Date of Adam's "Creation?

by Slidin Fast 32 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Slidin Fast

  How do JWs resolve these conflicting facts.

  1. No matter how you spin it, bible chronology calculates to Circa 4000 BC for Adam's creation. I followed the trail many years ago and that's what it adds up to.

  2. The most cursory investigation of any branch of relevant science puts man's habitation on the earth as hugely earlier than that. It's now so well-proved that anyone disputing it is guilty of wilful ignorance. There is so much evidence, hard evidence that I don't know how anyone could argue otherwise with a straight face.

  3. Since Jesus was a believer in this creation story and the ransom is based on the biblical narrative, this very fact blows JW and any other fundamentalist religion out of the water.

  WT has been stepping back from the 7000 year "creative day" doctrine for many years but bible chronology stubbornly remains out on an ever more dodgy limb.

  I suspect that Scholar will have something to say but I am really interested in how this circle can be squared.
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  TonusOH

  Counting back to Adam doesn't seem all that straightforward, or there would be a definitive scale, or at least an agreed-upon range. Perhaps the latter exists? After all, we are relying on the Bible for all of the dates and ages, unless there are other sources that are being consulted.

  I mean, if God wanted mankind to know the date of the creation of the first man, He could have made that much clearer in Genesis. That would've had the additional benefit of giving the whole world a basis for a starting calendar year. January 1, 1 would be the year humanity came into existence. I think it's a pretty good starting point.

  (I know, I know... he wouldn't have named it January. Maybe he could have improved on the names of months, too!)
  
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  St George of England

  Both the Creation account (4026 BCE), Adam & Eve etc, and the Flood, are allegorical tales that were handed down by word of mouth over millennia. The fact that Jesus, if indeed he existed, spoke about these events is purely for the reason that ordinary people would be familiar with them and understood the meaning he was putting to them.

  Personally I do not believe Jesus was in heaven at any time or had any part in creation. These days I am an atheist. In fact it was research into the flood story and subsequently creation and then 607.... and the pack of cards just crumbled.

  There is so much evidence for humans thousands of years before the so called creation account that even uber-JW Sis England no longer argues against it.

  George
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  road to nowhere

  Seemingly 4000 bc is the start of written records. Correlation versus causation conundrum
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  NonCoinCollector

  I mean, if God wanted mankind to know the date of the creation of the first man, He could have made that much clearer in Genesis. That would've had the additional benefit of giving the whole world a basis for a starting calendar year. January 1, 1 would be the year humanity came into existence. I think it's a pretty good starting point.
  (I know, I know... he wouldn't have named it January. Maybe he could have improved on the names of months, too!)

  While God was at it, he could have made the earth go around the sun evenly. Instead of 365.25 days, he could have made it an even number. It is almost as if things just came to be without the direct influence of a god.
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  stan livedeath

  i was made to read the bible as a kid--i got as far as the talking snake, and gave up at that point.
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  Phizzy

  The problem for J.W Org is that as far as possible they have followed C.T Russell's lead in interpreting the Bible literally as far as they can get away with it, and of course when it suits them.

  A Literalist view of the Bible was espoused in the late 19th Century and into the early 20th Century, by a few Protestant Ministers mainly, to counter the plain Evidence that the Earth was much much older than the Bible intimates, mind you, the Genesis passages on Creation have NOT been interpreted by J.W's in a Literal way, in total, for years, as to do so would be plain stupid, they Cherry Pick which bits to interpret one way or the other.

  But the Crazy Bible Chronology is plain for all to see.
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  Jeffro

  Every relevant field of science indicates that anatomically modern humans have existed for about 2-3 hundred thousand years.

  Aside from that, based on the stories in the Bible, Adam was created in either 3955 BCE or 4168 BCE (the discrepancy between the first option and the year asserted by Jehovah's Witnesses is a result of their misrepresentation of Babylon's '70 years'; for more information, see here). Which of those two years is chosen depends on whether it is claimed that the Israelites were 'enslaved in Egypt' when the descendants of Jacob - aka Israel - were supposedly made slaves after living in Egypt for some time (which never actually happened, and the lifespans indicated do not provide enough time) or when 'Ishmael made fun of Isaac' (as JWs and various other groups do even though it is asinine because the story depicts a brief incident when Israelites didn't even exist yet).
  
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  Judgerussellford

  I had ways wanted to base our year on the idea of Adam's creation. I'll have to share some pictures later but 3 months into my marriage, almost 3 years ago, I sat down and did the math, and some guess work cuz there is a couple of significant holes in the bible chronology. Thank God for babylonian record keeping or what I was doing would have been imlossible. Came out to our year being 6215., 6217 now. Not that I'm claiming accuracy I was just funnin around. But the 6000th creative day according to my math wouldn't be over for almost another 800 years. Russell and associates claimed 1874 and even earlier was the 6000th days end. Like I said, just for fun but even at that they still were off a lot because I got everything within a max ten year window
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  Disillusioned JW

  The dating of roughly 4,000 BCE (by various researchers of the Bible) for the date of the creation of Adam is based up the Hebrew OT, but based upon the Greek Septuagint Adam was created about 5,500 BCE years (when using an Ussher style method of tabulation). That is because a some of the numbers in the Greek text are larger than those in the Hebrew test. There is strong evidence of the Christians wrote the NT were using the Greek Septuagint Bible as their OT Bible instead of the Hebrew OT Bible.

  Furthermore, a number of Bible scholars say that the Hebrew words translated as "son" in our Bibles don't only pertain to sons, but also to grandsons and great-grandsons, and great-great-grandsons (in other words, meaning 'male descendant') - and that thus the chronology of ancestries skips many generations. That then allows for a Bible based dating of the creation of Adam to even about 10,000 BCE to 12,000 BCE!. As a result that interpretation corresponds well with the year modern science says the most recent age ended and also about the time that agriculture began. Furthermore, they make the Bible based date of the creation of Adam a little bit closer to what modern science science says is when our species evolved into existence.
  

  See https://biblearchaeology.org/research/biblical-chronologies/4353-the-case-for-the-septuagints-chronology-in-genesis-5-and-11 and

  http://www.accuracyingenesis.com/chronology.html for some ideas along these lines, though those source are not necessarily authoritative. I do not necessarily agree with all that those sources say.