How We Know the World Was Created in 4004 BCE…

[00:00:01] How We Know the World was created in 4004 BCE by Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth in my Bible intro, I included a number of boxes that deal with issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion, but of related interest or importance. Here's one of the ones in my chapter on Genesis in connection with interpretations that want to take the book as science or history. [00:00:28] For a lot of you this will be old news, but then again, so is Genesis. [00:00:34] In 1650 CE, an Irish archbishop and scholar, James Ussher, engaged in a detailed study of when the world began. Ussher based his calculations on the genealogies of the Bible, starting with those in the Book of Genesis which state not only who begat whom, but also indicate in many instances how long each of the people thus begotten lived, and a detailed study of other ancient sources such as Babylonian and Roman history. On these grounds he argued that the world was created in 4004 BCE. [00:01:09] In fact, at noon on October 23, this chronology became dominant throughout western Christendom. It was printed widely in King James Bibles and continues to be believed by non evolutionarily minded Christians today. [00:01:24] This has been a useful dating for many Christians since that time. For many centuries, going back in fact to the early second century of the Common Era, there have been Christians who thought that the world would last for 6,000 years. [00:01:38] The reason is a bit complicated. According to a passage in the New Testament with the Lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. [00:01:51] Now if the creation took God six days to complete and each day is a thousand years, then the creation must be destined to last a thousand years, right? [00:02:01] That would mean it would all end about 2,000 years after Jesus had died. [00:02:06] Why though, did Archbishop Usher not simply round things off a bit and opt for the year 4000 BCE say sometime in the afternoon? [00:02:16] It was because he realized full well that there was a problem or two with our modern calendars. The calendar we use was invented in the 6th century CE by a Christian monk named Dionysius Exiguus, whose name in English translates as Denis the Short. [00:02:34] Dionysius began the new era CE or AD with the year one. He had no option to that, since since the concept of zero was not mathematically worked out yet in the 6th century and so the first year could not have been zero. [00:02:50] But even more than that, Dionysius Exiguus miscalculated the date of Jesus birth from which the era had its beginning. For if Jesus was in fact an infant during the reign of King Herod, as related by both Matthew and Luke in the New Testament, then he must have been born no later than 4 BCE the year of Herod's death. [00:03:11] This creates a problem, of course, for those who continue to work with the abbreviations Ad anno Domini Latin for the year of our Lord and BC Before Christ, since, as sometimes noted, according to the calendar we use, Jesus was actually born four years before Christ. [00:03:32] The larger problem, though, for literalistic Christians who believe that the universe came into being not over 13 billion years ago, as modern astronomers maintain, but in 4004 BCE as Usher claimed, and who think that the world is supposed to exist for exactly 6,000 years based on the six days of creation in Genesis, it should have ended already by noon on October 23, 1997.