The Bible never gives the total. Adding up the ages in its genealogies gives about 4,000 years from Adam to Jesus using the Hebrew text, and about 5,500 using the Greek Septuagint: a gap of roughly fifteen centuries. Anyone offering a confident single figure is choosing a text and not saying so. The famous number James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, published a chronology in 1650 that put creation at the evening before 23 October 4004 BC. He was a serious…

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