A Note on Dating
A Note on Dating
It would be wonderful to get straight on with it, but we cannot begin at the Beginning without looking at the question of: How trustworthy are the dates of our most ancient records? The question is quite a thorny one, and not all scholars agree. Most ancient people, just like ourselves, were concerned to keep track of the passage of time. The commonest way to fix a date was to say something like: “This happened in the seventh year of the reign of King Philip”, or “this happened in the year of the great earthquake”. By carefully comparing lists of kings and other events it is possible to build up a general picture. Many ancient dates appear to have been very carefully noted down by the writers of the time.
On the other hand, it is easy to misunderstand what some ancient documents are really trying to say. There is a special problem with trying to fix a date for events that happened centuries before the invention of writing. Even though many peoples had specially-trained lore-masters who were committed to faithful memorising of the history of their people, once an error had crept in there would be no way to correct it. For example, there is a settled date for the founding of the City of Rome. Yet is this date really genuine, or is it a date fixed only centuries later by tidy-minded historians? Many historians would declare that Rome was not ‘founded’ in a self-conscious way at all, but grew imperceptibly from a collection of huts the inhabitants of which would have been astonished to learn what the future would hold for their descendants. Yet not all historians would agree with this assessment either. Ancient traditions very often do preserve a core of actual history, even if somewhat stylised in the transmission.
There is a separate difficulty in the dating of events recorded in the Bible. The Bible is not just a collection of books but the Word of God. The Catholic Church teaches that the books of the Bible are inspired by God for our Salvation. The God of Truth would not permit a falsehood to be presented as history. Yet there are serious dangers for the unwary in reading things into the text, especially in translation, that were never intended by the human author.
European nations in ancient times took it for granted that the dating in the Bible was straightforward, reliable fact.
The Ancient Irish Annals date their chronicled events "A.M." “Anno Mundi” - “From the Year Of The World” - in which the Expulsion from Eden was in the Year 1 A.M. They and other races, notably the British and Saxons, trace the genealogy of their kings back to Noah, and some of the earliest names cross-correlate. The Saxon tradition shows evidence that the tradition of Noah’s ark was received by them twice; once through their own oral tradition and again from the Bible. Yet are these genuine independent traditions, or were they deliberately made to harmonise with the Biblical account, taken as literal truth?
The Catholic Church is not committed to the dating which places the Garden of Eden in 4004BC. There are in fact several schools of interpretation that are consistent with holding the Catholic Faith, including the possibility that the Universe is billions of years old...
What then are we to tell our children? Shall we simply gloss over ancient history with a general comment that these days are too far away for certainty? Or shall we blindly accept every assertion that has survived from Antiquity? Prudence would counsel against these extremes. Shall we present data and invite the child to decide for himself? No, we have the right and duty to pass on to our children the benefit of our culture, of the mature deliberations of their forebears. Personally, I strongly reject the notion that a child ought, or even can, re-invent the whole of civilisation from scratch - which does seem to be the aim of certain educational courses.
What then? I suggest we present the child with a judicious selection from the corpus of historical knowledge. It is an objective fact that for millennia cerrtain stories were taken as exact and true accounts, together with the dating. Let us then present this fact; “This is what our ancestors believed happened”. In some cases it may never be possible to go behind the bare statements in the ancient manuscripts. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "The ancient documents say what they say, and cannot be added to, except by exercising our own imaginations [yet many 'scholars' do not seem to notice that this is what they are doing].
There has been a healthy swing against treating all ancient stories as of no authority or importance. Our ancestors did think they were important. Many disputed things have unexpectedly been vindicated by new discoveries. A recent example was the discovery of the tomb of Pheidippedes, the man who ran the first Marathon. In the 19th century, his very existence was dismissed as a fable by "modern scholarship". Yet a minor earthquake some years back uncovered his actual tomb, that has been hidden by a previous landslide.
I have prefaced certain paragraphs in the more remote centuries by stating their origins: e.g. “According to the Irish Annals” or “According to the literal dating of the Old Testament”.....By this device we may present an account in the historical record, without launching into an immediate attempt to judge it. Let us take things one at a time.