James Ussher

Irish archbishop

• Born: January 4, 1581
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: March 21, 1656
• Place of death: Reigate, Surrey, England

As archbishop of Armagh, Ireland, shortly after the English Reformation, Ussher opposed Roman Catholicism and encouraged an authentic Irish Protestant movement. Writing a master history of the world, he promulgated the notion that the Creation occurred in 4004 b.c.e..

Early Life

James Ussher (UHSH-uhr) was born into an Anglo-Irish family that had participated in government for four centuries. His grandfather James Stanihurst had been speaker of the Irish Parliament, and his uncle Henry Ussher had been archbishop of Armagh from 1595 to 1613. In order to promote the education of Irish Protestants, Queen Elizabeth I authorized the establishment of Trinity College, the University of Dublin, in 1592. With a reputation for having a bright mind and a gift for language, James was invited to enroll in one of the first classes at Trinity at the age of twelve. By the age of twenty, he had earned a masters degree.

Ussher was ordained as a clergyman of the Anglican Church and soon gained a reputation as a defender of Protestantism in opposition to those continuing in the Catholic Church in Ireland. By 1605, he was chancellor at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. His scholarly work led him, in 1607, to a position as professor of theology at Trinity College. By 1620, he was appointed bishop of Meath and, in 1625, archbishop of Armagh.

Life’s Work

As the one hundredth archbishop of Armagh, an archbishopric first established by Saint Patrick himself, Ussher focused his scholarship on the history of Irish Christianity. This scholarly focus took a polemical tone, since he concluded that Protestantism was consistent with the historical Irish church: It was Roman Catholicism that had strayed. Soon after taking up the office of archbishop, Ussher summoned other bishops to join him in the 1626 document, Judgment of the Archbishops and Bishops of Ireland , which referred to Catholics as “superstitious and idolatrous” and their faith as “heretical.” He argued that it was a “grievous sin” to tolerate them and to allow them to worship freely.

At the same time, Ireland’s version of Protestantism was complex. Ussher was a clergyman of the Church of England, but the early decades of his career saw a large influx of settlers in Ireland from Scotland, where the Presbyterian Church flourished. For most of his life Ussher found himself in a moderating position between disparate religious beliefs and traditions. This position was itself complicated as the leadership in England also went through changes, including the influence of William Laud, who as archbishop of Canterbury promoted high church ritualism and theology at odds with the beliefs of Presbyterian Calvinists.

When it came to church organization, Ussher leaned toward episcopalianism, defending the role of archbishops, bishops, and deacons. On other issues, Ussher was willing to compromise. Already in 1615, he was called upon to draft a document, known as the Irish Articles. Episcopalians had suggested that the Thirty-nine Articles adopted by the Anglican Church in 1562 were sufficient to define church doctrine. Others, such as the Calvinist cleric John Whitgift (c. 1530-1604), argued for a distinctive Irish statement. However, his 1604 Lambeth articles were rejected by King James I . Ussher’s solution to this impasse was to draft a document that was distinctively Irish, but that still emphasized unity with the Church of England. Among the 104 Irish articles, most of the 39 Anglican articles were included verbatim. Likewise, many of the Lambeth articles were also included. Both sides were satisfied with the compromise, because it helped to distinguish Irish Protestants from the majority Roman Catholic Church, thereby strengthening the Anglican Church’s position in Ireland.

For the most part, Ussher turned to scholarship to underscore the historic foundation of the Irish church. He translated into Irish Bede the Venerable’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731; English translation, 1723). His research led to the discovery of the Book of Kells (ninth century), the historic illuminated manuscript of the Gospels. He later published A Discourse of the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and the British (1631). On one point, Ussher was surprisingly inconsistent. In the Irish Articles, he had written about the importance of translating the Bible into the Irish language. His contemporary at Trinity College, William Bedell, supervised the Irish translation of the Bible and proposed an Irish language liturgy. Ussher, however, opposed such a liturgy, pointing to an act of Parliament that forbade preaching in Irish.

Ussher was a scholar at heart, spending many summers at London or Oxford doing research. He valued the study of Scripture in the original languages, collecting ancient manuscripts, including a valuable copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch. He made use of critical reasoning and was the first scholar to determine the seven authentic letters of the early Bishop Ignatius.

In 1641, when the Great Rebellion broke out in Ulster and Dublin, Ussher chose to remain in London, dedicating the rest of his life to scholarship. He disappointed the Irish Puritans when he defended the monarchy. It was during the Commonwealth that Ussher published his best known work, The Annals of the Old and New Testament (1650, 1654). His intention in this book was to integrate biblical and secular history.

Ussher is best known for his detailed chronology of Old Testament history, which places Creation at 12:00 noon on October 23, 4004 b.c.e. His starting point in determining this date was his placement of the death of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 562 b.c.e., Ussher considered the latter date to be reliably verifiable through nonbiblical documents, which made it an objective starting point. He then worked backward from Nebuchadnezzar’s death, using a literal reading of the various genealogies within the Bible to come up with precise dates for biblical events.

As a critical scholar, Ussher realized that his conclusions must be considered tentative because of the nature of the oldest genealogical lists. He noted discrepancies in length the period from Creation to the Flood: The Septuagint computation was 2,242 years, the Ethiopic text indicated a duration of 2,262 years, and the Samaritan Pentateuch only placed it at 1,307 years. Ussher decided to rely upon the Hebrew text computation of 1,656 years, and using this number as his basis, he adopted the 4004 b.c.e. date, realizing its provisional character.

Ussher’s specific date of October 23 may seem odd, but it is based on the Jewish New Year occurring in the fall. The Gregorian calendar, made official at the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, would not be adopted in England until 1752. Ussher still employed the Julian calendar and noted his assumption that Creation would have occurred on the first Sunday following the autumnal equinox.

Ussher’s conclusion was not in fact particularly original. In 1644, Bishop James Lightfoot of Cambridge had published his own chronology with similar conclusions. Ussher was also very much aware that Bede the Venerable had suggested 3952 b.c.e. as the date of creation, and the French scholar Joseph Scalinger (1540-1609) had come up with 3950 b.c.e. This view of the general age of the world, with variations of only a few hundred years, simply was the popular view in the prescientific era.

What differed about Ussher’s chronology, however, is that it was circulated, not just among scholars, but also among the general public. A new, authorized version of the Bible in English, commonly known as the King James Bible, had been published in 1611 under the rule of King James I. Archbishop Ussher’s reputation was such that subsequent editions of the King James Bible included his chronology in the marginal notes. Thus, the date 4004 b.c.e. is found in the margin for the Creation in Genesis 1; 2348 b.c.e. is the date provided for the Flood; 1921 b.c.e. is the date of the call of Abraham, 1491 b.c.e. that of the Exodus from Egypt, 1012 b.c.e. that of the foundation of the Jerusalem Temple, and 586 b.c.e. that of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem.

In 1656, Ussher died in Reigate, England. Oliver Cromwell ordered a magnificent funeral and burial in London’s Westminster Abbey.

Significance

A recent opinion poll of the American public found that 40 percent of responders accept a recent date for the creation of the earth, with 19 percent giving the date 4004 b.c.e. Ussher’s name is remembered for his contribution to this interpretation of the Bible. For some, Ussher is a bulwark against evolutionary theory and billion-year estimates of the age of the universe.

Another large segment of the public, however, rejects Ussher’s estimated age of the earth as incompatible with modern science. For the most part, the assumption of this latter group is that Ussher was naive and narrow-minded. His methodology led him to base his chronology entirely on biblical data. A comparison with Egyptian archaeological data, for example, shows that his dating of the exodus was off by 240 years. If current scientific methods are taken seriously, Ussher’s dating of the age of the earth is off by an order of magnitude.

Yet other people stress that Ussher was a contemporary of Galileo and Johannes Kepler. The Scientific Revolution was just dawning. It is impossible to know how Ussher would have responded to later geological findings and the contributions of Darwin. Some argue that Ussher’s passion for learning developed the climate for continued research and enlightenment concerning the cosmos, helping to make possible the very advances that seem to prove him wrong.

Bibliography

Gould, Stephen Jay. Eight Little Piggies: More Reflections in Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Harvard geopaleontologist examines a number of issues regarding time, including an analysis of Ussher’s chronology.

Gribbon, Crawford. The Irish Puritans: James Ussher and the Reformation of the Church. Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2003. A study of James Ussher as church leader during Puritan era.

Knox, Robert B. James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, 1581-1656. Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1968. A dissertation discussing contributions to church and scholarship.

Pierce, Larry, and Marion Pierce, eds. Annals of the World: James Ussher’s Classic Survey of World History. Green Forest, Ark.: Master Books, 2003. This is a recent republication of James Ussher’s classic work written in Latin in 1658, a history of the world from creation to 70 c.e. when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed.

Steel, Duncan. Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000. A thorough discussion of various issues concerning calendar calculations.