The Age of Earth in Church History

Until the end of the eighteenth century, Christians were virtually unanimous in the belief that the Earth was about six thousand years old according to the teaching of Scripture.  -- Davis A. Young, old-earth geologist, 1982.¹

I am sure you may get into Q. R. what will free the science from Moses, for if treated seriously, the party are quite prepared for it.  -- Charles Lyell to Poulett Scrope, 14 June 1830, on the review of Principles of Geology for the Quarterly Review.²

Based on my own research, no early church father taught any form of a day-age view or an earth older than 10,000 years.  -- John Millam, Reasons to Believe, 2011.³

Summary

This article asks three questions.  How did Jews and Christians date the world before geology existed?  When and why did deep time enter Christian thought?  And which doctrines rest on the answer?  The method is the site's usual one:  every writer is read in his own text, at a verified page, and the totals are added up.

1. Every Jewish and Christian writer before about 1750 who gave a number put creation under 6,000 years before his own day.  Josephus counted "five thousand years" of sacred history (AD 94).⁴  Theophilus of Antioch reached 5,698 years to AD 180.⁵  Clement of Alexandria reached 5,784 to AD 192.⁶  Julius Africanus put the Incarnation in the year of the world 5500, Hippolytus in 5500 or 5502, Eusebius reached 5,228 years to the fifteenth year of Tiberius, and the Byzantine Chronicon Paschale put creation on 21 March 5509 BC.^{7 8 9 10}  Augustine wrote twice that "not yet six thousand years" had passed since Adam.^{11 12}  Bede counted 3,952 years from Adam to Christ, Luther said "6000 years ago the world did not exist," Calvin said the world had not "completed its six thousandth year," and Ussher, Scaliger, Petavius, Lightfoot and Kepler all landed within a century of 4000 BC.^{13 14 15 16 17}  The spread between the totals (3,952 to 5,509 years to Christ) is entirely a dispute about which text of Genesis 5 and 11 to add up, never about whether to add.

2. The fathers' "a day is a thousand years" was a prophecy about the world's future, not a reading of the creation week.  Irenaeus, Justin, Hippolytus and Lactantius took Psalm 90:4 to mean that the six days of creation prefigured 6,000 years of history followed by a millennial Sabbath.^{18 19 20}  The same writers computed those 6,000 years from the genealogies and said the end was near.  A scheme that makes the world end at AM 6000 is the opposite of deep time.

3. The fathers who spoke to the length of a creation day said twenty-four hours.  Basil:  "twenty-four hours fill up the space of one day."²¹  Ambrose:  "Scripture established a law that twenty-four hours, including both day and night, should be given the name of day only."²²  Ephrem:  "let no one think that there is anything allegorical in the works of the six days."²³  The two allegorists, Origen and Augustine, shortened creation rather than lengthening it:  Origen thought the days could not be literal because there was no sun yet, and still told Celsus the world was "not yet ten thousand years old";^{24 25}  Augustine held that God "created all things together" in one instant, and still counted fewer than 6,000 years since Adam.^{26 11}

4. Hugh Ross's claim that Josephus, Irenaeus, Origen, Basil, Augustine and Aquinas "interpreted the creation days of Genesis 1 as long periods of time" fails on every name.²⁷  Josephus wrote that the world was made "in just six days" and deferred only the question of why Moses wrote "one day" rather than "first day."²⁸  Irenaeus's thousand-year "day" is the day of Adam's death, not a creation day.²⁹  Basil and Augustine are quoted above.  Aquinas records Augustine's instantaneous view and the "seven distinct days" of everyone else, and says elsewhere that the world's beginning is known "by faith alone."^{30 31}  Ross's own organisation conceded the point in 2011:  "no early church father taught any form of a day-age view or an earth older than 10,000 years."³  The old-earth geologist Davis Young had said the same in 1982:  "We find absolutely no one arguing that the world is tens of thousands of years old on the grounds that the six days are used figuratively for indefinite periods of time."¹

5. Deep time entered from geology, and its first Christian adopters said so.  Buffon printed 75,000 years in 1780, Hutton "no vestige of a beginning" in 1788.^{32 33}  Thomas Chalmers, who invented the gap theory, said in 1804 that "the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe" while lecturing on geology.³⁴  Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise (1836) adopted the gap to "reconcile the text of Genesis with physical appearances."³⁵  Hugh Miller switched from the gap to day-ages because of what he found in Scottish rocks, and said so in his preface.³⁶  Charles Hodge, the most careful Reformed theologian of the century, admitted that "taking this account by itself, it would be most natural to understand the word in its ordinary sense; but if that sense brings the Mosaic account into conflict with facts ... then it is obligatory on us to adopt that other."³⁷  No one claimed the new readings had been found in the Hebrew.

6. Ronald Numbers is right that Flood geology and organised young-earth creationism are twentieth-century products, and wrong if that is taken to mean the young age is.  Numbers found no post-Darwin creationist before 1900 "who rejected the antiquity of the earth," and showed that Bryan and Riley at the time of Scopes were day-age men.^{38 38}  That is true of a sixty-year window.  Finding 1 covers the seventeen centuries before it.  What George McCready Price and The Genesis Flood (1961) revived was the Flood as the cause of the strata, a position Buckland and Sedgwick had held and publicly abandoned in the 1830s.^{39 38}

7. Several doctrines depend on the chronology and the site should not pretend otherwise.  The Sabbath command rests on six days of creation (Exod 20:11).  Jesus placed the making of male and female "from the beginning of creation" (Mark 10:6), which is an odd sentence if humanity arrived 4.5 billion years in.⁴⁰  The genealogies of Luke 3 and Genesis 5 and 11 run without a break from Jesus to Adam.  Paul's argument in Romans 5 needs a first man whose sin brought death.  Against this, Warfield in 1911 called the antiquity of man "a matter of entire indifference" to theology, and the old-earth reply to Mark 10:6 is that "the beginning" means the beginning of the human story.^{41 42}  Both replies are stated in full below.

8. Weak points of the young-earth use of this history, stated plainly.  (a) The fathers' totals rest on the Septuagint's numbers, which the site elsewhere argues are secondary;  a 5,500-year total is not a vindication of Ussher's 4,004.  (b) Church history is evidence for what the text was taken to mean, not for whether it is true;  Barr's distinction between "literally intended" and "factually true" stands.⁴³  (c) Two pre-geology writers did loosen the days:  Newton privately told Burnet in 1681 that the first days could be made "as long as you please" if the earth was not yet spinning, and Augustine's instantaneous creation made the days non-temporal.⁴⁴  Neither imagined an old earth, but both show that the day was not sealed.  (d) Origen's "less than ten thousand" is not "less than six thousand."

Verdict:  For seventeen centuries the only question Jews and Christians argued was which text to add up, and every answer fell between 3,952 and 5,509 years before Christ.  The claim that the church fathers taught long creation days is false for every father named, and Reasons to Believe's own historian has said so.  Deep time entered Christian thought from geology after 1780, through men who said in print that they were reinterpreting Genesis to fit the rocks.  That history settles what the text meant to its readers.  It does not settle whether the text is true, and this article does not claim that it does.

The Jewish sources counted the years and got a young world

The habit of adding up Genesis is older than the church.  Josephus opened Against Apion (about AD 94) by saying that his Antiquities set out a history "containing five thousand years" drawn "from our sacred books."⁴  Five thousand is a round figure, but it is the right order:  Josephus's own Genesis 5 figures put the Flood at 2,262 years after Adam, the Septuagint's number.⁴⁵

Josephus also read the creation week as a week.  "Moses says, That in just six days the world, and all that is therein, was made."²⁸  He noticed that Genesis 1:5 says "one day" rather than "the first day," and promised to explain that "in a treatise by itself."  The treatise never appeared.  Ross makes much of the promise;  section 6 returns to it.

The Book of Jubilees (second century BC) dates the whole of Genesis by jubilees, weeks and years from creation.  Its Flood falls in the 27th jubilee, AM 1307, the Samaritan figure, and the book gives the patriarchs' begetting ages exactly as a chronologist would.⁴⁶  Seder Olam Rabbah, the rabbinic chronicle of the second century AD, opens with "from Adam to the Flood 1,656 years," the Masoretic sum, and runs the count forward to the destruction of the Temple.⁴⁷  The Jewish calendar still counts from that era;  the year beginning in September 2026 is AM 5787.

The Talmud fixed the frame.  Sanhedrin 97a records two versions of the same rule.  Rav Ketina:  "Six thousand years is the duration of the world, and it is in ruins for one thousand years."  The school of Elijah:  "Six thousand years is the duration of the world.  Two thousand of the six thousand years are characterized by chaos; two thousand years are characterized by Torah ... and two thousand years are the period of the coming of the Messiah."⁴⁸  This is the source of the Christian "world week," and it only works if the world is a few thousand years old when the writer speaks.

The one Jewish writer who did not take the six days at face value made creation shorter, not longer.  Philo of Alexandria (died about AD 50) wrote that "the world was made in six days, not because the Creator stood in need of a length of time (for it is natural that God should do everything at once, not merely by uttering a command, but by even thinking of it); but because the things created required arrangement; and number is akin to arrangement."⁴⁹  In the Allegorical Interpretation he was blunter:  "It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time."⁵⁰  Philo is the ancestor of Augustine's instantaneous creation, and of nothing else.

The fathers computed totals, and every total was under 6,000

The early Christians inherited both the arithmetic and the frame.  Their totals are in the table.  Each figure is the number of years the writer counted from Adam to the event named;  the text-form is the Genesis 5 and 11 numbers he used.

Three things stand out.

First, nobody declined to count.  Eusebius came closest:  he opened his Chronicle by warning that "it is not possible to know unerringly the chronology of the entire world" and refused to print an Anno Mundi date for the Nativity.  He then printed the sums for all three text-forms anyway, 5,518 years by the Septuagint to his own day, 1,237 fewer by the Hebrew, 935 fewer by the Samaritan.⁹  The familiar "Eusebius 5199" is Jerome's 2,015 years from Abraham added to Eusebius's 3,184 from Adam to Abraham;  neither man printed the total.

Second, the spread is a text-critical spread.  The Masoretic Genesis 5 and 11 give 1,948 years from Adam to Abraham;  the Septuagint gives 3,184 to 3,334 depending on Methuselah's age and the second Cainan.  Every chronographer then put about 2,000 to 2,300 years from Abraham to Christ.  Add the Hebrew figures and you get Bede's 3,952 or Ussher's 4,004;  add the Greek ones and you get 5,199 to 5,509.  The site's text article owns that dispute and argues the Hebrew numbers are original.  What matters here is that the dispute has a ceiling.  No text-form reaches 6,000 years before Christ, and no ancient writer tried to make one.

Third, the Christian totals cluster at 5,500 for a reason that has nothing to do with the manuscripts.  Hippolytus derived the year 5500 from the ark of the covenant:  its length of two and a half cubits, breadth of one and a half, and height of one and a half add to five and a half, "so that the 5500 years might be signified thereby."⁸  Six centuries later George Syncellus graded Africanus for dating the Incarnation to 5500 "in agreement with the apostolic tradition" and went two years astray on the Passion.⁵³  A number that a chronographer must conform to is a target, and the target was the world-week:  Christ comes in the sixth millennium, the Sabbath at 6000.  The next section explains why that target is fatal to the long-day reading.

Origen's figure needs a note because it is the loosest.  Celsus had mocked "the Mosaic cosmogony, which teaches that the world is not yet ten thousand years old, but very much less than that."  Origen did not dispute the description.  He turned it round:  Celsus, by dating Deucalion's flood as recent, "has fallen into testifying that the world is comparatively young and not yet ten thousand years old."²⁵  Ten thousand is a Greek round number (myrioi), and Origen's own phrase is "very much less than that."  It is not six thousand, and the article does not pretend it is.

Two later witnesses show that the count outlived antiquity.  Bede, working from Jerome's Vulgate, got 3,952 years from Adam to Christ and was denounced at a feast in Hexham in 708 for heresy, because his figure put Christ in the fourth millennium rather than the sixth and so broke the world-week.  His reply to Plegwin survives:  "in Octavian's 42nd year the Lord is born, 3952 years from Adam being completed, or according to others 5199."¹³  The quarrel was over which millennium, never over whether there were millennia to count.  Augustine's own handling of the Hebrew-versus-Greek numbers in City of God 15.10-14, where he rules that the original language wins when the two disagree, is set out in the text article and not repeated.

The world-week made a long day of the millennium, not of the creation week

This is the passage on which the whole "long-day fathers" claim rests, so it is quoted at length.  Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.28.3, written about AD 180:

For in as many days as this world was made, in so many thousand years shall it be concluded.  And for this reason the Scripture says:  "Thus the heaven and the earth were finished, and all their adornment.  And God brought to a conclusion upon the sixth day the works that He had made; and God rested upon the seventh day from all His works."  This is an account of the things formerly created, as also it is a prophecy of what is to come.  For the day of the Lord is as a thousand years; and in six days created things were completed:  it is evident, therefore, that they will come to an end at the sixth thousand year.¹⁸

Read the sentence structure.  The days are "the things formerly created," the account of what happened.  The thousand years are "a prophecy of what is to come."  Irenaeus is not saying that each creation day lasted a thousand years.  He is saying that the six literal days foreshadow six thousand years of world history, after which the seventh-day rest arrives as the millennium.  The six days are the type;  the six millennia are the antitype.  A type has to be real and short for the antitype to be long.

Lactantius, a century later, made the logic explicit and dated it.  "Let the philosophers, who enumerate thousands of ages from the beginning of the world, know that the six thousandth year is not yet completed, and that when this number is completed the consummation must take place."  Then:  "since all the works of God were completed in six days, the world must continue in its present state through six ages, that is, six thousand years."²⁰  The "philosophers who enumerate thousands of ages" are the deep-time party of his day, and Lactantius's reply is that the world is not yet 6,000 years old and will end when it is.  This is a young-earth chronology with an expiry date.  The same frame is in Hippolytus, who wrote that "6,000 years must needs be accomplished, in order that the Sabbath may come," and in the Talmud, as shown above.^{8 48}

Robert Bradshaw, who catalogued every early reference for his 1999 study, tabulated the writers who held the 6,000-year world-week (Pseudo-Barnabas, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Lactantius, Gaudentius and others) and drew the obvious conclusion:  the widespread acceptance of the creation-week pattern for earth history "implies the acceptance by many of the church fathers of two important points:  the earth is young (less than 6 000 years old).  The biblical genealogies provide an accurate chronology."⁵⁴  Davis Young, an old-earth geologist, concluded the same:  the fathers "did not believe that the creation had taken place over six millennia but that the totality of human history would occupy six thousand years, a millennium of history for each of the six days of creation."¹

There is one place where a father does stretch a "day" to a thousand years, and it is not a creation day.  Genesis 2:17 says Adam will die "in the day" he eats.  Adam lived 930 years.  Justin Martyr and Irenaeus both solved the puzzle with Psalm 90:4:  "we know that he did not complete a thousand years," wrote Justin;  Irenaeus reports "some" who "relegate the death of Adam to the thousandth year; for since 'a day of the Lord is as a thousand years,' he did not overstep the thousand years, but died within them."^{19 29}  This is exegesis of the death sentence, and it depends on Adam's lifespan being a literal 930 years counted from a literal creation.  It shows the fathers were willing to read "day" figuratively when a text forced them to.  It does not show that they read the creation days that way, and Irenaeus's 5.28.3 shows that they did not.

Basil, Ambrose and Ephrem said twenty-four hours

When a father addressed the length of a creation day directly, he gave the modern answer.

Basil of Caesarea preached nine homilies on the creation week in about 370.  On Genesis 1:5 he asked why the text says "one day" rather than "first day," and answered:  "If it therefore says 'one day,' it is from a wish to determine the measure of day and night, and to combine the time that they contain.  Now twenty-four hours fill up the space of one day -- we mean of a day and of a night."²¹  Basil goes on to give the same figure a second way, "a day is the time that the heavens starting from one point take to return there."  This is the passage Ross cites for Basil's alleged long days;  section 6 shows what Ross does with it.

Ambrose of Milan, who had read Basil, taught Augustine, and wrote his own Hexameron about 389, repeated the point:  "Scripture established a law that twenty-four hours, including both day and night, should be given the name of day only, as if one were to say the length of one day is twenty-four hours in extent."²²

Ephrem the Syrian, writing in Syriac at Edessa before 373 and outside the Greek allegorical tradition altogether, opened his commentary on Genesis with a warning:  "So let no one think that there is anything allegorical in the works of the six days.  No one can rightly say that the things that pertain to these days were symbolic."²³  His editors note that "most of the Commentary is a close literal reading of the text," and that its whole first half treats only the six days, the Fall and the Flood.²³

Theophilus of Antioch, the earliest of the group, did not need to say twenty-four hours because he did the sum:  2,242 years from creation to the Flood, and so on to 5,698, a count that only makes sense if the six days added nothing measurable to it.⁵  The same is true of every chronographer in the table above.  A writer who counts 5,500 years from Adam to Christ and calls the world 5,500 years old, as Young observed, has left no room for long days.¹

Jack Lewis, surveying the whole history for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society in 1989, found that the Antiochene school "was contending for literal interpretation" and that the hexaemeral homilies of Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose and the one under Chrysostom's name applied "a literal" reading;  his one-line summary of the Genesis text itself is that "the hallowing of the seventh day (Gen 2:1-2) presupposes the literal character of the six days."⁵⁵  Lewis is no young-earth writer, and his article is the best neutral map of the ground.

Origen and Augustine shortened creation; they did not lengthen it

Two fathers rejected the twenty-four-hour day, and both are named in every old-earth list.  What they put in its place is the point.

Origen's objection was that the first three days could not be solar days because the sun was made on the fourth.  "Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars -- the first day even without a sky?"²⁴  From this he concluded that the passage carries a spiritual meaning under a literal surface that cannot be pressed.  He did not conclude that the days were ages.  The same Origen, answering Celsus, defended a world "not yet ten thousand years old, but very much less than that."²⁵  Young's summary is fair:  Origen "came closest to holding the great antiquity of the Earth" and did not hold it;  he "argued for a succession of worlds rather than a very ancient existing world."¹

Augustine's position is better known and more often misreported.  In City of God 11.6 he wrote of the days:  "What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!"⁵⁶  In The Literal Meaning of Genesis he explained what he thought they were.  Reading Sirach 18:1 in the Old Latin as "He who lives forever created all things together" (creavit omnia simul), he concluded:  "It follows, therefore, that He, who created all things together, simultaneously created these six days, or seven, or rather the one day six or seven times repeated."  And:  "the reason why Scripture records that the creation was made perfect in six days, with the same day repeated six times, is that six is a perfect number, not that any interval of time was necessary for God, as if he could not have simultaneously created all things."²⁶  The "days" are the angels' knowledge of the works, presented in order;  the "evening" and "morning" are the angels turning from the creature to the Creator.  Aquinas summarised it exactly:  Augustine's opinion "is that all the days that are called seven, are one day represented in a sevenfold aspect ... while others consider there were seven distinct days, not one only."³⁰  Lewis's verdict:  "The contrast is not between solar days of twenty-four hours and unlimited aeons or ages.  Time is not involved at all."⁵⁵

So Augustine collapsed the six days to an instant.  He then counted the years from Adam like everyone else, and used the count as a weapon.  Against pagan histories "which profess to give the history of many thousand years," he replied that "reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed."¹¹  Against the Egyptian boast of a hundred thousand years of astronomy:  "since it is not yet six thousand years since the first man, who is called Adam, are not those to be ridiculed rather than refuted who try to persuade us of anything regarding a space of time so different from, and contrary to, the ascertained truth?"¹²  In the same book he spent five chapters on whether the Hebrew or the Greek numbers of Genesis 5 were right, which is not the behaviour of a man who thought the chronology negotiable.

Luther, who knew Augustine's argument well, rejected it on the ground Forster and Marston report accurately:  "that the account contains the language of time."⁵⁷  Luther's own words:  "when he says morning or day or evening, his meaning is the same as ours when we use those terms, without any allegory whatever. ... we conclude that Moses spoke literally and plainly and neither allegorically nor figuratively; that is, he means that the world with all creatures was created in six days as he himself expresses it."¹⁴  Calvin agreed:  "Here the error of those is manifestly refuted, who maintain that the world was made in a moment.  For it is too violent a cavil to contend that Moses distributes the work which God perfected at once into six days, for the mere purpose of conveying instruction."⁵⁸  Both Reformers were arguing against instantaneous creation.  Neither had heard of any other alternative.

Davis Young is right that Augustine "opened the door" to a non-literal week.¹  The door opened onto an instant, and nobody walked through it toward deep time for 1,300 years.

Hugh Ross's church-fathers claim, tested name by name

Ross's list circulates in this form:

Many of the early church fathers and other Biblical scholars interpreted the creation days of Genesis 1 as long periods of time.  The list of such proponents includes the Jewish historian Josephus (1st century); Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, apologist, and martyr (2nd century); Origen, who rebutted heathen attacks on Christian doctrine (3rd century); Basil (4th century); Augustine (5th century); and, later, Aquinas (13th century), to name a few.²⁷

The fuller argument is chapter 2 of Creation and Time (1994), which closes:  "A majority of those who wrote on the subject rejected the concrete interpretation of the Genesis creation days as six consecutive twenty-four-hour periods."⁵⁹  Each name was checked against the writer's own text.

The pattern is the same in every row.  Ross finds a father who says something non-literal about a day, and reports it as a father who held long creation days.  Justin, Irenaeus and Lactantius did make a "day" a thousand years, but it was the day of Psalm 90:4 mapped onto the world's future.  Origen and Augustine did reject solar days, but replaced them with no time at all.  Basil said twenty-four hours in the very passage Ross quotes.

Ross's organisation has since conceded this.  John Millam, writing for Reasons to Believe in September 2011, reported that Ross's "earliest statements claim that Irenaeus, Origen, Basil, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas taught that the creation days were long periods of time, which Mook rejects as incorrect.  In later books, Ross has backed away from many of those claims but still argues that Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and several others taught that the days of creation were 1,000 years each."  Millam's own finding:  "Based on my own research, no early church father taught any form of a day-age view or an earth older than 10,000 years.  In fact, the first people that I can clearly identify as teaching the old-earth view are Isaac Newton and Thomas Burnet in the late seventeenth century."³  Millam goes on to argue that this does not hurt old-earth creationism, because the fathers were not addressing modern geology.  That is a fair argument, and it is the argument Ross should have made.  It is not the argument in Ross's list.

The most useful witness is Davis Young, because he is an old-earth geologist writing twelve years before Ross.  His 1982 survey found "the virtually unanimous opinion among the early Christians until the time of Augustine was that human history from the creation of Adam to the birth of Christ had lasted approximately fifty-five hundred years," that "it is also very probable that the age of the world was regarded as the same number of years," that "in general, the church fathers regarded the days of creation as ordinary days," and that "we find absolutely no one arguing that the world is tens of thousands of years old on the grounds that the six days are used figuratively for indefinite periods of time."^{1 1 1}  Young also reports honestly what cuts the other way:  the fathers "did not shy away from regarding the days in a more figurative or allegorical sense either," and Augustine "opened the door" to a non-literal week.^{1 1}

Bradshaw's tables are the most thorough attempt to sort every early writer by his view of the days.  His own summary of the exercise is worth quoting because he began it expecting the opposite:  "Early drafts of my manuscript clearly indicate my intention -- to demonstrate that the early church fathers were forerunners on the modern young earth creationists.  As time passed this began to change ... The final result is not a wholesale endorsement of the young earth creationist position, but I hope, an accurate summary of diversity of opinion."⁵⁴  The diversity is real:  literal days, a single instant, a day as a type of a millennium.  What it does not contain is anyone who thought the world older than the genealogies allow.

One caution about Millam's "Newton and Burnet."  Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth explicitly keeps the biblical age:  the sublunary world "had its Original about six thousand years ago, according to the History of Moses."⁶⁰  Newton's contribution was a private letter, treated in the next section.  The first Christians who taught an old earth in print were the geologists of the 1780s and their theological allies of the 1810s.

Medieval and Reformation writers kept the arithmetic

Bede is the medieval hinge.  Working from Jerome's Latin Bible, he counted 3,952 years from Adam to Christ instead of the 5,199 the Septuagint tradition had handed down, and was called a heretic for it at a feast in 708.  His answer to Plegwin sets out the count age by age and ends:  "in Octavian's 42nd year the Lord is born, 3952 years from Adam being completed, or according to others 5199."¹³  The Hebrew arithmetic thereafter became the Western standard;  Orderic Vitalis in the eleventh century repeated Bede's 3952 "according to the Hebrew truth."¹⁶

Aquinas is worth quoting because he is on Ross's list and because his position is subtler than either side usually allows.  On whether the world had a beginning:  "By faith alone do we hold, and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist."³¹  Aquinas thought Aristotle's eternal world was philosophically possible and revelation alone excluded it.  On the days he lays out Augustine's single day against the "seven distinct days" of the others and declines to choose, noting that on the manner of production the two views "will be found not greatly to differ."³⁰  He never gives an age for the world.  A man who thinks the world might have been eternal but for revelation, and who thinks revelation says six days or one, is not a proponent of geological ages.

The Reformers restored the plain week and kept the count.  Luther on Genesis 1:  "From Moses however we know that 6000 years ago the world did not exist.  But of this no philosopher can in any way be persuaded; because, according to Aristotle the first and the last man cannot in any way be determined."¹⁴  He published his own world chronology, the Supputatio annorum mundi, at Wittenberg in 1541, revised 1545, a year-by-year table from Adam to his own day.⁶¹  Melanchthon wrote the Talmudic rule into Latin:  "sex milia annorum mundus, et deinde conflagratio: duo milia inane; duo milia lex; duo milia dies Messiae."¹⁶  Calvin, in the Institutes, dismissed the question why God waited so long to create by noting that "the present world is drawing to a close before it has completed its six thousandth year," and in the next section:  "Moses relates that the work of creation was accomplished not in one moment, but in six days."¹⁵

Ussher's 4004 BC is the most mocked number in the history of the debate, and Barr's 1985 study shows why the mockery misses.  "Figures a little below 4000 were common, and are found both in church tradition and in the works of scholarly chronologists."  "Scaliger placed creation in 3950 B.C. and Petavius in 3983.  So the figure of 4004 was not in itself a revolutionary shift."¹⁶  The four years come from Herod's death in 4 BC, established by Scaliger in 1583.  Ussher's date was the mainstream scholarship of his century, and the site's genealogies article walks through his method.  The story that Lightfoot fixed creation at nine in the morning on 23 October 4004 BC is a conflation by Andrew Dickson White:  Lightfoot's creation is in September 3929 BC, and the hour comes from a different tract.⁶²

Kepler belongs here because he is the scientist most often quoted for the old figure, and the quotation is real.  On finishing Harmonices Mundi in 1618 he wrote, in Brewster's rendering:  "The die is cast; the book is written, to be read either now or by posterity, I care not which.  It may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer."¹⁷  The greatest mathematical astronomer of his age took the biblical age of the world for granted.

Newton is the interesting case.  His published Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) gives no creation date;  its whole purpose is to shorten pagan chronology to fit the biblical.⁶³  But in January 1681 he wrote privately to Thomas Burnet, who had sent him the Sacred Theory in draft, and the letter is the first place a major Christian thinker loosens the days:

Now for the number & length of the six days: by what is said above you may make the first day as long as you please, & the second day too if there was no diurnal motion till there was a terraqueous globe ... If you would have a year for each days work you may by supposing day & night was made by the annual motion of the earth only & that the earth had no diurnal motion till towards the end of the six days.⁴⁴

Newton's mechanism is a slowly spinning earth, so that the first "days" were long in hours and the creation week still ended, on his own arithmetic, with Adam's life "increased but about 90 of our years."  In the same letter he insists on the Sabbath command "given by God in mount Sina" as the reason the days must be days.  This is not deep time.  It is a physicist wondering whether the first rotations were slow.  Burnet himself, as shown, kept 6,000 years.  The point for this article is that the length of the days was open to a man of Newton's calibre in 1681, and the age of the world was not.

Deep time entered from geology, and its first Christian adopters said so

The long age of the earth did not come out of Hebrew grammar.  It came out of Buffon's cooling iron balls and Hutton's unconformities, and the Christians who accepted it said, in print, that they were reinterpreting Genesis to make room.

Buffon published Les époques de la nature in 1778.  Reporting an objection to his own timetable, he wrote that "in view of your table, the Earth is aged seventy-five thousand years," and later counted "seventy-five thousand years from the formation of the Earth."³²  His private manuscripts ran to millions;  75,000 was what he thought the public would bear.  James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth," read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785 and printed in 1788, ends:  "The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, -- no prospect of an end."³³  Neither man argued from Scripture.

Georges Cuvier, the founder of vertebrate palaeontology, gave the deep-time case its respectable form in 1812 and kept one biblical element:  the last catastrophe was recent.  "If there is any circumstance thoroughly established in geology, it is, that the crust of our globe has been subjected to a great and sudden revolution, the epoch of which cannot be dated much farther back than five or six thousand years ago."⁶⁴  Cuvier's earth was old and its human history young, and that split is what the first Christian accommodations took over.

Thomas Chalmers, then a 24-year-old Scottish minister lecturing on chemistry and geology, said in 1804:  "The writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe.  If they fix any thing at all, it is only the antiquity of the species."³⁴  That sentence is the gap theory.  The geological ages go between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2;  the six days and the genealogies follow.  Chalmers's biographer notes that he was answering the charge that geology "undermines our faith in the inspiration of the Bible," and the answer was to move the Bible's claim.

William Buckland, Oxford's first reader in geology, put the same move in his Bridgewater Treatise of 1836.  Having listed the day-age reading of "learned theologians" and the gap, he chose the gap:  there will be "no necessity for such extension, in order to reconcile the text of Genesis with physical appearances, if it can be shown that the time indicated by the phenomena of Geology may be found in the undefined interval, following the announcement of the first verse."  He then quoted his own inaugural lecture of 1820, which supposed "the word 'beginning,' as applied by Moses in the first verse of the book of Genesis, to express an undefined period of time, which was antecedent to the last great change that affected the surface of the earth."³⁵  Buckland had, in Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823), attributed the cave bones and gravels of Europe to Noah's Flood.  By 1836 he had given that up too.

Adam Sedgwick, Cambridge's professor of geology and an evangelical clergyman, said so from the chair of the Geological Society on 18 February 1831:  "Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy ... I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation."³⁹  The heresy was the diluvial theory, the Flood as the cause of the surface gravels.  Sedgwick never gave up the antiquity of man's recent creation, and never gave up a young humanity.  He gave up the Flood as geology.

Lyell's letter of 14 June 1830 shows the other side of the same transaction.  Scrope was about to review the first volume of Principles of Geology for the Quarterly, and Lyell told him what to aim for:  "I am sure you may get into Q. R. what will free the science from Moses, for if treated seriously, the party are quite prepared for it."  He added that Buckland had found a bishop willing to attack the scriptural geologist Andrew Ure, and that the clergy "see at last the mischief and scandal brought on them by Mosaic systems."²  Lyell's aim was to detach geology from Genesis.  His allies in achieving it were clergymen.

Hugh Miller, the stonemason-geologist and Free Church editor, was the man who moved Scottish evangelicalism from the gap to the day-age, and his 1857 preface explains why:  "I adopt, in my Third and Fourth Lectures, that scheme of reconciliation between the Geologic and Mosaic Records which accepts the six days of creation as vastly extended periods; and I have been reminded by a somewhat captious critic that I once held a very different view ... I certainly did once believe with Chalmers and with Buckland that the six days were simply natural days of twenty-four hours each."³⁶  What changed him was fossil plants in the Old Red Sandstone, not a new lexicon.

Charles Hodge's Systematic Theology (1871) is the honest theological statement of the whole transaction.  He describes the gap and the day-age, then writes:  "It is of course admitted that, taking this account by itself, it would be most natural to understand the word in its ordinary sense; but if that sense brings the Mosaic account into conflict with facts, and another sense avoids such conflict, then it is obligatory on us to adopt that other."  Two pages later:  "The Church has been forced more than once to alter her interpretation of the Bible to accommodate the discoveries of science."^{37 37}  That is the case for accommodation stated by its ablest advocate, and it concedes the whole historical question.  The "ordinary sense" is the old one;  the new sense is adopted because of the facts.

Warfield, forty years later, moved the line further:  "The question of the antiquity of man has of itself no theological significance.  It is to theology, as such, a matter of entire indifference how long man has existed on earth."⁴¹  The Scofield Reference Bible (1909; the 1917 wording is quoted) built the gap into the notes of the most widely used study Bible in America:  "The first creative act refers to the dateless past, and gives scope for all the geologic ages."⁶⁵  By 1925 the day-age was the fundamentalist default.  Asked by Darrow at Dayton whether the earth was made in six days, Bryan answered:  "Not six days of twenty-four hours."⁶⁶

Against all this stood the "scriptural geologists," about thirty British writers between 1820 and 1845 whom Terry Mortenson has catalogued.  Their objections were the two that still stand:  the old-earth theories "superficially treated or completely ignored relevant Scriptures, especially Genesis 6-9 and Exodus 20:8-11," and "postulated long ages of violence, death and destruction before man was created and had sinned."⁶⁷  Mortenson concedes that "after 1845 these writers nearly became an extinct species."  The young-earth position did not vanish from the pews.  It vanished from print for sixty years.

Numbers's thesis: what is true in it and what is not

Ronald Numbers's The Creationists (1992) is the standard history, and its thesis is often summarised as "young-earth creationism is a twentieth-century invention of Seventh-day Adventism."  The book supports a narrower claim, and the narrower claim is correct.

What Numbers shows.  His survey of post-Darwinian creationists "has failed to turn up a single scientist or cleric who rejected the antiquity of the earth, denied the progressive nature of the fossil record, or attached geological significance to the Noachian flood."³⁸  Bryan "had long held to the day-age theory."  William Bell Riley, the leading fundamentalist organiser, "insisted that there was not 'an intelligent fundamentalist who claims that the earth was made six thousand years ago; and the Bible never taught any such thing.'"³⁸  George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist following Ellen White's visions, revived Flood geology single-handed after 1902;  John Whitcomb's 1957 dissertation, which became The Genesis Flood (1961), was devoted "to answering Ramm and defending 'the position of George M. Price.'"³⁸  All of that is documented, and the site has no quarrel with it.

What Numbers does not show, and does not claim in those words, is that the age was new.  The sixty-year silence of 1860 to 1920 is the anomaly.  Sections 1 to 7 of this article cover the seventeen centuries before it, and the scriptural geologists cover the thirty years before that.  What Price recovered was the position of Buckland in 1823 and Sedgwick before 1831, the Flood as the cause of the fossil-bearing strata.  What Whitcomb and Morris did was to attach that geology to the exegesis of Basil, Luther and Calvin.  The exegesis was old.  The geology was a revival.  The combination, as an organised movement with journals and research institutes, is twentieth-century, and the site says so in its Flood geology articles.

A related claim, that the church taught a flat earth until Columbus and fought Galileo on the same instinct that now resists geology, is the Draper-White "warfare" thesis of the 1870s and 1890s.  The flat-earth half is a nineteenth-century fabrication, treated in the ancient cosmology article.  White's method is on display in this very topic:  his "Lightfoot at nine o'clock on 23 October 4004 BC" welds Ussher's date to Lightfoot's hour, and the pages he cites give September 3929 BC.⁶²  The Galileo half is a real episode and a real caution, and the site's answer to it is the one Hodge gave:  the church has changed its reading of Scripture under pressure from facts before.  The question this article cannot answer is whether the facts of geology are of that kind.  That is for the dating articles.

Which doctrines depend on the chronology

Honesty requires saying which Christian claims are tied to the number and which are not.

The Sabbath.  Exodus 20:11 grounds the seven-day week in the six days of creation.  Lewis's survey opens with the observation that "the hallowing of the seventh day (Gen 2:1-2) presupposes the literal character of the six days."⁵⁵  Newton made the same point to Burnet:  the commandment "given by God in mount Sina" and "observed by our Saviour" fixes the days as days.⁴⁴  A day-age reading has to say that the Sabbath commemorates an analogy.  That is possible, and Hodge accepted it;  it is a cost.

The Fall and death.  If animal death and disease entered with Adam's sin, the fossil record of predation must be post-Fall, which on any old-earth reading it cannot be.  This is the strongest theological argument for a young earth and its weakest link, and it has its own article, Death Before the Fall.  The scriptural geologists made it their second objection in the 1820s.⁶⁷

The genealogies.  Luke 3 runs from Jesus to Adam in 76 names, and Genesis 5 and 11 give the begetting ages.  Gaps in names are possible;  gaps in years are not what the text offers, and the maximum any text-form allows for creation is about 5,600 BC.  The genealogies article makes the case.  Warfield's "entire indifference" was possible for him only because he believed the genealogies could be stretched indefinitely, a view Green had proposed in 1890 and which the site rejects on the arithmetic.⁴¹

Jesus's "from the beginning of creation."  Mark 10:6 reads "But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female."  Sarfati's argument:  "Jesus, speaking around 4,000 years after creation, was correct to say that Day 6, when humans were created, was effectively 'the beginning of creation' as seen from thousands of years later," whereas on the standard timeline humans arrive in the last hundred-thousandth of the earth's history.⁴⁰  The old-earth reply, in Grudem's words:  "old Earth advocates may respond that Jesus is just referring to the whole of Genesis 1-2 as the 'beginning of creation,' in contrast to the argument from the laws given by Moses that the Pharisees were depending on."⁴²  Mortenson's rejoinder is that this reply concedes the point, since it still puts Adam at the beginning rather than billions of years in;  and he found no old-earth writer who had actually made the argument Grudem imagines.⁶⁸  The verse is not decisive on its own, because "beginning" can take a loose sense.  Combined with Luke 11:50-51, where Abel's blood is shed "from the foundation of the world," it is a real difficulty for the view that Jesus knew of a world older than its people.

Noah.  Jesus and Peter treat the Flood as an event that happened to real people (Matt 24:37-39; 2 Pet 3:5-6).  Whether it was global is the Flood narrative article's question;  whether it happened is the Flood geology question.

Inerrancy.  Barr's 1987 lecture put the crux in one sentence:  "We have to distinguish between literal intention and historical, factual truth.  The figures are not, to us, historically, scientifically or factually true, but they were literally intended."⁴³  Barr was an unbeliever in the numbers, and a Regius Professor of Hebrew, and his verdict on intention is the same as this article's.  A Christian who holds that Scripture is true in what it intends to assert cannot both accept Barr's account of the intention and reject his account of the truth without doing what Hodge did openly:  adopting "that other" sense because the ordinary sense conflicts with facts.  Whether the facts require it is not a question church history can answer.

Common objections

Objection 1: "Augustine held that creation was instantaneous, so the church has never required a literal week."

True, and the site has said so above.  Augustine's instantaneous creation was a minority view, rejected by Basil and Ambrose before him and by Luther and Calvin after him, and it is not an old-earth view.  He collapsed six days into one instant and counted fewer than 6,000 years from Adam.  A reading that makes creation shorter than a week cannot be enlisted for a reading that makes it four billion years.  What Augustine does establish is that the length of the days was a live question in the fifth century, and that a Christian could reject solar days without abandoning the faith.  The site grants that freely.  It is a freedom to shorten as well as lengthen, and nobody used it to lengthen until geology asked them to.

Objection 2: "The fathers' 'a day is a thousand years' shows they were open to long days."

The phrase is Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8, and the fathers applied it to two things:  the day of Adam's death, and the six thousand years of world history.  Irenaeus's sentence separates the two explicitly:  the six days are "an account of the things formerly created," the thousands of years "a prophecy of what is to come."¹⁸  The scheme makes the world end at year 6000, and Lactantius says in the same breath that "the six thousandth year is not yet completed."²⁰  A thousand-year creation day would give a world of 6,000 years plus the genealogies, at most 12,000 years old, and no father computed even that.  Every total in the table was reached by adding the genealogies to a week of no measurable length.

Objection 3: "Ussher's 4004 BC was a seventeenth-century oddity."

Barr's answer is enough:  "Figures a little below 4000 were common ... Scaliger placed creation in 3950 B.C. and Petavius in 3983.  So the figure of 4004 was not in itself a revolutionary shift."¹⁶  Bede had 3952 in 708.  Luther had "6000 years ago the world did not exist."  Kepler had "six thousand years."  Ussher's number was the ordinary product of the ordinary method, and the method went back to Theophilus.

Objection 4: "Young-earth creationism was invented by Seventh-day Adventists in the twentieth century."

Flood geology as an organised scientific programme was, and section 9 says so.  The age was not.  Numbers's own evidence covers 1860 to 1925;  the seventeen centuries before it are the subject of this article, and they contain no writer who put creation more than 5,600 years before Christ.  The claim confuses a movement with a doctrine.

Objection 5: "Church history is not evidence for the age of the earth."

Correct, and the article has said so in its summary and its verdict.  What seventeen centuries of unanimity establishes is what the text was understood to assert by the people who read it in its own languages, without any motive to make it say either thing.  That is evidence about meaning, which is the question this article asks.  Whether the meaning is true is a question for the rocks, the ice, the tree rings and the isotopes, and the site treats those in their own articles without appeal to Basil.

Objection 6: "The fathers used the Septuagint's inflated numbers, so their totals prove nothing."

They prove exactly what they are used for here:  that the fathers counted, and that the largest count anyone reached was 5,509 years to Christ.  The site's own view is that the Hebrew numbers are original and the Septuagint's are secondary, which lowers the ceiling to about 4,000.  The objection helps the young-earth case, not the old-earth one.

Objection 7: "Galileo shows the church should defer to the scientists."

The Galileo affair shows that a reading of Scripture can be wrong and that the church can be slow to admit it.  Hodge drew the lesson and applied it to geology in 1871.  The lesson does not tell you which readings are wrong;  for that one needs the evidence, and the evidence for heliocentrism and the evidence for deep time are different evidence of different kinds.  The site's dating articles are where that comparison is made.  This article only records that the accommodations of the 1810s to 1870s were made because of geology, by men who said so, and not because anyone had reread Genesis.

Sources

Route notes:  "CCEL" means the Ante-Nicene / Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers HTML at ccel.org, downloaded with curl and read with the printed page fixed from CCEL's Page_NNN anchors;  "NBA" is the Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana Latin at augustinus.it;  "archive.org OCR" is the _djvu.txt of a public-domain scan with the page read from the printed running head;  "print-disabled read" is a paragraph read of a lending-restricted archive.org item through bin/iapdsearch.py, with the leaf converted to a page from the item's BookReaderJSIA.php map.  Every quotation is listed with its wording and route in quotes.md.