# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S110
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

110 Dr. Seyffarth's Corrections, etc.

historical certainty. From inscriptions, coins, the ages of the emperors and of others, and from astronomical observations, many errors of Petavius are recognized, which arose from his having drawn false eclipses into his reckoning. This fact has already been repeatedly stated by noted scholars and stands scientifically beyond all doubt: for example, Roman and Greek chronology do not agree with one another according to Petavius, and as soon as one undertakes to correct the one by the other according to the eclipses he made foundational, either the eclipses reported by Roman or those reported by Greek authors fail to fit.

His Roman chronology has countless astronomical contradictions. The Julian year began, according to the testimony of the ancients and Caesar's coins, 3 months 15 days before Caesar's murder, on the first of January with the first new-moon crescent. But not until 42 B.C. (not 44) did a new-moon crescent fall on the first of January. Besides this piece of evidence the author brings forward a great many others, by which it is shown quite convincingly that the whole of Roman history, from the founding of Rome to Titus, stands in need of correction. — The same is the case with Greek history and chronology. We single out only one striking instance: Xenophon, the eyewitness of the Peloponnesian War, affirms that the war lasted 28 years 6 months; according to Petavius only 27 years and 6 months result, and "the good Xenophon must have erred." Xenophon and Thucydides list 30 ephors who governed during the Peloponnesian War, whereas Petavius omits one archon (Endios) in order to make his chronology come out right. Hence the Parian Marble too, an unforgeable autograph record, counts, up to the Peloponnesian War, one whole archon-year more than Petavius. — As regards Persian, Median, and Assyrian history, it is noted that the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews, according to Petavius, would have lasted only 66 years, whereas the prophets and eyewitnesses expressly reckon "a full 70 years." — The Egyptian history and chronology now in use contains the greatest and most numerous contradictions and absurdities. Menes, the first king of Egypt, cannot, according to biblical tradition, have arrived there before the year 666 after the Flood, yet he has been placed even before the Flood, indeed even before the Creation. Moreover, in Manetho, in the Vetus Chronicon, in Syncellus, Eratosthenes, Herodotus, and others, such divergent variants and datings are found regarding the reigns of individual kings and individual dynasties that, for example, the 18th Dynasty, under which the Hebrews left Egypt, could with equal right be placed 400 years earlier or later. — As for the history and chronology of the Old and New Testaments, the Evangelists teach clearly that Christ's public ministry lasted over 8 years; according to Petavius and more recent chronologists only 2 years result. Dionysius Exiguus places, with