My Sunday School teacher says that JC and his followers and others of the time period believed the world was flat …
Yet my High School teacher said that Aristotle figured out the world was spherical by 300 BC.
Heck, just looking at the moon phases, I can tell the shadows were made that way from one sphere crossing another sphere. Were the people of Jesus’ time more gullible and believe whatever nonsense was spewed, or did those people just not care much about such matters?
How can we get the world to come together for World Peace, when some many deny obvious truths?
In his youth he did. Then, at the age of 11 and a half, he was tutored one long hot summer by Athena, who taught him the truth about astronomy, quantum physics, and all the major sciences.
Remember that (and this should be an obvious point) people in Jesus’s time had significantly less access to information and education than we do. The concept of a relatively standard education for all people is a remarkably new concept. People of Jesus’s time, most of them anyway, had very little knowledge about the world around them. They weren’t stupid, they weren’t gullible, they were uninformed.
True. The immediately-accessible evidence about the shape of the Earth leads one to call it flat, not spherical.* Unless you were a geometer you’d have no reason to think otherwise. And I’m not aware of any contributions the ancient Hebrews made in any branch of mathematics. Certainly their calculation for the length of the year shows they were quite a bit behind the Egytians, no?
Maybe your sunday school teacher isn’t the right source for this sort of information.
I’m just saying.
The guy who delivers my bottled water holds some pretty odd political views, but, y’know, I’m only looking for him to deliver the water. He’s entitled to his opinion, obviously, but I’ll look to a more informed source for political discussion, thanks anyway.
If that’s the case, then you’ve never really paid much attention to the phases of the moon, since they are not, in fact, produced that way, and cannot be explained that way.
As well as Pythagoras, Plato, and Eratosthenes. I think it was Aristotle who observed the curvature of the Earth from a lunar eclipse, but Eratosthenes who accurately estimated the size of the Earth in 240 BC.
By the time of Jesus, I think many educated Hebrews were aware of the Greeks’ theories on the shape of the Earth and had incorporated it into their theological world view. The same is true for the other educated people living within the Roman Empire at that time. As for others (the vast majority), whether you believed the Earth was round or flat depended upon personal observation. Somebody who never wandered more than ten miles away from his home during his entire life likely assumed it was flat whereas somebody whose livelihood involved seafaring could believe it was round.
AFAIK it was earlier than that. Wikipedia cites Early Greek astronomy to Aristotle for the statement that “after the 5th century BC, no Greek writer of repute thought the world was anything but round”. With an admitted dubious claim for Pythagoras as the originator.
Aristole is apparently one of the earliest people who reports a fairly ball-park measurement of the size of the earth, but IIRC those measurements weren’t performed by him.
I doubt Jesus was all that well-educated. He was a carpenter’s son living in a backwater town. Seems to me that any education he would have received would have been in reading the Torah and perhaps interpreting it.
While it is clear the Greeks knew, I’d like some evidence that a typical religious education in Israel included goyisher physics. We then have the question of what education Jesus got anyway - he certainly knew the Bible well enough, but it is unlikely he was trained as a priest.
I’d wager that Jesus, and 90% of his contemporaries, didn’t give any thought to the question at all. It’s not that they “didn’t know” the Earth was round, it’s that the issue was completely irrelevant to them. Jesus was a carpenter by trade. His associates were other tradesmen for the most part. The curvature of the Earth had no bearing at all on their daily lives.
For that matter, it has no bearing on my daily life either. The difference is that in our world, we are supposed to know things like that; in Judea during King Herod’s time, only the most well educated scholars were expected to care about such things.
Jew: Could you be quite, please. [To Trouble:] What was that?
Trouble: I don’t know… I was too busy talking to Big Nose.
Man: I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheese-makers’.
Jewwife: Ah. What’s so special about the cheese-makers?
Jew: Well obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally, it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.[right]-- Monty Python’s The Life of Brian[/right]
I’m not sure what you mean by this. The Jewish calendar typically has 12 lunar months in a year, but every few years on a set schedule they add another “leap month” to the calendar, to keep it in synch with the Sun. And in fact, the average length of the year so derived is extremely close to the correct value (I believe I’ve read that it’s actually better than our method of “leap day every four years except for multiples of 100 that aren’t multiples of 400”, but that’s due to luck more than to precision astronomy). I’m not sure that the Egyptians of the same time even had a proper calendar at all, and to the extent that they kept track of the years at all, they used the wrong kind of year (the sidereal year, rather than the tropical year), which may have been one of the causes of the decline of their civilization.
There were two pieces of evidence. The first is fairly subtle. If–and its a big if–you realize that a lunar eclipse is caused by the earth’s shadow, you can see that the earth’s shadow is curved. But remember that the moon is round so even if the earth were a flat surface, its shadow would be curved. But why wouldn’t you believe that lunar eclipses were just some phenomenon having nothing to do with the earth? Yes they come only at full moon which is suggestive, but a lot less than proof. Until you have a theory of the ecliptic and the moon’s motion above and below it. This is getting pretty sophisticated.
Much more convincing is how a sailing ship drops below the horizon as it sails off. This was the basis of Eratosthenes’s measurement of the earth’s diameter. He observed that at a certain place in Egypt (Cyene, now called Aswan) the sun was directly overhead at noon on a certain day of the year. So he measured how high the sun was on that day in Alexandria (I think). How did he know it was noon? Well, he measured the max of its elevation. Then came the hard part. Measuring the distance between the two cities. He built a primitive odometer that counted the number of turns of a wagon wheel going from one to the other. After that it was all elementary geometry.
Well…it seems unlikely that Jesus believed the Earth was flat. He was constantly quoting the Hebrew Scriptures. Read Isaiah 40:22. It talks about the shape of the earth.* And if you believe that Jesus was the son of God, well then that reshapes the whole discussion. But going solely on the fact that he was so familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, and that they made reference to the shape of the Earth, I’d say he probably knew the Earth wasn’t flat, but it wasn’t pertinent to his ministry, hence the lack of direct reference to it by him.
*Let’s not get too hung up on the geometric “circle versus sphere” nonsense. It’s the Bible, not a math book. Close enough is close enough.
