Posted on 10/23/2005 9:19:48 AM PDT by null and void
Bishop James Ussher Sets the Date for Creation: October 23, 4004 BC
When Clarence Darrow prepared his famous examination of William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial, he chose to focus primarily on a chronology of Biblical events prepared by a seventeenth-century Irish bishop, James Ussher. American fundamentalists in 1925 found—and generally accepted as accurate—Ussher’s careful calculation of dates, going all the way back to Creation, in the margins of their family Bibles. (In fact, until the 1970s, the Bibles placed in nearly every hotel room by the Gideon Society carried his chronology.) The King James Version of the Bible introduced into evidence by the prosecution in Dayton contained Ussher’s famous chronology, and Bryan more than once would be forced to resort to the bishop’s dates as he tried to respond to Darrow’s questions.
The chronology first appeared in The Annals of the Old Testament, a monumental work first published in London in the summer of 1650. In 1654, Ussher added a part two which took his history through Rome’s destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The project, which produced 2,000 pages in Latin, occupied twenty years of Ussher’s life.
[snip]
The date forever tied to Bishop Ussher appears in the first paragraph of the first page of The Annals. Ussher wrote: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, which beginning of time, according to this chronology, occurred at the beginning of the night which preceded the 23rd of October in the year 710 of the Julian period.” In the right margin of the page, Ussher computes the date in “Christian” time as 4004 B.C.
(Excerpt) Read more at law.umkc.edu ...
Sometimes I can wrap up a days work in 20 or 30 minutes. Surely God can do better than that!
Was that GMT, EST, CST, or PST? It couldn't be daylight savings time, could it? Anyway what's the date on the Gregorian calendar?
A day would have been a long time before the sun was created.
Perhaps that was the origin of Daylight Savings Time. :-)
Darrow moves from Creation to the date of the Great Flood. “How long ago was the flood, Mr. Bryan?” Bryan replies, “Let me see Ussher’s calculation about it.” Darrow hands a Bible to his witness. Bryan begins searching for the date. At first, he cannot find it. “I think this does not give it.” Darrow assures him that Ussher’s date for the disaster is indeed in his Bible, and Bryan finally locates it. “It is given here as 2348 years B.C.,” Bryan says finally. “You believe that all the living things not contained in the ark were destroyed?” Darrow asks. “I think the fish may have lived,” Bryan answers. “Outside of the fish?” “I do,” Bryan replies. “So that 4,200 years ago there was not a living thing on the earth, excepting the people of the ark and the animals of the ark and the fishes?” Bryan finds no “reason for denying, disputing, or rejecting” that assertion. Darrow asks, rhetorically: “Don’t you know there are any number of civilizations that are traced back to more than 5,000 years?” Bryan refuses to concede the point. I will not accept, “against what I believe to be the inspired Word of God,” that any such ancient civilizations exist, he says. “I am not satisfied by any evidence that I have seen.
Civilizations all over the world older than 5,000 years Placemarker
Genesis 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
The first two verses show a period of time before God created the light and seperated it from darkness, creating day and night. It doesn't show the first day being at the begininning of the creation of the earth, nor how much time transpired between the creation of the earth and the first day.
That's why He made it perfectly clear when He said "An evening and a morning were the first day." That's why the Jews start their days in the afternoon. There is no misunderstanding, there is only belief and non belief.
The Jewish calendar is at about 5758 or so not 6009. I don't keep up with the exact year, but I should. There are some quibles about the years the Jews were in captivity as to whether they were correctly counted or not so we probably can't know the exact time from creation. We are most likely less than 6000 but more than 5758.
Is there anything conrete in the bible stating when God created time, and whether it was before or after light, the heavens, etc?
Perhaps... and the Genesis account doesn't have the sun and the moon being created until the fourth day of creation. However, there is one problem with this. The Hebrew word for 'day' apparently (I'm not conversant in Hebrew myself but this is what I've read) makes it clear that what is being referred to in the Genesis account is a '24 hour period'. On this basis, it doesn't matter if the sun was created or not.
Ok, so what year did the "visitors" show up?
I think maybe God does more work than you?
Silliness factor: HIGH
Yup.
One can hope...
Silly? Moi????
[At least I'm not cranky!]
Grrrrr!
*lol*
The Great Year of precession is about 24,000 years. The Great Year was discovered during the Renaissance, but the funny thing is that it was known already when the Great Pyramid was built, and when the South American Pyramids and Chinese Pyramids were built. They also knew the cause of Precession, which we apparently do not and have to use a modern version of epicycles to explain.
I think it should be declared a national Holiday so we could at least get tomorrow of work..... another day of rest!
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