I’ve heard hardcore fundamentalist Christians believe the Earth is either 5 or 7 thousand years old (heard either, I think) - what’s the logic into coming up with that number?
they added up the ages of people in the Bible.
Take present day, then subtract 2000 or so years to get to the birth of Jesus, then, through some magickal numerology, subtract another 3000 or so for all the stuff that supposedly happens in the Old Testament, until you get to Genesis, wherein God makes the world.
Aha.
I’ve heard a quote something like “To God, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years a day” said in relation to it and I thought even literalists wouldn’t fail to see the obvious metaphor. So that has nothing to do with it?
Edit: Is there any gap in the Biblical record? A time between two people that is of ambiguous length? Is there conflict among the literalist community just how old the Earth is?
They will normally also claim the scientific methods that show the Earth is older than 5000 years old are all wrong.
John Lightfoot and James Ussher were both guys who added up people’s ages and decided when the earth was created.
Basically they added up all the ages and years or people in the bible, then added ~2000 years as the time since jesus, and came up with the number (which is just over 6000 years old, though some say it’s as old as 10,000)
I don’t think there is much said regarding the time between the Old and New Testaments. We know it, from a historical standpoint, to be around 1200 years from the time of Moses to the time of Jesus (there’s some debate as to exactly when Moses lived, which I doubt will ever be resolved, but if you ballpark it around 1200-1400 BCE than you get no arguements)
Jesus’s genealogy back to David, and then David’s back to Adam is given in the Bible, so the bible at least covers the name of one person alive continuously from Jesus’s time back though to creation.
While one can find a list of names extending from Adam throuh the Babylonian Captivity, (or through Jesus if one is so inclined), one cannot actually find dates or years associated with every name. That is why Ussher’s date, Lightfoot’s date, and the Jewish calendar are all off from each other by a little bit. Under Ussher, creation would have occurred 6012 years ago, under Lightfoot, 5937 or 5938 years ago, and according to the Jewish calendar, 5769 years ago. (And those are only the three most prominent calculations; lots of people have tried working out the dates.)
In addition to the point that tomndebb makes, IIRC, there are at least two different genealogies given for Jesus in the New Testament.
But by definition they are both correct.
It is perhaps worth saying that Ussher and his contemporaries were actually quite keen on looking beyond the Biblical evidence. In the wake of the work of Scaliger, the fashionable approach was to seek to combine the Bible with evidence from other ancient cultures in the hope of creating a grand unified theory of ancient chronology. It was just that the limited evidence they had from those other cultures got them no further back. It was not that they were relying only on the Bible.
Oh, right. I forgot.
I always wondered, though, why both trace lineage through Joseph. I thought it was pretty clear in the Bible that he had nothing to do with the actual conception of Jesus. Or was it okay to have a step-descendant of David be the Messiah?
I was about to mention this. Does anyone know how this was taken into account during Lightfoot’s and Ussher’s calculations? Did they do it both ways, then take the longest? Did one do it one way, the other the other? How did they reconcile this?
The two genealogies of Jesus - or the New Testament at all - didn’t enter into the calculations. The trick was to try to tie the first and second Temples to the current calendar and use the Old Testament genealogies and ages to work back from there. This old thread goes into more detail and highlights where there was still difficulty.
Furthermore, the two genealogies of Jesus agree prior to King David, in the stretch where Ussher etc. were relying on the lifespans of individuals, so they could avoid the issue entirely.
Ah. Thanks, **bonzer **- just what I was looking for!
Ah. Thanks, **bonzer **- just what I was looking for!