The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

Furuli’s First Book 439
chronological statements as truth and nothing but the truth. This is the reason
why Ptolemy’s statements are the very backbone of the modern New
Babylonian chronology.” (p. 73) But Furuli admits that the chronology of
Ptolemy’s Canon existed hundreds of years before Ptolemy, so how can
accusations against Ptolemy be a problem? Whether he was a fraud or not is
irrelevant to the evaluation of the reliability of the Ptolemaic Canon, which also, and more
correctly, is called the Royal Canon. (See GTR 4 , Ch. 3, A-2, ftn. 21.)
Ptolemy’s Canon—the foundation of ancient chronology?
So what about Neugebauer’s statement that “the data from the Almagest
provide the backbone for all modern chronology of antiquity?” The answer is
that Furuli quotes it out of context. It appears in Neugebauer’s work, A History
of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, Part Three (Berlin/Heidelberg,/New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1975, p. 1071), in a section in which Neugebauer describes
“The Foundations of Historical Chronology.” In this section, he uses the word
“modern” in the broader sense (i.e., the period since the breakthrough of
modern astronomy in the 16th century). In the very next sentence, Neugebauer
mentions the “modern scholars” who he says used Ptolemy’s dates as a basis
for their chronology: Copernicus (1473-1543), Scaliger (1540-1609), Kepler
(1571-1630), and Newton (1643-1727).
Neugebauer’s statement, then, refers to the situation that has prevailed
during the past 400 years. But he further explains that, more recently, securely
established chronological data of ancient observations have been obtained from
the “great wealth of observational records assembled in Babylonia during the
last three or four centuries B.C.” These data have enabled scholars to check the
Canon and confirm its reliability. (Neugebauer, pp. 1072, 1073)
Some years earlier, in a review of A. J. Sachs (ed.), Late Babylonian
Astronomical and Related Texts (LBAT) (1955), Neugebauer emphasized the
importance of the Babylonian astronomical texts for the Mesopotamian
chronology. Of their value for establishing the chronology of the Seleucid era,
for example, he explained:
“Since planetary and lunar data of such variety and abundance define
the date of a text with absolute accuracy—lunar positions with respect to
fixed stars do not even allow 24 hours of uncertainty which is otherwise
involved in lunar dates—we have here records of Seleucid history which
are far more reliable than any other historical source material at our
disposal.” (Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, Vol. 52, Berlin, 1957, p. 133)
A similar confirmation of the Ptolemaic chronology has been established for
earlier periods. The editor of the above-mentioned work, Professor Abraham J.
Sachs, who was a leading authority on the astronomical texts and also a close
friend and colleague of Neugebauer, explains how the cuneiform sources have
provided an independent confirmation of Ptolemy’s kinglist back to its very
beginning, thus establishing the absolute chronology of the Babylonian,
Persian, and Seleucid eras. In the statement quoted below, Sachs speaks of
Ptolemy’s kinglist as “Theon’s royal list” because it has traditionally been held
that the mathematician Theon (4th century CE) included the kinglist in his
revision of Ptolemy’s Handy Tablets. This view has recently been questioned, so