John Last at Noema Magazine:
Doubts about the accepted chronology of human events are much older than Illig, Velikovsky or Freud. Already by the end of the 17th century, the Jesuit scholars Jean Hardouin and Daniel van Papenbroeck argued that, given the near-ubiquitous practice of forgery in medieval clerical circles, virtually all written records before the 14th century should be considered the invention of overeager monks.
Two hundred years after Hardouin and van Papenbroeck, the historian Edwin Johnson claimed that the entire Christian tradition — including 700 years of documented history during the so-called “Dark Ages” of Europe — had been the invention of 16th-century Benedictines justifying the privileges of their order. Around the same time, British orientalist Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot was so discouraged by the state of historical records that he proposed the timeline be reset entirely to begin with the accession of Queen Victoria, just 63 years prior.
more here.
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