On this date, six thousand and eleven years ago (give or take a little due to the vagaries of how calendars are kept), the creation of the universe had just begun. That's according to the 1650 chronology determined by the Anglican Bishop of Armagh James Ussher, anyway, published in his Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti (Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world, which you can read here if you're well-versed in Latin).
Today it's easy to heap scorn on Ussher's dates. Scientific tests have confirmed over and over again that the earth itself is over 4.5 billion years old; it is so ancient that it is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of that number. If it were merely a case of modern scientific information vs. 17th century theological calculations, though, we'd have little reason to mention Ussher. The reason why everyone remembers this date as "Bishop Ussher Day" is because there are people who still believe that Ussher was mostly right, and that about 6,000 years ago humans frolicked with Tyrannosaurus in the garden of Eden.
We should be careful not to let modern fundamentalist beliefs overshadow what Ussher did, however. He did not pull the dates out of the air or simply add up all ages of the people listed in Old Testament genealogies. There were chronological gaps in the Old Testament that needed to be filled with outside information, and for his time Ussher took a more careful approach than we might expect. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his essay "Fall in the House of Ussher, "... our usual ridicule only records a lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past ..."
Indeed, Ussher was but one of many different theologians trying to work out the date at which creation had begun. They based their programs on the proposition that a literal reading of Genesis was historically accurate, and while we know this not to be true today, it was the standard starting point for determining the age of the Earth in Europe in Ussher's time. In fact, many of the dates reached by other workers before Ussher were in the ballpark of 4004 B.C., ranging from 3761 B.C. to around 5500 B.C., so Ussher's date for creation was hardly unusual.
Yet Ussher was not only concerned without determining the date of creation. Annales presents a comprehensive history as was understood at the time. Given that we pay so little attention to history, least of all in classrooms, it is easy to forget that important works cannot be easily distilled to a central point that then must be either accepted or rejected according to modern standards. We can safely reject Ussher's date for the beginning of creation, but we should not be so hasty in ridiculing the herculean effort he undertook to arrive at that conclusion.
Indeed, Ussher's legacy is doubly unfortunate. Many scientists accept the "textbook cardboard" version of his work (which I have to admit I did until one year ago, when some friends mentioned some resources to correct my historical myopia), and many creationists assume that Ussher had once-and-for-all pinned down that the world is only about 6,000 years old. The assumption of the latter group is that Ussher relied entirely on the Bible to reach his conclusions, and therefore there could be nothing incorrect about it.
Yet this is not true, and Ussher's conclusion is an interpretation of Scripture. Many young-earth creationists accept the date blindly without any understanding of why or how Ussher did his calculations; it has become an article of creationist faith. And yet the date is nowhere prescribed in the Bible, and these people are putting their faith into the "works of man," which is strange given how often they use their argument against modern science. Evolution, they exclaim, is part of "the world's" knowledge, and because we used our God-given brains to develop such an idea it is thus fallible. The same could be said of Ussher's dates. The Bible is not able to speak for itself about the age of the earth.
[And don't forget, it's Mole Day, too!]
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The exact figure of 4004 BCE probably being due to Ussher's desire to have exactly four thousand years between the Creation and the birth of Jesus. As for why Jesus was said to have been born four years "before Christ", well. . . blame the people who rooted through the mutually inconsistent chronological cues in the Gospels, seized on different ones, and interpreted them all literally. Dionysius Exiguus looked at Luke 3 and figured that Jesus had to be thirty years old in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Cæsar's reign as Roman Emperor, which would make the first year Anno Domini the 753rd year on the Roman calendar. (That is, year 753 AUC, where ab urbe condita — "from the founding of the city" — refers to the year when according to legend Rome was established.) Later, people looked at Matthew 2, which says that Jesus was born "in the days of Herod the king". Herod ruled Judea from 716 AUC until his death in 749 AUC, so if you want the Three Wise Men and the Slaughter of the Innocents and all that good stuff in your Jesus story, then your protagonist has to be born in 4 BCE, at the latest.
(The "life of Jesus" we soak up through cultural osmosis is a cartoon version, a bricolage of bits and pieces taken from different gospels and even from wholly extra-Biblical sources. Nowadays, the people who like digging through that kind of mess and inventing a consistent story to explain it all have switched to a new target: trying to figure out when World War III happened in the Star Trek universe, instead. The gospel of Enterprise finally explained how the Klingons got their forehead ridges, but many believers insist that show is apocryphal, and at any rate, Trekologians have yet to agree on how the Trill got their spots or when Picard lost his hair.)
Blake; Thanks for the impressive comment. I have my doubts as to whether Ussher rigged his study to span 4,000 years from the beginning of creation to the birth of Jesus. Although it was published a number of years ago (and there may be more up-to-date sources), Gould brings this up in his essay;
"This situation must inspire a nasty suspicion that Ussher "knew" the necessity of 4004 B.C. right from the start and then jiggered the figures around to make everything come out right. Barr, of course, considers this possibility seriously but rejects it for two masons. First, Ussher's chronology extends out to several volumes and 2,000 pages of text and seems carefully done, without substantial special pleading. Second, the death of Herod in 4 B.C. doesn't establish the birth of Jesus in the same year. Herod became king of Judea (Roman puppet would be more accurate) in 37 B.C.--and Jesus might have been born at other times in this thirty-three-year interval. Moreover, other traditions argued that the 4,000 years would run from creation to Christ's crucifixion, not to his birth--thus extending the possibilities to A.D. 33. By these flexibilities, creation could have been anywhere between 4037 B.C. (4,000 years to the beginning of Herod's reign) and 3967 B.C. (4,000 years to the Crucifixion). Four thousand four is in the right range, but certainly not ordained by symbolic tradition. You still have to calculate."
The "He seems to have worked really hard" isn't a particularly strong argument, but I would err on the side of caution before stating that Ussher may have cooked his books a bit to come out with 4004. As you and Gould have both pointed out, there were plenty of inconsistencies and different traditions, and the best way to cut through them may have been to calculate. That it came out to a reasonable result, so much the better.
You don't have to consciously cook your books to come out with an answer you find convenient. One example which is fairly well-known to physicists is Millikan's attempt to find the charge of the electron. He had a good and clever experiment for doing so, but the number he got was slightly wrong (IIRC, he had a bad value for the viscosity of air, which threw off any other calculations he had to do). It took a while for later experimentalists to get the correct value, because they were all so impressed by Millikan's work: if their number was far off from his, they looked for mistakes they had made, but if their result was close to Millikan's, they didn't.
I imagine the same problem could arise in figuring out a chronology: "Hmmm, so the Creation happened in 4004? Well, that's nice — time for tea." Had the numbers worked out slightly different: "Hmmm, I get that the Creation happened in 3814. Did I remember to carry the one? Maybe my date for King Saul's coronation was off. . ."
Speculating about what was going on half-consciously in Ussher's head is probably a fruitless endeavour. More interesting for me is the issue of how he got his data. What did the people of his time consider an acceptable datum to use in calendrical calculations, and why? The stories in one gospel are not the same as those given in the others (the early chapters of Matthew read suspiciously like stuff added to make Jesus' early life resemble that of Moses), so which are chosen? (Quirinius was administrator of Syria from 6 to 4 BCE and again from 6 to 9 CE; only the first period overlaps that of Herod, but only in the latter was a census for taxation purposes taken, etc., etc.)
I agree that expecting a particular outcome can have an affect when you're doing calculations, Blake, I'm just saying I don't know what was going through Ussher's head at the time and can't be sure. The issue you brought up is important to consider, but whether Ussher was thinking about it (and then what he may have done about it) is something I don't know.
I am curious about the other questions you bring up, as well. With so many conflicting accounts and traditions, how was everything boiled down to make sense? This is all the more reason why I find it strange that creationists just accept that Ussher was mostly right and do not try and work out the chronology again (they'd still wind up with the wrong answer, but you'd think they'd want to be as accurate as possible if they really cared that much about Genesis!).
At the other end of the chronology, Genesis has some awfully weird temporal anomalies, like half a dozen different durations being given for the Flood (originally caused, perhaps, by multiple traditions being redacted into a single text). Genesis 7:17 says, "And the flood was forty days upon the earth." Meanwhile, verse 7:24 tells us, "And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days", a figure also given in verse 8:3. But chapter 8 of Genesis is just weird:
I guess you don't have to see a mountain to rest on top of it. A few verses later, we get to this:
When the best one can say is that the Flood lasted somewhere between forty days and three hundred seventy (vagaries in the length of a "month" factor in here, too) I'm not sure I'd try to bother pinpointing the date of the Fall to even a year's accuracy. Then, too, the idea that the Pentateuch was a composite of multiple traditions — now known as the J Document, the P Document and so forth — didn't really get going until the latter half of the 1700s, so while a later analyst might have said, "This chronology gives you a creation date of 4004, while this other one starts in 3998, with a possible variation to 4002," a person in Ussher's time would have wanted to settle on a single figure.
Of course; it's unconfirmed (and perhaps unfalsifiable) speculation.
Beats me. If I had to give an answer, I'd suggest that they don't care about Genesis, not in the scholar's sense of wanting to know how it was put together; instead, they are loyal to the image of Genesis which was erected in their minds. But that's just my guess, informed a bit by the surveys on how little the people who revere the Bible know about it.
This topic always sparks an interesting conversation Brian!
First off, I actually want to back off a bit from my flippant comments about Hutton I made last year in light of the comments made by John Pieret on that post. At least we owe Hutton the same latitude we give Ussher I suppose.
Second, just to echo and reinforce the "consensus" sentiments of your posts and comments made by others, I do think it's important to recognize the contribution that clerical scholars made to our understanding of the universe and the development of Western academic culture, despite the fact that they were working under radically different paradigms and admittedly with very different objectives. Monks were contributing to significantly science at least up through Mendel, and probably far beyond (anyone have a 20th/21st Century example?)
While the vagary and inconsistency in the Bible rightly makes us reject it a sole objective source for historical information (and I'm leaving "science" entirely out of the picture for the moment here), I think the argument can be made that the composite, complex nature of the work itself helped to provide ample fodder for critical scholarship when few other avenues were intellectually or socially acceptable. At the same time it's worth recognizing the parallel traditions of inquiry and scholarship cultivated by other religious traditions including (though certainly not limited too) Judaism, Islam (to whom we owe a special debt for keeping countless pre-Christian classical sources alive as well as making significant scientific progress in their own right), Hinduism and Buddhism.
I know I'm veering dangerously into Kumbaya territory here...but in an era where religion is increasingly deployed as an anti-intellectual weapon, and where intellectuals are adopting increasingly reactionary stances in response, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate that this antagonism is not an eternal conflict but one development in a complex but not monotonically negative relationship.
Do I sound like a hippie or what?
Neil; Well said, and I agree with you. The "Warfare Between Science & Theology" model is popular, but it represents just one aspect of a larger and more complex ongoing interaction. While I'm not going to go the Dinesh D'Souza route and claim that Christianity emanates some glorious cultural aura that makes everything better, I can't help but recognize how different aspects of science evolved (if you will) out of religious traditions.
Take Darwin himself, for example. If he didn't want to be a country priest, perhaps he wouldn't have taken the interest in Paley that he did and wouldn't have spent so much time studying natural history. The fact that the studied Paley closely was also significant in that Paley's was an adaptationist approach, and I think that Darwin drew on what he had read in Natural Theology in writing his own work (particularly anticipating classic examples of design in nature).
This whole thing reminds me of that scene in The Life of Brian where the Judean People's Front are meeting and the question of "What have the Romans ever done for us?" came up. We can't ignore conflict, but we also shouldn't be ignorant of history.