Loading...In my Bible Intro, I am including a number of “boxes” that deal with issues that are somewhat tangental to the main discussion, but of related interest or importance. Here’s one of the ones in my chapter on Genesis, in connection with interpretations that want to take the book as science or history. For a lot of you, this will be old news. But then again, so is Genesis.
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In 1650 CE, an Irish archbishop and scholar, James Ussher, engaged in a detailed study of when the world began. Ussher based his calculations on the genealogies of the Bible, starting with those in the book of Genesis (which state not only who begat whom, but also indicate, in many instances, how long each of the people thus begotten lived) and a detailed study of other ancient sources, such as Babylonian and Roman history. On these grounds, he argued that the world was created in 4004 BCE — in fact, at noon on October 23. This chronology became dominant throughout Western Christendom. It was printed widely in King James Bibles and continues to be believed by non-evolutionarily minded Christians today.
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For those interested in how Ussher arrived at that number there is a chart at:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v1/n1/world-born-4004-bc
Thank you Adam, for posting this.
I’ve always wondered about the details of Usher’s arguments (but have never had the motivation to look up Usher’s work on my own. 😉 )
This is clearly not telling Dr Ehrman anything he doesn’t already know, but to follow up a bit on the notion of “6 days of creation” corresponding to “6000 years of (total) world history”:
This idea certainly goes back quite a ways in Christian thought. One notable example is in the _Epistle of Barnabas_ where the author (in his efforts to show that Jews had completely misunderstood the meaning of the Old Testament) made this connection –as well as indicating that the “seventh Day Of Rest” corresponds to Christ’s millennial reign.
A few questions:
1] Although the author of EoB doesn’t explicitly say so, it’s probably reasonable to assume that he saw himself at near the end of the 6000 years (i.e. near the End Times).
If this is is true, it’d be interesting to know where “Barnabas” got his date for the creation (and age) of the world.
Or, on the other hand, if he _didn’t_ see him self near the end, I wonder where in the span of history he might have imagined himself? In this case, how far off did he believe the end of the world to be?
2] To follow this a step further, I wonder if there are any cases in Christian Eschatology where someone gave a specific date for the end of the world which _wasn’t_ imminent. That is, who named a date that would be, say, centuries –or millennia– in the future?
(But, perhaps, this sort of defeats the purpose. “The world will end in 800 years, so we don’t have to worry _too_ much right now.”)
3] Usher’s dating of the creation of the world might be seen as an example of this (i.e. the logic above would put the end of the world some three and a half centuries in his future.)
But do we have any reason to think that Usher –or folks in his day– ever thought in these terms. Perhaps he saw himself as simply establishing a date for Creation, with no thought about how this affected the other end of things.
For that matter, when _did_ folks start using Usher’s date to put the End of Days near the end of the 20th century? Are there any examples earlier than, say, 1950 or so?
Not to mention that, if the Earth was 6,000 years old, the entire night sky would be black, given the huge amount of time starlight takes to reach Earth.
One of my favorite explanations:
“How do six days of creation equal fifteen billion years? According to the calculations of the 13th century Kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac of Acco, the universe is precisely 15,340,500,000 years old.
The calculation proceeds as follows:
According to the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97a, ” R. Kattina said: Six thousand years shall the world exist, and one [thousand, the seventh], it shall be desolate…”. Ancient and medieval Kabbalists such as Nehunya ben HaKanah, in Sefer HaTemunah (written about 100 AD) and Rabbi Isaac of Acco understood these seven thousand years a running parallel to the Jewish Sabbatical cycle. In this cycle the fields are planted and harvested for six years and left unplanted in the seventh year.2
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, who apart from being a rabbi, also held a master’s degree in physics, cites the calculations of Rabbi Isaac of Acco in his commentaries on the book Sefer Yehzirah: The Book of Creation. This book has an oral tradition going back to Abraham, but was first committed to writing about 1500 years ago. In his commentary on this book Rabbi Kaplan writes:
“According to the master Kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac of Acco, when counting the years of these cycles, one must not use an ordinary physical year, but rather, a divine year. The Midrash says that each divine day is a thousand years, basing this on the verse, “A thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday” (Psalm 90:4). Since each year contains 364 ¼ days, a divine year would be 365,250 years long.
According to this, each cycle of seven thousand divine years would consist of 2,556,750,000 earthly years. This figure of two-and-a-half billion years is very close to the scientific estimate as to the length of time that life has existed on earth.
If we assume that the seventh cycle began with the Biblical account of creation, then this would have occurred when the universe was 15,340,500,000 years old. This is very close to the scientific estimate that the expansion of the universe began some fifteen billion years ago” (Kaplan 186).
That a thirteenth century rabbi could have so accurately calculated the age of the universe, using only the Scriptures and Jewish traditions, is astounding. It would take science nearly seven hundred more years to arrive at this same figure.”
From: The Missing Link in the Debate
Isibiel Myrna Cohen
http://www.yashanet.com/library/missing_link.htm