JW Insider

I accept your apology. Yes, I have 2 books by Raymond Franz. CoC and iSoCF. I assume they are the latest editions. I also purchased a copy of GTR4 a few years ago, but this was after Rolf Furuli sent me his two books. He sent me Vol II for free, after I discussed some issues with Vol I with him. When I worked in Manhattan for 25+ years it was in midtown, just a few blocks from the NYPL research library at 42nd & 5th, where I made photocopies of entire books or at least key pages from almost every reference work that the WTS has quoted from Assyrian/Babylonian/Persian tablets. (Parker & Dubberstein, Sachs & Hunger, etc., etc.) Many of these had to be ordered from different libraries around the country. They never could get me a copy of JQB except on microfilm, and I never ordered it. All of this was well-before Google Books and the availability of so many works on PDF.
I don't know that Raymond Franz was ever influenced by COJ, but I have never disputed that he wasn't. Did you make that up - that I had disputed this somewhere? I could not have said either of them were or were not influenced by each other, because I don't know. If either one of them claimed to be influenced by the other, that doesn't change a thing. Whenever you, Allen, read something by anyone, I assume you are 'influenced' in some way, but it doesn't mean that you necessarily believe everything you read. I wouldn't doubt at all that there are faults in their books, but you haven't shown any. And your track record has been something like ZERO so far on being able to back up what you say with facts when it comes to these books. I have never yet heard you make a true claim about the books, and yet I have heard you make false claims about them several times. So I have my doubts you'll finally come through this time, but it still wouldn't make a difference to me. I don't depend on anything in any of their books.  (But I do appreciate them for their candor and accuracy in everything I've been able to check out so far.)

AllenSmith wrote:
Now, after several requests, you finally manage to quote from Franz's book. Of course, as usual you have no idea what you're talking about.
Note that this is from the 4th edition of 2004. It duplicates material from page 140 of the 1st edition of 1983.
So according to your own quoted material, Franz first saw the earliest version of Jonsson's research in 1977 -- 27 years before the material you quoted, 3 years before Franz left Bethel, and six years before Jonsson published his 1st edition of GTR in 1983.
The above in no way supports your claim that Franz made any sort of errors about chronology, nor that Jonsson made any sort of errors at all, in any version of his research or books.
Duh. That's because the original research was not a book, nor was it anything beyond a first draft of a book, and not meant for general publication. Furthermore, Jonsson was constantly doing research and learning new things. By the time he published his first version in 1983, he had added a great deal to his original research. So by that time, all of the material in his 1977 draft was incorporated into the 1983 book, and a lot more besides.
You showed no such thing.
Spluttering excuses. Jonsson explicitly and at length described all three main instances of exile (605/604, 597, 587/586 (and another in 582/581) ) in all four editions of GTR.
I've never heard of material pregnant to a goal.
I possess all editions of GTR and of CoC. Obviously you don't. By your own definition, you're not a GOOD researcher or scholar.
I love it. Said by among the most clueless of JW defenders I've ever encountered.
AlanF

I was never that concerned about JQB, and I'm not really that interested in getting volume 2. "Scholar_JW" already proved to me that COJ was correct in his assessment when "Scholar_JW" (Neil) admitted that the best evidence against COJ's summary was in Vol 2, p.208, but wouldn't dare show it. There was already plenty of evidence on the Internet that "Scholar_JW" was not telling the truth, because he had already been thoroughly embarrassed over a decade ago when he attempted that same dishonest claim. I'm also not so concerned about COJ. I don't know what you mean by ideologies, but I absolutely know that your claim about a copy never came from me, whether three years ago or at any time, because I never had a copy, and was never that concerned about it. There are dozens of Biblical reasons to reject the 1914 ideology, I don't need secular reasons. But I know that other people should see the secular reasons, too, because they honestly believe something about the secular evidence that isn't true. I'm also willing to share what I have learned about all the evidence because of how important this idea is, and how dangerous it can be from a Christian's perspective. (see Matthew 24, etc.)

No, you don't remember that at all, because nothing like it was ever said. Not by me, nor anyone else that I can remember.
The closest thing I said was that two members of the Writing Department (who shared an office) were discussing it with me, and said that it still remains on a shelf, collecting dust, because everyone in Writing considered it a "hot potato." No one wanted to be assigned to respond to it, because that would be a lose-lose situation. You couldn't respond honestly, and if you couldn't respond you'd be considered a potential apostate.
I never saw it at all until a few months later. Brother Schroeder had a small portion of it photocopied, and he took it with him when we traveled together on a trip to Europe in 1978. He did not allow me to read any of it and I never asked. I never had a research assignment related to it. I didn't see the manuscript at all until early 1980 when Brother Rusk and I were going over my wedding plans in his office and he needed to take about an hour to respond to a phone call (regarding a blood issue) while I sat in his office. While I waited, I grabbed a book from his library, and I also looked around and saw that he had the manuscript open in about three stacks on his desk, but again I never read more than the pages on top of the stacks.
I doubt it was ever discarded. It seems probable that what Fred Rusk had on his desk was already a photocopy.

I remember pointing this out previously in a discussion of whether Sirhan Sirhan's father had a relationship with the Witnesses. (He didn't.) In the letter that the Watch Tower Society sent out to provide to newspapers who requested it, the letter made it clear that (in 1968) the governing body was the "Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society."
So notice that the Watchtower was consistent in this claim for many years. Even back 15 years earlier, in 1953, the same idea showed up here. Note that the Governing Body had 402 members. That was the number of [voting] members of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.

Any nitpickers for accuracy might have wondered why this article in 1990 (among others) claimed something different from the above.
*** w90 3/15 pp. 16-18 pars. 8-13 Cooperating With the Governing Body Today ***
Looking back in this “time of the end,” we are not surprised that the members of the Governing Body were at first closely identified with the editorial staff of the Watch Tower Society. . . . For years, the visible Governing Body came to be identified with the seven-member board of directors of this corporation established to publish the Bible study aids needed and used by the Lord’s people earth wide. The Society’s seven directors were faithful Christians. But their role in a legal corporation might have suggested that they owed their positions on the Governing Body to their being elected by legal members of the Watch Tower Society. Furthermore, by law such membership and its voting privileges were originally granted only to certain ones who made contributions to the Society. This arrangement needed to be changed. This was done at the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania corporation of the Watch Tower Society held on October 2, 1944. The statutes of the Society were amended so that membership would no longer be on a financial basis. Members would be chosen from among faithful servants of Jehovah, and these have come to include many serving full-time at the Society’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, and in its branches throughout the world. Reporting on this improvement, The Watchtower of November 1, 1944, stated: “Money, as represented in financial contributions, should have no determining voice, should in fact have nothing to do with the filling of the governing body of Jehovah’s witnesses on earth. . . . The holy spirit, the active force which comes down from Jehovah God through Christ Jesus, is that which should determine and guide in the matter.” . . . Until 1971 those of the Governing Body were still identified with the seven members of the board of directors of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania. At the same time that the "governing body" was over 400 members --during those years from 1944 to 1972-- something termed a "central governing body" or sometimes "spiritual governing body" were terms that began to be associated with the decision makers in Brooklyn, New York.
 
 

My father was in one of the assembly dramas back in 1967. Brother Glass had worked out this "play" with the Gilead students and produced the one-hour skit that was recorded by him and the Gilead students and a couple of other Bethelites with good voices (especially from the other primary instructors: Maxwell Friend, Harold Jackson, Karl Adams, Bert Schroeder). I remember that we attended two assemblies that year because of the drama. I was baptized at the first one.
Those dramas had just started in '66 (Aachan and the theft of contra-"ban" at Ai) and that year they had learned that subtle gestures don't show up well in large stadium audiences, so they taught everyone to over-gesture (and gesticulate) so hard that everyone was karate-chopping the air with every syllable so you knew who was speaking.
But the only thing I remember from the content was that it was used to show that everyone should stay in the protection of Jehovah's arrangement for security (the organization) or they would die. That we are all blood-guilty even if just "accidentally" so, through the sin of Adam, and that we must remain until the "high priest dies" but that he already died in 33 CE, so we are no longer bloodguilty, but we need to stay put anyway.
Of course, that wasn't the whole story, but it definitely was NOT mined for treasures or gems the way that more recent discussions have done (including yesterday's WT study).
I was also thinking that it highlighted safety issues, and it also did something else that isn't mentioned anywhere as far as I know. It's not just to provide a cooling-off period for the avenger who would be tempted to avenge potentially innocent manslaughter ("innocent" in the sense of unintentional). It's also a loving provision for the families who would have to continue to live and work next to the person responsible for such trauma and pain. Defending honor has developed into some terrible practices around the world, including Hatfield and McCoy style feuds that can go on for a century or more. I saw the play Hamilton last year which means I know even less about U.S. History now than I did before, but it showed a facet of dueling that I wasn't aware of, wherein, persons could use it for personal revenge, or purposely arrange to "miss" so as to forgive.
Last year, I spent several days over the course of a week at the British Museum and asked if I could find information on other nations that were known to have sanctuary cities or cities of refuge. The answer was surprising, and got to read one of the recent books they had from David P. Wright and a couple articles in the JBL, including Jeffrey Stackert. 
Why Does Deuteronomy Legislate Cities of Refuge? Asylum in the Covenant Collection (Exodus 21:12-14) and Deuteronomy (19:1-13) Author(s): Jeffrey Stackert Source: Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 125, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 23-49 The book by Wright would be very controversial for most of us.

True of course. But I didn't want to focus so much on whether Jewish sources were always reliable, but in this case it would make sense because the point of the cities of refuge was not punishment, but rather a merciful provision for those who otherwise would have to be executed, because that was the law, regardless whether it was accidental or not. It would make no sense for example  if the accidental manslayer was a wife, and  her husband and dependent children would have to abandon her. I don't think the point of this law was to break up families.There are so many other  scenarios one could think of, that obviously could not all be covered by the law in detail, so the law must have been applied in principle. This wasn't even my observation but a friend of TTH suggested that the father of a fugitive son who had accidentally killed his brother would be allowed to go with him. It made sense to me....

I agree with the comment by JWI on the speculative nature of scenarios in connection with the cities of refuge. I haven't investigated cities of refuge in a historical context simply because reliable information seems rather scant.
Apart from the setting out the provision in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua,, there doesn't appear to be any reference to the use of the provision in the Hebrew Scriptures, like for example, the cameo appearance of Ruth with reference to the provision of "levirate" marriage.
There is a lot of what I term as higher-critical gobbledegook on the matter, but really only of some academic interest (to me). Perhaps, rather like the Sabbath Year and Jubilee provisions, there was little adherence to the legislated procedure over the years. (Compare Jer.2:34 "Even your skirts are stained with the blood of the innocent poor ones, though I did not find them in the act of breaking in")
Anyway, with regard to TTH's comment, this manslayer, self assessesed as "guiltless", has rather missed the point. Where human blood has been shed there is no "guiltlessness" as the basis for the Mosaic provision makes clear at Genesis 9:5-6. Anyone of that opinion was not thinking in harmony with Jehovah God's view of the matter of shedding human blood in any circumstance, and would be putting themselves greatly at risk of an execution of judgement without mercy.

Sounds interesting, but isn't it all just speculation?

@Ann O'Maly  I agree @Ann O'Maly
I will try to restrain my powers of banning people to a minimum. But at some point it becomes ridiculous.

A recent topic about whether the Watchtower view of 607 BCE is SCRIPTURALLY supported is linked below. This new topic should provide a better place to discuss the SECULAR evidence. I also think it would be useful to discuss the methodology that the Watch Tower Society has historically used to treat this evidence.
I would hope that we can do this without so much side discussions of unrelated topics. To avoid another topic that goes on for 30+ pages where only half of them were on-topic, I would suggest that if we get enough off-topic posts, we merely move them to another more appropriate topic.
The link to the most recent topic on a similar subject is here:


 

I'm going to remember this one in PERPETUITY !!!
Good to see you back. Catch anything?

The video in the last post is just over 3 minutes long, and doesn't get into any specifics about the archaeological evidence. For those who can't see the video, the image below presents the basic claims for the dates of the period in question. Persian rule actually goes on until about 330 BCE. Also note that the dates below include the actual first year that the king acceded to the throne (accession year) even if it was not his first, full year as king (regnal year). Also, the tablets and cuneiform inscriptions were picked to indicate variety, not necessarily their importance to the chronology of each king.
The basic idea of the video is the following, mostly taken straight out of the video:
The entire Neo-Babylonian  and Persian time periods are interlocked and intertwined.
30,000 dated tablets cover the Neo-Babylonian period.  Each is dated with the current king’s year, month & day.
Also, there are contemporary astronomical diaries, king lists, letters and royal inscriptions that perfectly interlock with these 30,000 dated tablets.
There is no difference in the evidence for each period: the The Neo-Babylonian and the Persian.
You canÂ’t accept one date and reject another. All the dates are from the same evidence:
539 is just as accurate as 626, 587, or 598.  If you accept one, you are accepting them all. So, 539, the start of Cyrus’ rule over Babylon, is no more or less accurate than:
•        626 for the start of Nabopolassar
•        587 for Nebuchadnezzar’s 18th year, the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple
•        537 for Cyrus’ 2nd full year over Babylon
Accepting 539 is the same as accepting that there were 50 years from NebuchadnezzarÂ’s 18th-19th year to CyrusÂ’ 2nd-3rd year.
Yet, a certain Bible interpretation [the "607 Theory"] requires that we, instead, count a 70-year period that must run from NebuchadnezzarÂ’s 18th-19th year to the 2nd-3rd year of Cyrus.
 

I'll definitely add that to my REPERTOIRE!

I'm going to remember this one in PERPETUITY !!!
Good to see you back. Catch anything?

Goodness gracious, AllenSmith28 (I assume). There are better ways to argue your case.
You (or at least, AllenSmith) were not banned for using foul language, but for making it personal. This is what is being done again again here. What AlanF did is point out what foul connotations Foreigner was likely intending with the "P*ND*JO remark. This is quite different from using foul language just to call people names. That's what got Allen Smith banned and disciplined so often he parodied his own case by creating AllenSmith20-something through AllenSmith28, to go along with a small army of other names to play various characters [and voting blocs]
But I agree that AlanF should get a second warning even if he pointed out the fouler connotation of a word that someone else used. But I don't think anyone should be banned. We can all decide to avoid seeing someone's comments by blocking them if we are sensitive to that kind of thing. And a warning is available so that others can be aware that they may not wish to read what any certain person is saying. In a discussion like this, as I've said, it's much more useful to get warnings about logical fallacies, and warnings about the difference between depending on facts and depending on speculation. Misuse of language is a trivial matter to me.

My father was in one of the assembly dramas back in 1967. Brother Glass had worked out this "play" with the Gilead students and produced the one-hour skit that was recorded by him and the Gilead students and a couple of other Bethelites with good voices (especially from the other primary instructors: Maxwell Friend, Harold Jackson, Karl Adams, Bert Schroeder). I remember that we attended two assemblies that year because of the drama. I was baptized at the first one.
Those dramas had just started in '66 (Aachan and the theft of contra-"ban" at Ai) and that year they had learned that subtle gestures don't show up well in large stadium audiences, so they taught everyone to over-gesture (and gesticulate) so hard that everyone was karate-chopping the air with every syllable so you knew who was speaking.
But the only thing I remember from the content was that it was used to show that everyone should stay in the protection of Jehovah's arrangement for security (the organization) or they would die. That we are all blood-guilty even if just "accidentally" so, through the sin of Adam, and that we must remain until the "high priest dies" but that he already died in 33 CE, so we are no longer bloodguilty, but we need to stay put anyway.
Of course, that wasn't the whole story, but it definitely was NOT mined for treasures or gems the way that more recent discussions have done (including yesterday's WT study).
I was also thinking that it highlighted safety issues, and it also did something else that isn't mentioned anywhere as far as I know. It's not just to provide a cooling-off period for the avenger who would be tempted to avenge potentially innocent manslaughter ("innocent" in the sense of unintentional). It's also a loving provision for the families who would have to continue to live and work next to the person responsible for such trauma and pain. Defending honor has developed into some terrible practices around the world, including Hatfield and McCoy style feuds that can go on for a century or more. I saw the play Hamilton last year which means I know even less about U.S. History now than I did before, but it showed a facet of dueling that I wasn't aware of, wherein, persons could use it for personal revenge, or purposely arrange to "miss" so as to forgive.
Last year, I spent several days over the course of a week at the British Museum and asked if I could find information on other nations that were known to have sanctuary cities or cities of refuge. The answer was surprising, and got to read one of the recent books they had from David P. Wright and a couple articles in the JBL, including Jeffrey Stackert. 
Why Does Deuteronomy Legislate Cities of Refuge? Asylum in the Covenant Collection (Exodus 21:12-14) and Deuteronomy (19:1-13) Author(s): Jeffrey Stackert Source: Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 125, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 23-49 The book by Wright would be very controversial for most of us.

Exactly! I've said this many times myself. Long before I read anything about the 200-tablet exhibit at the BLMJ. I don't know if you noticed, but this particular exhibit of "new" tablets you have been talking about is only strengthening the same evidence that Mason and COJ and O'maly and Jeffro and AlanF and others have been pointing out for many years.
In fact all "new" archaeological evidence that comes to light, invariably continues to strengthen the general Biblical description of events and continues to weaken the claims that the Watchtower has been asking us to believe. I suspect that the frustration arising from such evidence is where the repetitions of nonsensical arguments, distractions, and temper tantrums are coming from.

I just made a video that expresses my current general overview of the secular evidence. If it's not totally accurate, I can make appropriate changes to it.
Here it is...

Your browser does not support the HTML5 video tag.

A recent topic about whether the Watchtower view of 607 BCE is SCRIPTURALLY supported is linked below. This new topic should provide a better place to discuss the SECULAR evidence. I also think it would be useful to discuss the methodology that the Watch Tower Society has historically used to treat this evidence.
I would hope that we can do this without so much side discussions of unrelated topics. To avoid another topic that goes on for 30+ pages where only half of them were on-topic, I would suggest that if we get enough off-topic posts, we merely move them to another more appropriate topic.
The link to the most recent topic on a similar subject is here:


 

Just to make it easier to read page 2:
 

Do you mean to tell me this has all been much ado about nothing?
@Shiwiiiand his friends have been blowing up this balloon as if experiencing orgasm for months, even years. Even JTR, who now acts as though he knew it all along,  did all he could to suggest the Witness organization was the very Mecca of pedophilia. And now, it all comes to this? JW children are the safest of all?
Can it really be? I need some smart people to weigh in on this.

JW Insider wrote:
Exactly. And I find the history and usage of cusswords in any language fascinating. My stepson and I had an extremely amusing conversation about the use of cusswords in the Hispanic community in Colorado.
Fair enough; I won't go there.
AlanF

Exactly! I've said this many times myself. Long before I read anything about the 200-tablet exhibit at the BLMJ. I don't know if you noticed, but this particular exhibit of "new" tablets you have been talking about is only strengthening the same evidence that Mason and COJ and O'maly and Jeffro and AlanF and others have been pointing out for many years.
In fact all "new" archaeological evidence that comes to light, invariably continues to strengthen the general Biblical description of events and continues to weaken the claims that the Watchtower has been asking us to believe. I suspect that the frustration arising from such evidence is where the repetitions of nonsensical arguments, distractions, and temper tantrums are coming from.