July 1927
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by an unwarranted assumption of antiquity. How about tbe other phase of the query; the Biblical date of man’s creation? Here there is even more need for sane think ing and cautious progress if we are to keep clear from the danger of accepting traditions as fact. W h a t A re T h e B ib l e F a c t s ? There are two events recorded in the first chapter of Genesis; creation of the cosmos, and creation of living creatures. The Bible gives us no inkling of the date of the first event, and the eager student who would seek light on the date of the creation of Adam must delve deeply into the text and proceed with care. The common method (and the only available one) of research here is to take the genealogies of the Old Testa ment and add together the age of each patriarch when his first mentioned son is born. Ussher, using this method, arrived at the date 4004 B. C. for the creation of Adam. Not for the creation of the earth, but of Adam. The method of Ussher may have been sound but he fell into a pitfall that the enemies of our Lord Jesus Christ had dug for the unwary, and accented the dates from the Hebrew text without question. This is an error. We must remember .the bitter enmity of the Jews who hated and rejected their Messiah in the person of Jesus Christ, and keep clearly in our minds the fact that there was no crime or outrage that they would not perpetrate to embarrass o r handicap Him. Indeed, what lesser evil will murderers be afraid of? The rulers; of the Jews violated every law, both civil and ecclesiastical, in their foul conspiracy against Jesus. “They plotted against Him, how they might put Him to death, but secretly, for fear of the people.” They who were His judges themselves hired perjured witnesses to testify to lies against H im ; they hired a traitor to betray Him, and they mocked Him on the cross; then found all their efforts unavailing when He rose from the dead! Consternation filled them when the apostles came preaching, “This Jesus, whom ye have rejected, God hath made both Christ and Saviour. Ye have crucified your Messiah!” That cry must be stopped at any cost. So more perjury was resorted to. First, they suborned the Roman soldiers, and persuaded them at great cost to say: “While we slept, the disciples came and stole His body.” While many of the Jews believed this, the mass of the people knew that a Roman soldier sleeping on duty would be crucified, and laughed at such a tale. So the priests tried another plan: they changed the dates in the Holy Record and deliberately altered the Old Testament in the Hebrew Language to prove that Messiah would not come for a thousand years! Sacrilege? Certainly : but what is sacrilege to perjured murderers? H e b r e w C o p ie s T a m p e r e d W it h It was easy to change the Hebrew Old Testament, as the priests had control of the few copies existing in that language. But God had evidently foreseen this action on their part, and had moved to frustrate it. In the third cen tury before Christ a committee of learned Rabbis had come together to translate the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek. These seventy men were the outstanding scholars of their day, and the result of their labors is the version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, which means, in Greek, “The Seventy.” They used the Old Testament in Hebrew as it was in the third century before Christ. They were all He brews, scholars, Rabbis; they knew their own language, and they were learned in the Gre.ek. They translated the
Old Testament as it then was; and if there is any dis crepancy between the Hebrew scriptures now and the Septuagint translation, it was made after the work of the seventy Rabbis was finished, and after they were dead. So when the priests of the day of Jesus sought to prove that Christ was not the Messiah, they changed the Hebrew copies of the Old Testament^ of which there were comparatively few; but the Greek version had flooded the ancient world and they couldn’t get their hands on enough copies to attempt the alteration of the Septuagint. Remember that the. Canon of the Scripture 'closed in the fifth century ,B. C., somewhere about the year 432 B. C., when Malachi finished his prophetic utterances. The Committee of Seventy finished their work of trans lating the Hebrew Into the Greek about 280 B. C., when many scholars were alive to criticize any error or change in the text, but these seventy Rabbis had all been dead for centuries when the priests in the time of Christ made this change. That they did this thing is attested by the Fathers of the Church/Justin Martyr in particular having much to say on the subject. The text of the Hebrew was originally what we have now in the Septuagint. Accepting these dates, we arrive at a date for the creation of Adam as being 5411 B. C. Add to that the current date of 1927 and we have a period of man’s antiquity of not less than 7,338 years thus re corded. We say “not less” because the genealogy was not put in as a calendar, and it is possible that having ful filled the purposes, of the Scripture with accrediting the line of descent, the author may: have left out some gen erations not essential to the proof of genealogy. This, how ever, would increase the antiquity rather than shorten it. T h e F lood D a t e s The Septuagint dates, then, being accepted by us as they were by Josephus and the early Christian Fathers, the date of the Flood of Noah would be the year 3155 B. C. Thus any kings,; dynasties, ancient races, cultures or anthropological records of a proved date before that year must be antediluvian. This, leaves an enormous stretch of time between Adam and the flood for ancient civilization to flourish, a total of not less than 2256 years. What marvelous things could happen in that time! Deduct that many years from our day and we are back in the year 229 B. C. Think for just a moment on the rise and fall of empires, the parade of kings and emper ors, the tides of conquering races and the convulsions of culture that have swept across the face of the earth since 229 B. C .! That same procession of events took place in the years between Adam and the flood: and the archaeol ogist who delves today among the tombs of that era is simply loosing the clamoring tongues that so long have lain silent in the hush of the grave. One of the greatest ministers of God’s Word in the world today is the science of archaeology, properly pur sued and applied. Let the faith *of none of God’s chil dren be shaken in regard to the findings of archaeology as the Word of Truth: it stands unshaken and immovable, “till the heavens wax old like a garment and the elements melt in fervent heat.” . 2 $% ^ ' ate ate Id iot Fringe Theodore Roosevelt once said: “Every great cause has its idiot fringe.” Do not be discouraged if any good and great cause with which you are identified is in a measure discredited by some who advocate it.
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