Christianity
Archbishop James Ussher and the Age of the World
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Saturday, 14 November 2009
Archbishop James Ussher
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” on October 23, 4004 BC. That is what Archbishop James Ussher says in Annals of the World, first published in Latin in 1654, then in English in 1658. The book is popular with fundamentalist Christians for whom it is a chronology of the world based on biblical revelation rather than the false science of evolution. It is the alternative history of the world to that based on Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Young earth creationists who claim the world is merely 6,000 years old get the date from Ussher, not from the bible.
Ussher was an Anglican Archbishop of Ireland. In his day, when the basis of the scientific revolution was just being established, Ussher was a prodigious scholar of the old school, whereby the bible still retained its medieval authority. When he died in 1656, Cromwell honored him with a burial in Westminster Abbey for his staunchly Protestant views.
The assumption usually made is that Ussher just added up the ages of people given in the biblical chronologies, together with some reign lengths, and such, to arrive at his date purely based on biblical data. Sadly, though, that is insufficient for that purpose, even assuming it is infallible. It is sufficient at the beginning of the biblical chronology up until the reign of Solomon, last king of the so called United Monarchy, but thereafter the dates are highly insecure. So Ussher had to use secular works of ancient history besides the bible to have enough data to complete his task—texts of ancient historians like Herodotus and Xenophon, and Chaldean and Persian records. The latter were needed to get from Nebuchadnezzar II whose 37th year matched the year of exile of king Jehoiachin into Roman times, Herod, and thus to the birth of Christ.
He was guided by the theological belief that each day of God was a 1000 years to humanity. The creation took six days—for God—so actually lasted 6000 years, and this was thought by theologians to be the whole duration of the world, supposed to have been 4000 years before Christ and 2000 years after. This idea came from the Persian religion which gave the world 12000 years, but only the 6000 were historical. Christ was expecting the end of this period when he was waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane. Ussher also knew of the error in dating the birth of Christ, made by Dionysos Exiguus in the sixth century AD, which added the extra 4 years. Thus he knew what figure he was aiming for, and had the leaway in the uncertainty in biblical dating to make it right.
Scripture and “Reason Well Directed”
So, from Ussher’s chronology, creationists think everything was made by God in 4004 BC. Yet, 6,000 years is quite untenable as the period in which the depth of ten miles or so of sedimentary strata observed on the earth could have been laid down. The answer for fundamentalists is that the fossil record and the geology of the earth depended on Noah’s flood, in 2348 BC, according to Ussher. But a single flood, even ten miles deep, cannot account for the nature of the sediments. So scientific geology is impossible according to biblical belief.
Ussher’s book contains more than twelve thousand footnotes from secular sources and over two thousand quotes from the bible or the Apocrypha. For example, the text of Genesis never identifies the exact day of Creation. Ussher assumed that, since the Jews used to start their year in autumn, it must be an ancient memory of Creation. He then uses astronomical tables to determine that the first Sunday after the autumnal equinox would be 23 October in the Julian calendar. It had to be a Sunday because God rested on the seventh day, and that is the sabbath, a Saturday for Jews.
The Holy Ghost was being slack in not including all the data Ussher needed for his chronology in the bible alone. It therefore does not contain all knowledge. For this reason, Ussher defended his use of extrabiblical sources, saying we knew about the history of God’s Creation…
Not only by the plain and manifold testimonies of Holy Scripture, but also by light of reason well directed.
In saying this he refutes all those among his fundamentalist supporters who think the bible is sufficient for everything they require. Ussher’s Annals are testimony that it is not, for it relies on the application of reason besides the supposed revelation of the bible. Ussher had to suppose that God meant him to use his reason as well as the bible, and he was, of course, using the reasoning available to him then, 450 years ago. It is mindlessly unreasonable to ignore all the additional information we now have.
If Ussher’s date is right, all the scientific evidence that the earth is billions of years old is false. And the bible says human beings were made on the same day as animals, so all the evidence for animal species existing before people is false too. Dinosaurs undoubtedly existed, unless God is trying to fool us—some Christians believed that too!—so humans and dinosaurs must have coexisted on earth. Creationists believe it, and show it in their pretty but pretty stupid Creationism exhibitions. Ussher was a pious bishop, but a diligent scholar. He was not a dunce. If he were alive today, he would have been torn between what he had been taught in an unenlightened age, and the importance of all the new data available to us now. To continue to believe his Annals, he would have to have been a dunce.
