Many of us might be familiar with the story
of Noah and
the flood, we’ve got the tower of Babel
where the first
languages were all confused and that’s kinda
the origin
of human culture. We’ve got Methuselah who
lived 969
years and kind of a whole line of people living
ridiculously long times. We’ve got Enoch
who was taken
up to heaven, disappeared one day. So these
stories are
all in Genesis.
Genesis is the first book in the Old Testament
and it
kicks off the story of God’s people, so
it’s thought maybe
to have been linked back to Moses. We don’t
really know
who wrote the book, it isn’t written in
the first person.
The book of Genesis as we read it today was
put
together 3 or 400 years before the time of
Jesus, it’s
made up of a handful of different pieces of
material.
Some of it is very ancient folklore, some
of it is sort of
pseudo scientific folklore that owes an awful
lot to
Babylon.
Genesis means origins, beginnings, and that’s
really the
theme of the whole book. It’s the beginning
of creation
of the world, the beginning of God’s interaction
with the
world.
The word Genesis is the Latin form, if you
want to be
technical, of the Greek word for ‘begettings’.
And what does begetting mean?
Well, begettings means ‘how things came
to be.’
Well, one of the key things about Genesis
is that it deals
with the creation, the most obvious thing
about it. And
the most obvious question you have to ask
then, is what
does this mean? What does this story mean,
is it real? Is
it a metaphor or whatever? I work on James
Ussher who
was an Irish Archbishop who lived from 1581-1656,
and
he’s known these days for one thing only.
Look him up
on Google and you will find hundreds of thousands
of
hits for James Ussher as the man who said
the world
was created in 4004 BC on the 23rd of October.
There’s
two people who respond to Ussher these days,
there is
the creationists who think he is a hero and
there is
everyone else who thinks he was faintly mad.
In fact
they are both wrong. What Ussher was doing
was using
the most respectable science, biblical scholarship,
history, archaeology, chronology, everything,
to try and
date the Bible precisely. What he wanted to
find was
dates in the Bible, such as Nebuchadnezzar,
say which
you could find in history, apply that date
to the Bible
then count back all those generations, X begat
Y begat Z
in the bible. Count back in the bible and
get to the
creation.
The church fathers, those who formed the Christian
church, especially in the first few centuries,
they didn’t
read like some people do today. They didn’t
read
Genesis, what we would call literally. So
Genesis One
where you would say there were different days,
some
people today think: ‘Oh, that must mean
the world was
created in six days’ but the church fathers
never
understood it this way at all. They never
read it what we
would call literally, but for them, they were
reading it
literally, which is to say it had a literal
truth. But for
them what literal meant was, you know, what
was it
trying to tell us and in fact if you look
at someone like
St. Augustine, writing in the fourth and fifth
century, he
said that if Christians were to read Genesis
and then
turn it to science they would be talking nonsense.
Because he said: ‘listen there are astronomers,
there
are physicists (they wouldn’t have been
called that in
that time) but there are different scientists
who know
more about that than we do. So if you try
and make it
into science, you’re gonna make the faith
look
ridiculous.’
But it does, history does become the key point
something really very crucial around the time
of the
reformation in the 16th century because they
think that
the books of the bible, particularly in the
Old Testament,
have to be historical fact, that that’s
the foundation of
their importance and their value. The symbolism
they
think is less important, what they want is
concrete
history. And a good example of the way in
which that
becomes important is that all of a sudden
in the 16th
century, people start looking for the Garden
of Eden.
They think where was it? Where might it have
been? So
they start expeditions to try and find the
Garden of
Eden, they start expeditions to try and find
Noah’s ark.
And the reason that becomes so important is
because if
they can nail it, they can nail the location,
they can find
the boat that Noah built, they can say, there
we go,
you’ve got the historical facts, the book
is true. Whereas
in the early church that wasn’t the issue,
it didn’t
matter. So this business of going and looking
for the
Garden of Eden and going looking for Noah’s
Ark,
becomes absolutely crucial to a very particular
moment
in Christian history.
What we have here is the, the opening page
of Ussher’s
Annals of the World: The Annals of the Old
Testament,
From the beginning of the World. He starts
with Genesis
1 Verse 1, the beginning of the Bible. ‘In
the beginning,
God created heaven and earth which beginning
of time
according to our chronology fell upon the
entrance of the
night preceding the twenty third day of October
in 4004
BC.’ I think Ussher would be deeply embarrassed
by the
fact that what he is remembered for is something
on
which he was wrong. Would you want to be remembered
for the, for something you got spectacularly
wrong? And
the whole point is he got so much spectacularly
right.
Where was the Garden of Eden thought to be
located?
Somewhere in what is today, Iraq. In what
was then
known as Mesopotamia, near the river Tigris
in
Euphrates. Noah’s ark was thought to come
to rest at
the top of Mount Ararat, which is a dormant
volcano in
Turkey, and Genesis is quite clear that Mount
Ararat was
the place where Noah’s Ark came to rest.
So have they gone and recovered it now?
LAUGHS
I don’t think anyone has found it. Several
people have
claimed to have found the remains of Noah’s
Ark, but I
don’t think it’s been definitely, definitively
discovered.
There was a general assumption at Ussher’s
time that
the world would last for 6000 years. And if
you take then
4004 as the creation of the world, you can
do a little bit
of math and you can work out that therefore
the end of
the world was going to be 2004. And there
were in fact
quite a few people around about the 23rd of
October
2004 wondering whether the world was going
to come to
an end. Now it didn’t, as we know and at
the time, they
did wonder whether they might have got it
wrong, which
of course they did, cause there is no year
0. So the
actual year for the end of the world was 2005
and of
course we know it didn’t happen then. But
this is typical
of the way in which people trivialise Ussher
and forget
about the basic fact: at the time he was doing
the best
he could to the best of his scientific and
theological
knowledge.
