their "chronology" -- the very basis of their religion -- is completely flawed.
AlanF
