Are there two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 that contradict each other?

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Are there two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 that contradict each other?

Critics of the Bible sometimes claim the 1st and 2nd chapters of Genesis represent two different creation accounts and that these two accounts are clearly contradictory. They allege the order of events is different. But some critics claimed Genesis 2 teaches the opposite. Genesis 2 teaches that Adam was created before Eve. But doesn’t Genesis 1 indicate they were created at the same time?

As is often the case, the critics just haven’t read the text carefully. Genesis 1:1-2:4 records an overview of the cosmic events of the creation week. It gives the order of events and a broad summary of what happened on each day.

Genesis 2:5–25 is not a second or different account of creation; rather it’s a more detailed report of the Adam–Eve focused events of Day Six. This should be clear, because this chapter describes in greater detail the creation of Adam and Eve – events that Genesis 1:26-30 indicate happened on the 6th day.

But what about the alleged differences? Genesis 1 indicates plants were created on Day 3 and people were created on Day 6. So, plants already existed when man was created. But regarding the early events of Day 6, Genesis 2:4-5 discusses a time “before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.”

Is this contradictory? Not at all. Notice that Genesis 2 does not teach that there were no plants on Day 6. Rather, it states there was no plant of the field and that no herb of the field had grown. The phrase “of the field” is translated from the Hebrew word sodeh, which in this context refers to cultivated plants – those that were planted by man in ground tilled by man. So there were plants on Day 6, just know cultivated plants. And the rest of the verse gives the reason – because “there was no man to till the ground.”

 

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Are there two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 that contradict each other?

 

Are there two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 that contradict each other?

James Ussher and His Chronology: Reasonable or Ridiculous?

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James Ussher and His Chronology: Reasonable or Ridiculous?

This is Ray Mossholder with an article from Acts and Facts Magazine by Jerry Bergman PhD. Dr. Bergman is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Toledo Medical College in Ohio.

Learned professors, nearly all of their students, and everyone else who is steeped in the evolutionary theory, scoff at the timeline believed to be true by Archbishop Ussher in the 17th century. While evolutionists are quick to skip over or avoid any conflicts with their theories – and there are multitudes of conflicts that both logically and scientifically contradict them on point after point – most of them choose to be evolutionists in order to do away with any thought that God created the heavens and the Earth. Not to mention, they want nothing to do with Jesus Christ.

Archbishop Ussher did used that the age of Earth is something close to 6000 years, certainly not the millions or billions of years the evolutionists proclaim as necessary to agree with their theories.

So, what is the truth? In weeks to come I will continue sharing nothing but facts that the evolutionists are basically ignoring. Most of the articles, but not all, will come from the scientific results of scholarly study by the Institute For Creation Research. This organization is not trying to debate scientific evidence. Their scholarship proves their points.

From Acts and Facts Magazine

Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656) was one of the most important biblical scholars of the 17th century. His research and scholarly work have even earned high praise from some who are opposed to his conclusions. Called “the greatest luminary of the church of Ireland” and “one of the greatest scholars of his day in the Christian Church,” his work has influenced generations of Christian thinkers with a force still felt today.¹

An expert on the writings of the early church fathers, Ussher majorly impacted Reformation theology. The 18-volume set titled The Whole Works of James Ussher contains his most important writings.² Today, he is best known for his chronology research that concluded Adam was created in 4004 B.C. Consequently, anti-creationists heavily criticize him, often picturing him as naive, ignorant, anti-science, and someone whose research was superficial and based solely on the biblical record.³ Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that Ussher “is known to us today almost entirely in ridicule—as the man who fixed the time of creation at 4004 B.C.”⁴

In reality, Ussher was a first-class scholar very involved in scholarly research. He regularly interacted with “the most learned men of the day” to intellectually savor their ideas.⁵He was also “a real connoisseur of books,” and there was scarcely a book in any British library that he was unfamiliar with.⁶

History and Scholarship

In the West, our knowledge of the ancient world has historically been determined largely “by a straightforward reading of the Old Testament” plus a study of history.⁷ This practice conflicted with many “Eastern religions [that] allowed for a far older universe than was common in Judaism. And the Greeks, Aristotle for example, thought that the world was eternal. Early Christian theologians like Augustine dismissed pagan estimates that ran into the hundreds of thousands of years as myths.”⁸

According to the Jewish calendar, the creation event occurred in 3761 B.C. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, known today as the Septuagint, put the date at 5500 B.C., and “by the time of the Renaissance, an age of the Earth somewhere around 5000 to 6000 years appeared perfectly reasonable.”⁹ Furthermore, it was widely accepted that the narrative “given in the book of Genesis, which parallels to some extent creation narratives from other cultures of the Middle East, accounts for the origin of the physical world as the deliberate act of an almighty Creator.”⁸

In the 17th century, “Archbishop James Ussher turned his outstanding scholarly expertise” to the problem of the date of creation.⁹ This project meshed very well with his strong interest in history, astronomy, math, and geometry.¹⁰

Background

Ordained as a priest at the young age of 20, James Ussher became a professor at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1607 when he was only 26. In 1625, he was appointed as Archbishop of Armagh, which made him “head of the Anglo-Irish church, the Protestant leader in a predominantly Catholic land.”⁹

Ussher wrote his famous Annals of the Old Testament, Deduced from the First Origins of the World, in which he arrived at the 4004 B.C. date, during the latter period of his life. The monumental work contains over 12,000 footnotes from secular sources and another 2,000 references from the Bible and the Apocrypha.^11,12

Building the Dates

The common claim is that “Ussher reached his famous date of 4004 B.C.E. by simply calculating back from the time of Jesus by adding up years involved in the lineages of Christ given in the Bible and going all the way back to Adam.”¹³One problem was that the Old Testament contains the required information to achieve an accurate chronology only up to Solomon’s time. After that, ambiguities exist and no straightforward data were available. And for about 400 years before the birth of Jesus, the Bible’s book of Matthew gives the genealogy leading up to Christ, but not the chronology.¹³

To arrive at the date of creation, Ussher replicated the methods that others had used before him; namely, he attempted to correlate information from around 400 B.C. to Jesus’ birth “with known dates from the histories of other cultures, specifically the Chaldeans and Persians. This all required…an incredible expertise in biblical knowledge, in secular history, and in language abilities.”¹³ In fact, the majority of the evidence Ussher used to arrive at the 4004 B.C. date was non-biblical. Historians acknowledge that “Ussher had one of the best minds of his time and he applied it unrelentingly to synthesize information from disparate sources” to achieve as accurate a chronology as possible.¹³

To deal with the many major contradictions in secular records, Ussher’s calculation required an intensive study of both history and languages. For example, King Herod, who attempted to kill Christ, died in 4 B.C., and the Julian calendar had undergone major revisions at the end of the 16th century. In order to produce his chronology, Ussher was forced to deal with these and other problems.¹³ After many years of labor, in 1640 he published the first part of hisAnnals of the Old Testament. Four years later, the second part of the work was available to the public. He then began a third part, carrying on the chronology to the beginning of the fourth century A.D., but did not live long enough to complete it.¹⁴

“Light of Reason”

Many skeptics have dismissed Ussher’s work, claiming he merely used dogma to solve a scientific problem. The late Stephen Jay Gould disagreed. Seeking to understand how Ussher arrived at his deductions, after detailed investigation Gould concluded that the archbishop’s critics were not only ignorant but that they also entirely misunderstood his work.¹⁵Gould addressed this with an entreaty: “I close with a final plea for judging people by their own criteria, not by later standards that they couldn’t possibly know or assess.”¹⁵ He was delighted with Ussher’s declaration that his (Ussher’s) results were determined “not only by the plain and manifold testimonies of Holy Scripture, but also by light of reason well directed.”¹⁵

For these reasons, Gould determined that Ussher’s chronology was an “honorable effort for its time” and argued that the common ridicule only reflects a “lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past.”¹⁶

The reality is that the relevance of Ussher’s work “may be seen in the fact that his Chronology has been accepted by nearly all the Reformed Churches.”¹⁴ Ussher’s research merits our highest respect and serves as a solid foundation for us to build upon today.

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References

1. 
   

   Carr, J. A. 1895. The Life and Times of James Ussher: Archbishop of Armagh. London: Wells, Gardener, Darton and Co., 1-2.
   

   
   


2. 
   

   Ussher, J. 1864. The Whole Works of James Ussher. Dublin: Hodges, Smith, and Co.
   

   
   


3. 
   

   Lawson, K. 2003. Darwin and Evolution for Kids: His Life and Ideas with 21 Activities.Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 89.
   

   
   


4. 
   

   Gould, S. J. 1993. Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 181.
   

   
   


5. 
   

   Carr, The Life and Times of James Ussher, 96.
   

   
   


6. 
   

   Ibid, 343.
   

   
   


7. 
   

   Gregory, F. 2008. The Darwinian Revolution. Chantilly, VA: The Teaching Company, 22-23.
   

   
   


8. 
   

   Ibid, 23
   

   
   


9. 
   

   Ibid, 24.
   

   
   


10. 
    

    Carr, The Life and Times of James Ussher, 322.
    

    
    


11. 
    

    The 2003 reprint of The Annals of the World by Master Books (referenced below) is 960 pages long.
    

    
    


12. 
    

    Pierce, L. Editor’s Preface. In Ussher, J. 2003. The Annals of the World. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 5.
    

    
    


13. 
    

    Gregory, The Darwinian Revolution, 26.
    

    
    


14. 
    

    Carr, The Life and Times of James Ussher, 363.
    

    
    


15. 
    

    Gould, Eight Little Piggies, 193.
    

    
    


16. 
    

    Ibid, 183.
    

    
    

Image credit: National Portrait Gallery, London

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James Ussher and His Chronology: Reasonable or Ridiculous?

Where did Adam and Eve"s sons find their wives?

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Where did Adam and Eve’s sons find their wives?

According to Genesis, Adam and Eve had sons, and 1 Corinthians 15:22 teaches that all of us descended from Adam. But if they only had sons, then where did their children find the wives necessary to continue the human race? Three lines of evidence point to a good answer to this common yet perplexing question –


Where did Adam and Eve’s sons find their wives?

Where did Adam and Eve"s sons find their wives?

How old are earth"s rocks? REALLY?!!! from Acts and Facts

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How old are earth’s rocks? REALLY?!!! from Acts and Facts

Ray is going to read an article by Brian Thomas that comes from the June 2015 issue of Acts and Facts magazine that he originally titled “Monuments of Catastrophe from Mount St. Helens”. Ray will also tell you how to get a free monthly subscription of Acts and Facts.


How old are earth’s rocks? REALLY?!!! from Acts and Facts

How old are earth"s rocks? REALLY?!!! from Acts and Facts