XianJedi said:
Before jumping blindly into the arms of Thiele, you might want to consider criticism of his work (from Bible-believing Christians, not atheists).
http://www.biblicalhorizons.com/ch/ch2_09.htm
and
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/i1/chronology.asp?vPrint=1&vPrint=1
You are quite right that any scholarly proposals should be carefully considered and critiqued.
However, the very act of attempting to synchonize biblical data with external archaeological data will inevitably involve interpretation, and some kind of agreed upon basic minimal set of apparent facts, however cleverly they are accounted for.
Jordan's Critique
In your first link, James Jordan's article seems to simply assert that the text as we have it (even with variants?) is essentially inerrant, and this is not apparent from the actual surface data. He fails to show that previous workers in the field have at all adequately accounted for the obvious internal descrepancies in the text, and there are clearly plenty of them.
The main criticism that he levels against Theile is that Theile attempts to interpret the biblical data to be in harmony with established chronologies of other nations, arrived at independantly from their own records. He seems to imply that this is a methodological error, whereas this is hardly the case.
Also, he reduces the problem to a claim that secular scholars have simply made errors in reconstructing chronologies of these other nations. This is an oversimplification of the problem bordering on total dishonesty. The main problem of the O.T. records is their apparent SELF contradiction, which drives us to compare them with independant external records in the first place.
He finds fault with Theile as a 'well meaning' scholar who has made the 'blunder' of accepting archeaological work on records of other nations, although he admits Theile is obviously a bible-believing Christian with a high view of the accuracy of the Massoretic text, presumably the text Jordan would accept as 'inerrant' in the first place.
What he does *not* mention, which seems equally dishonest in his critique is that the men he quotes, such as Lightfoot, are hardly upholders of orthodox or fundamentalist viewpoints of the scriptures, such as the New Testament. Anyone conversant with Lightfoot's work on the NT and his adoption of the unsavory critical principles and findings of 19th century textual criticism will quickly realise that it is Lightfoot et al. who are the 'suspect' scholars, not Theile, who is the only one who has attempted to accept the readings of the O.T. at actual face value.
His quotation of another critic of Theile is also unimpressive. (again this man's non-fundamentalist background is skipped over without comment). Yes, Theile's 'system' is odd, and slightly unusual. But it is not odd at all that biblical editors (and the scribes who copy them) strongly resist the attempt to 'correct' their texts, even when conflating or combining them, an act which often actually generates apparent errors. The process of combining documents in O.T. was very naive and primitive, but also honest, and any urges to 'fix' the text have for the most part been successfully resisted by both editors and copyists. Jordan seems to take the opposite view that this known fact is 'implausible', and we should expect the compilers of Kings and Chronicles to have edited and fixed the text.
If that were true, of course there wouldn't be any descrepancies at all, and most of the problems would have been unknown because the evidence would have disappeared. That we actually have a problem among the books of Kings and Chronicles attests to the fact that Jordan is wrong and Theile is right. The scribes preserved original readings that derived from different systems of dating, reckoning and chronologies, and these are real problems that have to be parsed.
