Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
the end of the seventeenth century, there were more than a hundred biblical chronologies to
choose from that set differing dates for the beginning and end of everything.
The most venerated biblical chronology is Bishop Ussher's influential
Annals of the Old
Testament
. Published in 1650, it revealed Sunday, October 23, 4004
BC
, as the date of
Creation. Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, James Ussher was a confidant
of Charles I, with an international reputation as a brilliant scholar and one of the largest
personal libraries in western Europe. Ussher's prestige was such that he was buried with
full honors in Westminster Abbey.
Ignoring Egyptian and Chinese histories that extended back before his preferred date for
the Creation, Ussher concluded that Noah's Flood occurred 1,656 years after the dawn of
time. Noah and company embarked on Sunday, December 7, 2349
BC
, spent a little over a
year aboard, and disembarked on December 18 the following year.
How did he establish the year of Creation from the Bible? Like Julius, Ussher tallied up
the lifespans of the biblical patriarchs listed in the unbroken male lineage of who begat
whom from Adam to King Solomon. To fill in the gap from Solomon to the birth of Jesus,
he had to cross-reference biblical events with those of a known age from Babylonian, Per-
sian, or Roman history. Ussher also had to choose which translation of the Bible to use, as
the genealogy in the Greek Bible pushes the date of Creation back almost another thousand
years. Finally, he corrected for the awkward problem that the first-century Roman-Jewish
historian Josephus indicated that Herod died in 4
BC
, and thus that Jesus could not have
been born after that since the Bible says that Herod tried to kill the newborn Jesus.
How could Ussher pinpoint the day it all started? He used reason. God rested on the sev-
enth day after the Creation, and the Jewish Sabbath is traditionally Saturday. So, counting
backwards six days from Saturday, God started making the world on a Sunday. Assuming
that the Creation began near the autumn equinox, Ussher probably used astronomical tables
to determine that the equinox occurred on Tuesday, October 25, making Sunday, October
23 the best fit for the day it all began. However he came up with it, in 1701, the Stationers'
Company inserted his 4004
BC
date of Creation into a margin note for a new edition of the
King James Bible. From then on, his calculated guess as to the age of the world became
gospel for many Christians.
