The Truth About The Creation
God's Glory, God's Handiwork, God's
Word, The Genesis Account
A Dissertation by Pastor Ed Rice January 2017
13: James
Ussher's Calendar and Dating Methods
James
Ussher (1581-1656) was the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate
of all Ireland between 1625 and 1656, but two factors make him
pertinent in this day. First is his staunch belief in the verbal
plenary inspiration of the infallible inerrant Scriptures. James
Ussher preceded by 300 years the diabolical deceptions of Brook Foss
Westcott (1825-1903) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-1892), two
Anglican ministers fully steeped in the Alexandrian philosophy that
“there is no perfect Bible”
Westcott and Hort brought Biblical criticism into vogue for
'scholars'-so called and their critical works have not considered the
Holy Bible inerrant since. The tremendous strides made by James
Ussher are, thus, all the more noteworthy. It is also noteworthy that
Ussher was contemporary with the 57 linguistic giants that labored
for 7 years (1604-1611)
to translate the Greek Received Text (T.R.) and the Ben Chayyim
Masoretic Text (M.T.)
into the English language. Biblical Scholars of that day readily
believed in the verbal plenary inspiration of the infallible,
inerrant Scriptures. That is so not true after Westcott and Hort's
critical efforts induced Bible critics to fix all the perceived
errors in God's Holy Scriptures; a myriad of copyright
“fixes”
now flood the markets. It is also worth mentioning that the
Septuagint is an Alexandrian corrupted Greek translation of the
Hebrew Bible, and all the chronology corrections it produces are not
viable. Anything from Egypt, i.e. the Septuagint, Sinaiticus, and
Vaticanus is of the world and therefore corrupt.
Secondly
James Ussher was contemporary with Jesuit astronomer Christopher
Clavius (1537-1612) who was recruited by Rome to fix the Julian
Calendar which had allowed the solar equinox to drift from March 21st
to almost April fools day. The Roman popes, who thought themselves
infallible, were tired of dating Easter on a very fallible Julian
Calendar.
Julius Caesar needed a reformed calendar for his world empire and
following his conquest of Egypt in 709 a.u.c. (i.e. From founding of
the city of Rome) (which is what one now calls 46 BC ) he adopted the
Alexandrian Aristarchus calendar, which recognized a solar year of
365 ¼ days, likely taken from the Babylonians in 239 BC This
Julian
Calendar, as it became called, was 11.23 minutes per year to long,
accumulating a whole day every 130 years. In James Ussher's lifetime
it was resolved to make a leap year only when the year was divisible
by 4 but not by 100 or if it was divisible by 400, because a year has
365.2422 days, not 365.25 days. This intriguing mathematical solution
allowed Ussher a zeal to roll back a calendar through all eons of
time, even back to the six-day creation! The extraordinary detail
found in the Bible and the extraordinary exactness found in this new
calendar mathematics made James Ussher the extraordinary explorer of
past chronologies. His extensive investigative work is still
trustworthy today. The modernist scholars scoff at James Ussher's
extensive research for two reasons. He believed in every word of the
Holy Bible as inspired, inerrant and infallible, they do not. He thus
believed in a six-day creation which according to that inerrant
infallible Biblical record occurred in 4004 BC, they did not. He did
not use secular sources to correct his Holy Bible, they regularly do.
An
intriguing insight about Ussher's exactness comes from his zeal in
affixing the creation date to October 23rd, 4004 BC. It is amazing
that one can sit in a study with an internet connection and access
all 1200 pages of his work in “The Annuls of the
World”. Do not
miss the free purview of the public domain document and Ussher's
tremendous detailing of Biblical History. Without the aid of
calculators or computers James Ussher determined that in that year,
all the planets were lined up and the Sunday nearest to the autumnal
equinox occurred on October the 23rd, 4004 BC.
That zeal has lead to some of the grossest criticism of his genius.
Colin Groves, a Professor of Bioanthropology at Australian National
University published an article with some of the most open slander
and unmitigated guile against Ussher. Grove's sarcastic, mocking and
demeaning style, originally published in 1996 and titled “From
Ussher to Slusher, from Archbish to Gish: or, not in a million
years.”
It attacks
all creation
scientists and openly scoffs God and his Holy Bible. I cite it here
because it evidences Groves' open hatred toward James Ussher's
genius, and because it is a representative reaction of atheistic
evolutionists in general.
The list of references blatantly attacked and slandered in Groves'
article include:
Gish. D.T. 1979. Evolution ? The fossils say no! San
Diego:
Creation-Life Books.
Gish, D.T. I 9~5. Evolution: the Challenge Of the Fossil
Record.
San Diego: Creation-Life Books.
Ham, K. 1983. The origin of the races. Ex Nihilo, 6, 4:6-l2.
Humphreys, D.R. nd. Evidence for a young world. Creation
Science Foundation, P.O.Box 302, Sunnybank, Qld., 4109.
Lubenow. M.L. 1992. Bones of Contention: a Creationist
Assessment
of Human Fossils. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House.
Morris, H.M. 1970. Biblical Cosmology and Modern Science. Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House.
Morris, H.M. 1972. The Remarkable Birth of the Planet Earth.
Minneapolis: Dimension Books.
Morris, H.M. 1974. The Troubled Waters of Evolution. San
Diego: Creation-Life Books.
Morris, H.M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. 2nd.ed.
El Cajon,
CA: Master Books.
Price, B. I 990. The Creation Science Controversy.
Sydney:
Millenium Books.
Setterfield, B. 1981, 1983. The velocity of light and the age of the
universe. Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, 4, 1 :38-8
and 3:56-81.
Slusher, H.C. 1979. Age of the Cosmos. San Diego:
Creation-Life Books.
Snelling, A.A. 1990. Koongarra Uranium Deposits. In RE. Hughes (ed.)
Geology of the Mineral Deposits of Australia and Paptia New
Guinea, pp.807-812.
Taylor, C. 1983. What happened at Babel? Ex Nihilo, 6,
2:20-23.
Whitcomb, J.C. 1959. Darius the Mede: the Historical
Chronology of
Daniel. Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed
Publishing Co.
Whitcomb, J.C. & H.M.Morris 1961. The Genesis Flood. Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House.
In all honesty I have not read all these works, but it seems that if
C. Groves is against them, I can in general recommend them.
One should not overlook the genius of James Ussher and his diligent
research in setting chronological dates to every event in the Bible.
Modern scholars, and more so the modernist scholars, use secular
resources to try to correct Ussher's methods. After all, they
contend, James Ussher had nothing but a Holy Bible to use in his
research. They think they have “evolved” to a much
higher state
of understanding with all their archeological discoveries. It is wise
for a Bible student to keep Ussher's dates and discard the modernist
works, in the same way that they keep older Roman Catholic bibles,
which came from Alexandria Egypt, and discard the T.R. and Masoretic
text.
To Continue in this series click the link below:
Epilogue.
. . 258
www.truthaboutthechrist.com/thetruthaboutthecreation/epilogue.html
God's Glory, God's Handiwork, God's Word, The Genesis Account
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