PREFACE.
The book ‘Czar of the Slavs’ concerns the new dating of the Nativity of Christ as the year 1152 AD which we arrived at in 2003. The reconstruction of the events of the XII century which emerged as a result is presented here.
The book contains only the new material and the results we arrived at in 2003. They are all published here for the first time.
We would like to highlight that the main result of this book is a new and evidently final dating of the nativity of Christ and the Gospel events. It was the result of a number of scientific methods independent from each other (and naturally of the Scaligerian chronology). In this book we give a detailed account of the way this purely chronological result was achieved and how you can understand it. We suggest a number of hypotheses and theories aimed at giving such explanations. Addressing our critics we would like to say that our reconstructions are not mere ‘contemplations on the theme’, but attempts to interpret reliable chronological results. To see the details of our analysis of the chronology on the whole and the evidence proving that the Scaligerian version is erroneous, please refer to our books [���1], [���2], [���3], and also CHRON1-CHRON3. Unfortunately some of our critics immediately direct their fire against the hypotheses which they don’t like for whatever reason, overlooking the chronological basis and the mathematical results. Of course, the emotions are quite understandable here. But nevertheless the matter is important enough and demands attentive and deliberate research. Beginning with the basics. The emotions should be left for later.
The final dating of the Nativity of Christ as year 1152, which we came up with in this book, turned out to be not that different from a working hypothesis of the Nativity of Christ as the middle of the XI century, which we have suggested earlier. A hundred years difference on the historical scale is not that big. However the correct dating of the epoch of Christ as the XII century A.D. allows us to considerably develop our reconstruction of the world history. In our previous books we hardly touched upon the time prior to the XIV century – i.e. before the great = ‘Mongol’ conquest. The layer of the surviving documents from the XI-XIII cc. was hardly examined by us until recently. Now the situation had radically changed. There appears an extremely interesting picture of the pre-history of the Great = ‘Mongol’ Empire. Here the history of the Christian church takes centre stage. In our opinion the discovery of the whole strata of the secular primary sources describing Christ became a major discovery. The final dating of Christ’s life as the XII century allowed us to see what was practically impossible to notice before then. The difficulty, among other things, was in the fact that the old secular life descriptions of Christ were often written by the authors far from Christianity and from perspectives deeply hostile towards Christ. That is why it was impossible thus far to recognise their true meaning by simply reading the chronicles. However, as soon as the exact chronological place of Christ’s life is specified, it becomes clear which characters of the secular history in particular are in fact Christ’s ‘doubles’. The picture of the discovered parallels turned out to be astonishing in its scale. For the first time in several hundred years, for the researcher of Evangelical history there opens up an opportunity to use the biographies of Christ written within a framework of an entirely different tradition and in its essence completely independent from the Gospels. The more striking is its apparent profound similarity with the Gospels. (Here we refer to the events themselves and not the attitude of this text’s author towards them). As a result a great many new and extremely interesting pieces of information about Christ come to the surface.
To repeat, the dating of the epoch of Christ we came up with in the present book is final, as was achieved using the independent astronomical methods. Besides in the old sources there were discovered the direct references to the correct dating of the Nativity.
The dating of the Nativity of Christ as the XII century is in the ideal correspondence with the statistical parallelisms we have discovered earlier. Overall this allows us to complete the reconstruction of the written history of mankind, bringing it to the epoch of the origin of the written language in the X-XI cc.
The new step in our reconstruction made in this book, allows us to look at the place of the Russian Orthodoxy in Christianity on the whole in an essentially different way. It is known that Russian Orthodoxy up until the XVII century preserved many intrinsically archaic characteristics which distinguished it for example from Greek Orthodoxy. According to the reformers of the XVII century the difference between Russian and Greek Orthodoxy can be explained by the fact that the Russians, having adopted their faith from the Greeks, could not keep it in all its purity and in time the Russian church allegedly accrued some flaws. The opponents of the reforms were claiming their own tradition in Russia, ‘as good as the Greek one’ and maybe ‘even better’. From the point of view of the Scaligerian chronology which we are accustomed to today, it was the reformers who were naturally right. As we have been indoctrinated that the Russians adopted the Christian faith from the Greeks at the time when the Greek Church allegedly had already existed for a long time. And therefore the Russian church is somewhat a protégé of the Greek Church. But now it becomes apparent that the true picture was entirely different. It turns out that Russia was baptised by Christ himself in the XII century, when he for a long period of time lived in Russia. This is why the Russian Orthodoxy and the Greek Orthodoxy are overall equal churches which emerged at the same time. Where the Russian Orthodox was created even a little bit earlier, which explains the existence in Russian Orthodoxy of its own, authentic features originating essentially from Christ himself.
Eventually the distinctive features of Russian Orthodoxy were declared ‘incorrect’ and were destroyed to a great degree during the church reforms of the XVII century (which, incidentally, started before Nikon). Nevertheless some things survived, if not in the church daily practice, then in the old books and documents. The existence of a purely original Russian stream in the Orthodoxy possibly played an important part in relocation of the metropoly of the Great Empire from Czar-Grad in the Bosporus to Vladimir and Suzdal Russia in the XIV century.
To highlight, in our research, we never touch upon questions of either faith or theology. In particular we do not discuss any church dogmata. The book addresses only the questions of a historical and chronological nature. We are saying this because there are many wishing to demagogically distort the very essence of our research and present it as some kind of intrusion into the theological and dogmatic sphere. This is not true. We will repeat once again, that our works on the chronology and this book in particular do not concern any of the teachings and dogmata of the Christian church, nor of any other church.
We will repeat that in the books written prior to 2003, in particular in the seven volume ‘The World Chronology’, as a preliminary hypothesis we adhered to the Mediaeval tradition, which we have restored and which dated the epoch of Christ’s life to the XI century. Matthew Blastares, the famous chronologist of the XIV-XV cc., for instance, also followed this tradition. However our further research showed that the correct dating of Christ’s life was approximately a hundred years later. Such shift in the dating of the Nativity of Christ essentially does not interfere with the material we have presented in our earlier books, as it mainly concerns the later epoch of the XIV-XVII cc.
When reading this book you should bear in mind the following important fact. In antiquity and in mediaeval times the texts were often written vowel-less, i.e. either without any vowels or omitting most of them. For example in the Arabic written language the vowels have practically disappeared as there simply were no letters for them. We shouldn’t think the Arabic letters are present only in the Arabic texts. Some Old Russian texts were also sometimes written using Arabic letters, see ‘The New chronology of Russia, England and Rome’ and CHRON4. We cannot be sure that this or that word, let’s say from a Russian chronicle in its time did not pass through the filter of the Arabic written language, having lost all its vowels in the process. Later there were restored, but it is possible, it was done incorrectly. Besides in the Russian old written language the vowels were often omitted anyway. On the whole the vowels in the old words, and moreover in the first and other names are not particularly reliable. See the details in [MET1]. That is why the reader should not be surprised when in our book he or she will see the attempts to read the old words based only on the framework of the consonants. For a contemporary reader, who is used to the equally clear reproduction of both vowels and consonants in the contemporary written language, such an approach might seem strange. We should get used to it, as we are dealing with the old texts.
We would like to express our gratitude to N.D.Gostev for his great support in searching for the sources vital during the creation of this book.
Recently, riding on the wave of our research, in the press there started to appear more and more works (including books, published by the respected publishers) containing groundless ‘reconstructions’ of history. Moreover, some of them are the hidden parodies of our work and even premeditated attempts to reduce the new chronology to an absurdity. We would like to stress that such ‘reconstructions’ have nothing in common with the new chronology and should be distinctly separated from it. We are trying to identify interesting works concerning the new chronology and give the information about them in our books or on our website chronologia.org.
To conclude we would like to note that our reconstruction of history, including the one represented in this book, is as yet hypothetical. At the same time we stand by the accuracy and reliability of the dating we achieved. I.e.- by the new chronology. It is possible to give different reasons and explanations of it by suggesting different hypotheses. We think that the explanations we put forward are quite natural and on the whole are justified. Nevertheless we do not insist on them.
A.T.Fomenko, G.V.Nosovskiy
August 2003. Moscow.
