work tracing the history of the world and the Jews from Creation to the 2nd century CE. It allows 410 years for the duration of the First Temple, 70 years from its destruction to the Second Temple, and 420 years for the duration of the Second Temple, making a total of 900 years for the two temples. This schematic approach to numbers accounts for its most remarkable feature, the fact that it shortens the entire Persian Empire from over two centuries to just 52 years, mirroring the 52 years it gives to the Babylonian exile. Christian use and development of biblical chronology The early church father Eusebius (), attempting to place Christ in the chronology, put his birth in AM 5199, and this became the accepted date for the Western Church. As the year AM 6000 (800 CE) approached there was increasing fear that the end of the world was nigh, until the Venerable Bede made his own calculations and found that Christ's birth took place in AM 3592, allowing several more centuries to the end of time. Martin Luther (1483–1546) switched the point of focus from Christ's birth to the Apostolic Council of Acts 15, which he placed in the year AM 4000, believing this marked the moment when the Mosaic Law was abolished and the new age of grace began. This was widely accepted among European Protestants, but in the English-speaking world, Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) calculated a date of 4004 BCE for creation; he was not the first to reach this result, but his chronology was so detailed that his dates were incorporated into the margins of English Bibles for the next two hundred years. This popular 4,000 year theological timespan, which ends with the birth of Jesus, differs from the 4,000 timespan later proposed for the Masoretic text alone, which ends with the Temple rededication in 164 BCE. The Israelite kings The chronology of the monarchy, unlike that of earlier periods, can be checked against non-biblical sources and seems to be correct in general terms. This raises the prospect that the Books of Kings, linking the Hebrew kings by accession and length of reign ("king X of Judah came to the throne in the nth year of king Y of Israel and ruled n years"), can be used to reconstruct a chronology for the monarchy, but the task has in fact proven intractably difficult. The problem