testimony.doc
9
Nov. 16, 2005
In this conclusion they were correct, if their starting assumption is granted. If the
Scriptures were put together by authors and editors who lived long after the events they
were describing, then these authors and editors could never have produced chronological
data of the complexity found in Kings, Chronicles, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel that are
consistent with each other and also consistent with several dates in Assyrian and
Babylonian history. By declaring implicitly or explicitly that these presumed writers
could never give us a consistent chronology for the kingdom period, and since a
harmonious chronology has been produced, the critics have established by their own
statements that their initial assumption about the late-date origin of the text was false.
We can think about this as follows. Imagine someone cutting a series of arbitrary shapes
out of cardboard--in our case, more than 120 such shapes--and then hoping that
somehow these shapes would all fit together in a picture puzzle. Better than the analogy
of a picture puzzle is that of a logic puzzle. Figure 1 shows a logic puzzle, such as my
wife likes to work to keep her mind keen. The example given deals with trying to match
five professors with their classes and their eccentric ideas. The clues, given in sentences
one through seven, provide sufficient information to solve the puzzle. If this looks
interesting and you're thinking that designing logic puzzles might provide a source of
income after retirement, then try making up your own clues before you know the answer
to this particular puzzle. You will find that late-date editors cannot just make up clues and
have them all fit together; you have to know the answer before you can give clues that
will fit together into a solution. Furthermore you need to give a sufficient number of clues
so that someone else can solve the puzzle.
Now apply this to the chronological information for the divided monarchies. This is in all
respects a logic puzzle. It gives us approximately 124 clues to help determine a
chronology of the time, compared to the eleven clues in the seven sentences of the logic
puzzle of Figure 1. Since we find by experiment that we cannot produce arbitrary clues
that will give any good chance of success for a simple logic puzzle of eleven clues unless
we know the answer beforehand, then how could someone produce 124 clues that make
up the scriptural logic puzzle, and have all these clues consistent with each other, unless
he already knew the answer and then was very careful in giving the clues so that there
was a sufficient number of them to provide the answer?