From Sacred Texts Christianity
{From the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. XI, Part 1,
1943, pp. 52-74. The transcriptions of the original texts have been omitted in this version.}
p. 52
an endnote says
If the start of BC is -3 then -5493 is really, in modern terms, - 5496 BC. Subtracting 93 (Omission Principle – see Barry Setterfield at http://www.setterfield.org) then Anno Mundi is -5589 or 5589 BC. Adding a number to get to the Deluge is dodgy because we have a range of numbers to choose from: see Whiston’s Josephus; 2262 (= 2242 from LXX plus Africanus’ 20), 2256, 1656, 1556, 1550, etc. Taking 2262 we get -33271 – see CUT. When Enoch ruled is from -3914 so adding 328x gets us to - 628 if x=6. If 258 yrs, as stated, is an invention then we are free to examine a little more. Let us state that Vištāsp's reign commenced 268 yrs + 30 years before Alexander’s conquest of Persia in - 330 then unfortunately for Zoroastrian dating we have a -628 start for our benchmark king. This satisfies CUT’s chronological schema. Move over Zoroaster2.3 Presumably the number of years supposed to have passed from the time of Enoch to the beginning of the reign of Vi§tasp. The date for Enoch was probably calculated with the help of the Jewish
world-era, or the mundane era of Alexandria (beginning 5493 B.C.), or by counting backwards from
the Deluge. Taking 3237 B.C. (but 3251 B.C. according to the Coptic chronology) as the date of the
Deluge (see S. H. Taqizadeh, BSOS., X, 122, under c), and adding 669 ( = from Enoch's death to the
Deluge according to the Hebrew Genesis), and subtracting the number in our fragment, 3,28[8 ?],
from 3,237 + 669 = 3,906, the resulting date, 618 B.C., agrees perfectly with the traditional
Zoroastrian date for the beginning of Vi§tasp's reign (258 + 30 years before Alexander's conquest of
Persia, 330 B.C.; cf. Taqizadeh, ibid., 127 sq.). From this one may infer that the famous date for
Zoroaster: "258 years before Alexander" was known to Mani (Nyberg, Rel. Alt. Iran, 32 sqq., thinks it
was invented towards the beginning of the fifth century).
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1 Cut needs to correct a Flood date of 829.13 for Day 1. It should be 829,044,373 yrs ago or 829.04. Forty days later is 828,815,463 yrs ago or 228, 910 radiometric years later.
2 From Enc. Brit., 11th Ed., Vol 28 Handy Edition, p.1041 we have “We are quite ignorant as to the date of Zoroaster; King Vistãspa does not seem to have any place in historical chronology, and the Gathas gives no hint on the subject. ... According to the Arda Viraf, I, 2, Zoroaster taught, in round numbers some 300 years before the invasion of Alexan¬der.” This then puts us with Zoroaster looking for a patron to advance the spread of his teaching ca. - 332 – 300 = -632 in round numbers. Given that our options are varied we should look at the other end of the space and take -329 -300 = -629. If we go with the first option we have an x=3, and -632 – 3283 = -3915 Enoch’s start of rule in CUT. If we go with the second option we have x=6 and -629 – 3286 = -3915. If our rounding is ± 2 then x goes down to 1 or up to 8 to maintain CUT’s contention. The closer to the start of King Vistãspa’s reign the better since Zoroaster would have been seeking a sponsor very early on. Taking -618 for the King we would find that Zoroaster spent some possibly 10 years searching a sponsor and this is a bit unrealistic for such a likely lad. As well, the rounding down of the 300 years by 14 years is a bit of a stretch.
A final point to make is that the next year-pair is -2902/-2901. The ‘little’ Zoroaster and King devia¬tions pale into insignificance with the -2902 - -3327 = 425-yr gap. Remember that Henk Jens with
NB from the above it is the promiscuous mixing of Coptic and non-Coptic sources which generates chronologists’ visits to the dating hell of “14 missing years”.
the reversal of his use of E.W. Bullinger only gives certain limited date pairs throughout ancient his¬tory.