On this date (Oct 22) in 4004 BC something very important happened. According to James Ussher, an Irish theologian in the 17th century, that’s the day God spoke the universe into existence. Pretty big deal!
Obviously, in today’s world, Ussher is considered to be just a wee bit off. He has the creation of the universe happening some 2000 years after the first use of bricks; 1200 years after the development of wine; 1000 years after the domestication of rice, beans, gourds, maize, and water buffalo; 500 years after the development of copper jewelry, the plow, the wheel, and beer; and 238 years after the first date on the Egyptian calendar. But hey, what’s 13 or 14 billion years between friends?
Still, as it turns out, criticisms of Ussher aren’t really fair. Obviously he didn’t have anything that was even close to modern tools at his disposal. But more than that, in his time, there just wasn’t a paradigm that would allow for any kind of non-biblical time calculation.
Given his historical context and the constraints of contemporary knowlege, he did a pretty good job! His scholarship was fairly serious. Along with his biblical knowledge (figuring differences in ancient languages, counting generations enumerated in the Bible, etc.), he brought in several pieces of extra-biblical information – showing a kind of intellectual rigor that wasn’t common in his day (or, in some circles, even in our day!). He researched non-biblical sources to uncover the histories of the Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. He accurately pinpointed the dates for the deaths of Alexander the Great (323 BC) and Julius Caesar (44 BC).
All in all, it was rigorous scholarship, pulling together the best of what he had available and arriving at what was a remarkably reasonable conclusion.
It’s pretty easy to fall prey to the temptation to judge folks in the past by applying present knowledge. In just about every case, that’s not fair… and in this case, it’s not just unfair – it’s negligent. Consider how he’d be received today: a theologian willing to incorporate what we know about the world from extra-biblical sources into his theological worldview? Folks from the Westboro Baptist church would immediately declare him a heretic and ban his books… and that’s a pretty solid recommendation!
Well done, Bishop Ussher!