History Online - Chronology

For many an ancient historical text, commentators have performed the job of discovering repeating fragments, or duplicates. By a repetition (variant of a duplicate), we may understand not only a repetition of names (see above) but, more generally, the repeated description of some event in the text, and so forth. For example, in the Old and New Testament, all such individual repetitions (duplicates) discovered by the commentators have been indicated and collected in the so-called set of parallel passages. This list counts about 20,000 verses in the Old and New Testament. If some historical text X is supplied with the same (or similar) set indicating duplicates, then, for their correct chronological ordering, we can apply our method from Section 6.4. Meanwhile, we have to regard the repeating fragments of the text as repeating "names".

The method of text ordering and duplicate recognition is also applicable to the list of reciprocal citations in any closed collection of historical and other texts. In particular, I have applied all these methods to the Old and New Testament, which resulted in the discovery of new and previously unknown duplicates in addition to those known previously, such as the First and Second Book of Samuel, the First and Second Book of Kings, and the First and Second Book of Chronicles. The distribution of these duplicates in the sequence of the books of the Old and New Testament is represented in Fig. 18 by the line B, where all the discovered duplicates are denoted by identical letters.

It turned out, in particular, that the traditionally accepted order of chapter generations, and therefore books, of the Old and New Testament differs sharply from the one chronologically correct in the above sense, which has been discovered by applying our method of text ordering. The averaged graph of J constructed for all the books of the Old and New Testament was found to be monotonicall decreasing, thus satisfying the frequency-damping principle in that and only that case where the separate chapters and books of the Old Testament are mixed up and permuted in a definite and rather intricate manner with those of the New Testament. Roughly speaking, the books of the Old and New Testament can be shifted toward each other.
Meanwhile, it is important that in about 88% of the cases, the mutual position of chapters and books is retained inside the shifted fragments.

A striking example can be given by the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, traditionally placed last in the Canon.
However, the real frequency graph for the Book of Revelation, given by a continuous line, is sharply different from the theoretical one. Hence, to eliminate this discrepancy and to restore the correct chronological order, we should place the Book of Revelation near the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Exodus and Leviticus (with the new ordering discovered by our method).