When students in public schools learn about history, we don't hear religious conservatives complaining that they students are being exposed to 'secularist' dating methods that have replaced proper 'biblical' dating. We don't hear that history classes should teach 'both sides' and that multiple dating methods should be used.

The Wilson Quarterly discusses “Dating History: The Renaissance and the Reformation of Chronology” by Anthony Grafton, in Daedalus (Spring 2003)

In Europe, Renaissance chronologers faced a particular challenge. Not only had many ancient records been destroyed—as was the case in the city of Rome—but scholars also were forced to accept biblical notions of time as sacred and true. There was one big problem: The Greek and Hebrew Bibles did not agree on chronology. Working backward from the birth of Christ, and forward from the moment of the Creation—as European chronologers did from the 13th century onward—the Hebrew text suggested that the Creation occurred in 5200 b.c., the Greek, around 4000. (English archbishop James Ussher famously arrived at the precise date of 4004 B.C.)

Into this perplexing mess stepped a remarkable scholar, a Huguenot named Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609). Working what Grafton describes as “bibliographical and philological miracles,” this “most arrogant as well as the most learned of men” relied on his knowledge of ancient languages and astronomy to fix dates from the fall of Troy to the fall of Constantinople. He was the first to establish a “coherent, solid structure” of historical time, “basically the one that scholars still use.”

Dating, whether our current dates or the dates of ancient events, is not the sort of thing most people give much thought to. Proper dating is, however, crucial for our ability to understand history and place ourselves in the course of human events. Doing so, however, requires not relying solely upon religious scriptures for all our information.

 

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