Theology: dating the Creation

    James Ussher (1581-1656), the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh in Ireland, is famous for calculating, from intensive study of the Old Testament, that God had created the world in 4004 B.C. But how and why did he arrive at such a strange date?

   There are no dates of any kind in the Gospels and the New Testament. Obviously, only Mary and Joseph could know exactly when Jesus was born. It should have been possible for Luke, or Paul, or some other early Christian to discover a date for the Crucifixion ("The 17th year of the Emperor Tiberius", or something on those lines?), but they were not historians in any modern sense and such details did not interest them. 

  Attempts were made to calculate the date of Jesus's birth in the 3rd century, and the system of numbering years with which we are all familiar, whether as BC/ AD or more recently BCE/ CE, gradually became used throughout Western Europe. But as scholarship advanced, an awkward problem emerged.

   We all know the early chapters of St Matthew's Gospel with its story of the three kings at the Nativity. (Incidentally, Matthew never calls them kings, only "wise men from the East", nor does he say how many there were: it's only the fact that they give three gifts that leads people to think there must have been three of them). But before finding the baby Jesus, they meet King Herod, and there the problem lies, for in Roman dating Herod died in the equivalent of 4 BC!

  By the Early Modern period, it was realised that the date of the nativity had been miscalculated; but what to do? It was clearly impossible to change the whole system of dating: far simpler just to acknowledge the error. So when Archbishop Ussher calculated a date for the creation of the world, he estimated it as 4004 BC rather than the more convenient 4000. (It is also why, in the past century, certain evangelists predicted the end of the world in 1996 rather than 2000)

   It is a mistake to believe that it was only with Darwin in the mid-19th century that people began to question Ussher's dating. In fact, many had been puzzling over this for over 150 years. More about this on a later Blog entry.