Drawing on the history of chronology, biblical studies, and ecclesiastical history, C. Philipp E. Nothaft argues that, despite critical narratives that date the emergence of scientific chronology to the early modern period, early modern innovations in chronology were the consequence of a long history of debates regarding the dating of Christ's birth, passion, and resurrection, debates which spanned from late antiquity through the Middle Ages. While the French philologist Joseph Justus Scalinger (1540–1609) is usually credited with the earliest uses of astronomy to validate biblical history and calculate biblical dates with scientific accuracy, Nothaft argues that “applying astronomical calculations to the dating of historical events . . . had been a part of Christian scholarship ever since the third century” (281). Chapter 1 outlines the history of the dating of Christ's passion through astronomy (the science of which Nothaft calls “computistical chronology”). Chapters 2 and 3 examine early attempts in the East and West to use lunar and solar calendars to calculate the dates of Christ's birth and crucifixion, while chapters 4–6 chart the development of “scientific awareness” in chronology from Bede in the eighth century through Roger Bacon in the thirteenth. The book concludes with a survey of early modern successors to Bacon in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, arguing that scholars must see scientific chronology not as a modern innovation, but as a medieval contribution to the history of intellectual culture.