Dating the Passion ─ The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology, 200-1600

Nothaft (Hebrew and Jewish studies, U. College, London) believes that the remarkable continuity between late antique and modern scholarship regarding the life of Jesus can be fruitfully exploited to shed new light on the history of chronology as a scientific discipline. He examines the different attempts to find the precise date of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, as they were produced in Christian scholarship up to the end of the 16th century, when the work of a number of scholars--the most celebrated being Joseph Justus Scaliger--transformed historical chronology into a fully fledged discipline. His topics include the origins of computistical chronography and its crisis in the early Middle Ages, chronology and the 12th-century Renaissance, a science of time with Roger Bacon and his successors, biblical chronology and Ptolemy's eclipses, and the life of Jesus and the emergence of scientific chronology. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Ph.D. (2011) in History, University of Munich, is a research assistant at the Department of Hebrew & Jewish Studies, University College, London. He has published several articles on the history of scholarship and chronology.