What About "The Jimmy Akin Solution"?

"Adam was not an individual, the fall was collective" - Evil or Just Wrong? · What About "The Jimmy Akin Solution?" · 1909 vs § 390

I am sorry, I did not "read his paper" but heard him on a video, so I took the last view he presented, and he spent a bit more time on it than on others, as I recall the subjective feel, as that opinion being his own. It is possible I misjudged him on that one, he could simply not be intending to spell out his own view, here is a discussion of it, linking back to his video: Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: A Discussion on one of the subjects of Glossa Ordinaria "Mary is the New Eve" https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-discussion-on-one-of-subjects-of.html Can Catholics Believe Theistic Evolution? - Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World Jimmy Akin | 29 March 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBssnELtE94

First a qualifier. To Jimmy Akin, this is not dogma, it's a possible solution to a thorny problem or a few of them, a bit like identifying Babel with Göbekli Tepe is to me. Yes, I know the city of Nebuchadnezzar is also termed Babel in Hebrew, I do not deny they are the same ideological community, just saying they are different locations. So, Jimmy Akin should not be held as positively teaching this as the truth.

Nevertheless, it's a position he has mentioned with some favour.

So, let's deal with it.

To Mr. Akin, human origins basically evolved on the lines suggested by modern anthropology. At some point, men were sufficiently evolved to become God's image, and God made them His image. Probably at this point, perhaps later, I'm less than sure since he has so far not given chronological even hypotheses that I have seen, a couple, Adam and Eve, as individual people, were "federative heads of mankind - under God" - God's grace flowed through them to the rest of the men, and if they had continued to do so, would have continued to do so.

It's not totally inconceivable for us Catholics that God's grace can flow through even created human persons (and not just directly from the One Mediator, the divine person who became man, Jesus), so, the how is not a real problem.

However, the problem is, perhaps even the Incarnation, certainly the way it played out, with Crucifixion, only became necessary by the fall of Adam. St. Thomas opined, without the Fall, God the Son would not have been incarnate. Saint Bonaventure on the other hand opined, even without the fall, God the Son would have been incarnate to ennoble the human race.

Now, all sides, prior to modernity, agree, without the fall, we would have all been born with original grace and original righteousness, as in fact only Mary and Jesus were.

This means, tradition agrees that people other than Adam and Eve would have had grace from them, but would have had that as having grace from their immediate parents (and these either being them or having grace from them). Grace and nature would have coincided.

That we are born without grace (apart from St. Jeremias, St. John the Baptist, the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord) is a consequence of sin, of Adam's sin.

So, before Adam sinned, there is no sense in which one could conceivably imagine that men already created in God's image before Adam and Eve could have come to depend on them as mediators to have grace from God, since they could not have them as parents.

So, what if they would have had the image of God quality from Adam and Eve? Well, that would have meant that prior to Adam and Eve, despite possibly human anatomy, they were beasts. But beasts cannot speak. If you can as much as say "this morning I ate yoghurt" which right now has no practical importance, you have thereby proven you are made in God's image. You can abstract from the immediate and use that to express yourself about the past. And it is very obvious that people dated by conventional science as more than 100 000 years ago actually did have this ability, which is godlike and not bestial.

If you pretend Adam and Eve lived 500 000 years ago, Genesis 3 is not history, and the Proto-Gospel in Genesis 3:15 is simply a myth. A fiction. But if you admit Adam and Eve are as far back as the Biblical timeline suggests (yes there is one, even if it is not all contained in one chapter, the part from Adam to Abraham being in Genesis 5 and 11, which is elastic due to text versions, but not infinitely so), then you either admit Biblical chronology fully, or you say people who lived prior to 7000 years ago (after Göbekli Tepe!) were not yet people but beasts, or you come back to, they were already God's image before Adam and Eve existed, which means, they could not have to depend on Adam and Eve to be God's image, and therefore also not on grace.

I think this should adequately dispose of the Jimmy Akin solution if so I may call it. If Adam and Eve had not fallen, men would have inherited grace, directly with the image of God in their nature, from them, as from parents. This excludes the idea of pre-Adamites.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Lydia of Philippi
3.VIII.2023

Philippis, in Macedonia, sanctae Lydiae purpurariae, quae, praedicante ibidem sancto Paulo Apostolo, ut beatus Lucas in Actibus Apostolicis refert, omnium prima credidit Evangelio.

Child Adam?

Theological Consequences · Jimmy Akin on Patristic and Scientific Expertise. · Child Adam? · Archaic Actual Humans or Apes in Human Shapes? · What If Adam Became a Man - When he Became a Man? · Tolkien's Elves Are Not the Key to Cain's Wife or Adam's Growth

BioLogos has the good sense to show off their knowledge of the traditional doctrine that they reject:

In a common traditional view, Adam and Eve were created de novo—they were created by God as fully formed humans (Homo sapiens), roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. God made them quickly and completely as fully formed humans with no biological ancestors. In this traditional de novo view, Adam and Eve are “sole progenitors”: they were the first two humans, and they alone gave rise to all other humans. The Genesis account is taken to be a record of real events similar to the way a journalist would record them today.

If we change the job description from "journalist" to "involved actors" and the recording mode from detailed reportage to scaled down easy to recall narratives, yes, that is how I, as a proponent of the traditional view see this. Here is the article I cited by the way.

Were Adam and Eve historical figures?
https://biologos.org/common-questions/were-adam-and-eve-historical-figures/

Now, they proceed to state that and why they don't share it. Genesis 4 refers to Cain's wife who along with the people in his city "do not seem to be descended from Adam and Eve", Genesis 2 and 3 suggests archetypes, but above all they are Evolutionist.

If you accept Adam and Eve as archetypes only, you are not Catholic, Session V of the Council of Trent makes it abundantly clear that Adam was an individual, the first human sinner and by that fact and the fact of approaching the sin from a sinless state, the origin of original sin. Now, what about their other options?

Now, they give two views on how to reconcile Evolutionism with a more than just archetypal existence of Adam and Eve. And since both of these make them part of an already existing Homo sapiens population, both will involve Adam, if not Eve, having been a child of some biological ancestry not sharing his relation with God. Now, there are problems with each, I'll state these first, but there is also this common problem, which I will come back to.

Some Christian leaders (such as Billy Graham) are open to models that see evolution as compatible with Adam and Eve as real historical people. In one version, suggested by theologian Henri Blocher and others, God entered into a special relationship with a pair of ancient historical representatives of humanity about 200,000 years ago in Africa. Genesis retells this historical event using cultural terms that the Hebrews in the ancient Near East could understand.

Genesis 3 is history. More precisely, it is not history as revealed by a revelation, it is more like the Exodus event a history known historically and in which God reveals Himself in the actual events (obviously, Genesis 3 includes a revelation by God to Adam, to Eve and to the serpent, but this does not make the events something only Moses was told of. Haydock in the famous Haydock Bible had facing pages Douay Rheims in the Challoner revision, facing pages comment he provided by compilation and own learning. Attached to his comment on Genesis 3:24 is this, which actually is his own comment - signed H. - to the whole chapter:

Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. H.

With the primeval longevity, the 2500 years from Adam to Moses in Masoretic chronology or the 3000 years from Adam to Abraham in LXX chronology are not a huge problem. They become comparable to the 400 years between the Trojan War and Homer's composing the Iliad. But with 200 000 years lapsing, not only is the probability far less of a correct transmission, the transmission would also be shown incorrect by Genesis 5 and 11 showing, not so much a genealogy with some gaps, comparable to Matthean genealogy, as more gap than genealogy. In other words, we would be asked to believe a transmission not just incredibly long for a purely oral one that's still correct, but also one even shown incorrect through the faulty transmission of genealogies.

In another version Adam and Eve are recent historical persons, living perhaps 6000 years ago in the ancient Near East rather than Africa. By this time Homo sapiens had already dispersed throughout the earth. God then revealed himself specially to a pair of farmers we know as Adam and Eve. God could have chosen them as spiritual representatives for all humanity. Genealogical science suggests that a pair living at that time and place could be part of the genealogies of all humans living today.

First, there is not just a question of Adam being an actual man, but also of his being the first such.

But second, suppose you waver that problem for a moment, how is Adam supposed to have been ancestor of all First Nations in the Americas and all Aborigines of Australia, not now, but back when Vikings arrived to Vinland and van Diemen to Tasmania? You see, Americas are in the uniformitarian line supposed to have been peopled c. 20 000 BC, and Australia's Mungo man or Mungo woman would carbon date about the same, but a thermoluminiscence date has given Oz the added prestige of a 40 000 year old human settlement.

The second solution therefore flirts with the idea of pre-adamism, which is also condemned by the Catholic Church, the specific reason why Isaac La Peyrère got in trouble with Church Authorities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Adamite

And it seems some "Catholic" old earthers, notably Jimmy Akin, buy into this idea too. Even if he is not explicit when his Adam and Eve are supposed to have lived, he clearly says they were not all the men there were, even if they were the first two modern men with modern human souls.

Here we must consider for a moment the history of Old Earth ideology among Catholics. The Day-Age paradigm was held by Sulpîcian Father Fulcran Vigouroux, and this may be the exact same scenario as held by Pius XII. It goes like this: add lots of time in the creation days by making each an age, but only up to creation of Adam. From then the Biblical timeline, at least in the LXX version, holds, though one could imagine it to hold some gaps in the genealogies (notably Genesis 11) apart from the II Cainan omitted in Masoretic. But for the moment, he didn't need that. He was also the man who on behalf of the Papal Biblical Commission in 1909 authorised Day-Age as an option. And note, just as an option.

Now, since certain dates - carbon for El Sidrón Neanderthals, others for Homo sapiens 200 000 pretended years ago - have been made, this is no longer an option. One must either defend a Biblical timeline by saying no to these dates, which would involve saying no to the Old Earth overall, or, buying into Old Earth, accept these dates, which will involve the named and also other problems. I already said : since both of these scenarios make them part of an already existing Homo sapiens population, both will involve Adam, if not Eve, having been a child of some biological ancestry not sharing his relation with God.

The one version is therefore pre-Adamism - others were truly human, if not modern human before Adam and Eve. But this is condemned. In Humani Generis, Pius XII speaks of:

For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.

So, he doesn't speak of men before Adam, he speaks of "pre-existent and living matter"? In other words, the parents of Adam would have been non-human. Indeed, there seems to be a piece from 1941, adressed to the academy of sciences, in which he says as much - they would not have been truly his parents, since not truly human.

And this poses the question of how Adam fared as a child. A human being with a rational soul - and let's underline, what's special is not a special relation with God not shared by other beings with equally rational souls, what's special is having a rational souls in the first place, some relation to God follows from that - can be a parent, can teach his children language, does have language. A non-human can't, and isn't.

If Adam was human, and the testes and ovaries he came from belonged to non-humans, it is impossible that they had real human language, and therefore impossible that they taught Adam such. Indeed, they could not have anything remotely like it. Human language has a double articulation into three levels : sentence, morphemes, phonemes. This can produce an infinity of sentences, and is only motivated if a rational being has an infinity of rational observations to make. The pragmatic observations of beasts come into the range of sth like 500 complete messages - about as many as the traffic signs, which are also purely pragmatic.

And man is created to receive a first language (possibly two first languages at the same time) at a certain stage in his development. For an adult it is too late. So, Adam would have been a feral child. No language.

Or one could say Adam got a language from God, while aware of not sharing it with his genitors. How good is it to feel quasi infinitely superior to one's parents? No. Adam getting his language as a miracle sparing him from being feral isn't an option either. Only Adam being created with an adult and getting language miraculously from start is theologically viable.

But could Cain at least have married an anatomical human not his sister, if by his doing so she was also endowed with human rationality? I have already answered that years ago:

Creation vs. Evolution : Scenario impossible
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2014/01/scenario-impossible.html

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Monday after Quinquagesima
28.II.2022

Jimmy Akin on Patristic and Scientific Expertise.

Theological Consequences · Jimmy Akin on Patristic and Scientific Expertise. · Child Adam? · Archaic Actual Humans or Apes in Human Shapes? · What If Adam Became a Man - When he Became a Man? · Tolkien's Elves Are Not the Key to Cain's Wife or Adam's Growth

Creation vs. Evolution: Jimmy Akin on Patristic and Scientific Expertise. · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Extract of Lazar - Akin : Where is the Authority?

Understanding the “Unanimous Consent” of the Church Fathers
Jimmy Akin | August 13, 2018
https://jimmyakin.com/2018/08/understanding-the-unanimous-consent-of-the-church-fathers.html

Around 50 minutes in into his discussion with Gideon Lazar, the latter says all Church Fathers were Young Earth Creationists and believed Genesis 5 and 11 literally. Jimmy Akin admits this is true. He counters the Church Fathers believed "other things" and goes to Ptolemaic astronomy and this implying Earth at the centre and crystalline spheres. Gideon Lazar considers Geocentrism would if so be authoritative, but gives a somewhat hesitating rejection of the crystalline spheres. Like an at least preliminary one. Now St. Basil did not hold Ptolemy and his likes in great esteem:

4. One day, doubtless, their terrible condemnation will be the greater for all this worldly wisdom, since, seeing so clearly into vain sciences, they have wilfully shut their eyes to the knowledge of the truth. These men who measure the distances of the stars and describe them, both those of the North, always shining brilliantly in our view, and those of the southern pole visible to the inhabitants of the South, but unknown to us; who divide the Northern zone and the circle of the Zodiac into an infinity of parts, who observe with exactitude the course of the stars, their fixed places, their declensions, their return and the time that each takes to make its revolution; these men, I say, have discovered all except one thing: the fact that God is the Creator of the universe, and the just Judge who rewards all the actions of life according to their merit. They have not known how to raise themselves to the idea of the consummation of all things, the consequence of the doctrine of judgment, and to see that the world must change if souls pass from this life to a new life. In reality, as the nature of the present life presents an affinity to this world, so in the future life our souls will enjoy a lot conformable to their new condition. But they are so far from applying these truths, that they do but laugh when we announce to them the end of all things and the regeneration of the age. Since the beginning naturally precedes that which is derived from it, the writer, of necessity, when speaking to us of things which had their origin in time, puts at the head of his narrative these words--"In the beginning God created."

Elpenor, St. Basil's Hexaemeron, Homily I, chapter 4
https://www.elpenor.org/basil/hexaemeron.asp?pg=6

And here, more directly to Jimmy Akin's point:

Elpenor, St. Basil's Hexaemeron, Homily III, chapter 7
https://www.elpenor.org/basil/hexaemeron.asp?pg=28

Citing only the first words:

Therefore we read: "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters." I have said what the word firmament in Scripture means. It is not in reality a firm and solid substance which has weight and resistance; this name would otherwise have better suited the earth. But, as the substance of superincumbent bodies is light, without consistency, and cannot be grasped by any one of our senses, it is in comparison with these pure and imperceptible substances that the firmament has received its name. ...

Tycho Brahe proved, there were no crystalline spheres that were solid bodies, since the comet would have crashed into such, when going through the levels of several planetary, possible spheres. So, at least one Church Father does not believe the Firmament is a solid crystalline sphere. And that is all that has been disproven.

Geocentrism hasn't.

Jimmy Akin's point against believing the Church Fathers does not stand. But is it even compatible with what he said himself?

He considers the doctrinal content behind the Tridentine discipline means that we need to take heed of the Church Fathers, partly when bishops and reflecting the ordinary magisterium, and partly whether bishops or not when they bear witness to the sensus fidelium.

This is a point where I took difference with Robert Sungenis, who had said the Church Fathers were Geocentric in face of massive Pagan Heliocentrism:

Mr. Olar’s appeal to Augustine and Aquinas might have some bite, that is, until we realize that both these saints were dyed-in-the-wool geocentrists, and who chose this cosmological stance in the face of the Greeks of the former’s day who were touting heliocentrism and the Indians of the latter’s day who were touting the same.

I made the bad choice to link to Sungenis' work not in a full url, but in a short url which no longer works - I was overusing short urls at the time, and now they are down. So, here is where I quoted it and I refute it in part:

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : St Augustine was a Geocentric ... in face of what, Mr. Sungenis?
https://filolohika.blogspot.com/2011/03/st-augustine-was-geocentric-in-face-of.html

I really see no reason to say that the Greeks of St Augustine's day were touting heliocentrism. Aristotle was as Geocentric as Augustine. The Pythagorean and Epicurean authors who were not were long since dead and by St Augustine's time had few followers.

I'm not sure there even was an Epicurean Heliocentric - Lucrece was Geocentric. And very bad at astronomy. So, one could say St. Augustine was Geocentric by default, not because "that was the science of the time" (though, in a somewhat different sense than that considered by Jimmy Akin, it was). But because it was common sense commonly admitted by the time and nothing in St. Augustine's faith made him challenge it. However, it is bound up with things that are of the faith, like miracle of Joshua, God being truthful when working miracles, heaven being a place, and the universe being created well below 10 000 years ago, not thirteen billion plus years ago.

Because, there were indeed pagans who thought Egypt had 40 000 years' history or Mesopotamia (with various metropoles) 150 000 years' history. Now, this was invariably repudiated. Why? Because these pseudo-histories involved various divinities we know to be false gods? No, Church Fathers had no problem, generally speaking with Euhemerism, I think the dropping of Euhemerism as to pagan divinities started with St. Francis Xaver concluding from the Japanese god "Bodda's" 9000 years of incarnations that "Bodda" had to be a total invention of imagination, when most people these days consider that the "last of the reincarnations" namely Siddharta Gautama was perfectly historic. The one reason the Church Fathers could have had to ditch Egyptian and Babylonian chronology was ... the Bible.

Now, let's see:

6) Does the decree mean that Catholics can’t interpret the Bible and must simply repeat what the Church or the Fathers say it means?

No. The decree doesn’t say anything so restrictive. Catholics are free to read and interpret the Scriptures.

The law merely established that they weren’t to contradict Church teaching or the unanimous consent of the Fathers when these sources had a definitive teaching on the meaning of a passage.

That's exactly why I verified that the "skyscraper" interpretation of the Tower of Babel was not universal in Fathers and Scholastics before I offered an alternative one - or before I persisted in doing so.

Now, the next paragraph seems to be somewhat ill chosen here:

7) Are there many such passages?

No. Pope Pius XII pointed out in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu:

There are but few texts whose sense has been defined by the authority of the Church, nor are those more numerous about which the teaching of the Holy Fathers is unanimous (n. 47).

Catholic biblical interpreters thus have a broad liberty of interpretation. As Leo XIII stated:

By this very wise law the Church by no means retards or blocks the investigations of biblical science, but rather keeps it free of error, and aids it very much in true progress. For, to every private teacher a large field is open in which along safe paths, by his industry in interpretation, he may labor efficaciously and profitably for the Church (Providentissimus Deus 14).

Suppose this is correct, I think taking the timelines of Genesis 5 and 11 literally would be among the top candidates. If a given passage to have such a patristic unvarying interpretation had to be commented on by all Church Fathers, arguably no passage at all would qualify, and the Church law of Trent would have been empty of concrete object - like a law on land property on Atlantis would be void of object since Atlantis sank.

Note, I am not saying the Church Fathers all agree on what the timeline is, but they are however deriving it from the text - as is Josephus who is even, for Genesis 11, in contradiction with himself as to what the timeline is, but nevertheless takes it as literally true, whether he means the sum total given (292 years from Flood to birth of Abraham) or the details given (which if correctly added together give a very different sum total).

But if one passage (outside the New Testament) has even better claim to have all Church Fathers agree, it's God creating Adam directly and directly specially. Not via evolution and by adding a special chosing. It's a matter for another post why this is a problem, but it is clear that Jimmy Akin has run into it. And very much from not taking the Biblical timeline even remotely literally as history.

Now, the spontaneous interpretation of the rule from Trent, in practise, is treating Church Fathers, when they don't disagree between them, as infallible, whether "consensus of Church Fathers" was or was not erected to an infallibility occasion. All the upshot of Jimmy Akin's post is to minimise this. There is another type of consensus which he is by contrast not the least interested in minimising : that of experts. The infallibility of the Church is a promise by Christ and the consensus of fathers is at least possibly a way of verifying if this was on a certain matter met during the first thousand years. The infallibility of human reason after the fall is not a promise at all, and as there are human reasoners not in "communion" with expertise, unlike Catholic Christians who needed to be in communion with bishops and with the saints canonised, the consensus of experts is not a way to verify that the best criteria of human reasoning have been met. Nevertheless "you'd need like 6 PhD's to be a qualified expert" ... "the standard answer, throughout human history, has been experts" (he's not an expert on history!) "historically it has been viewed safer to go with majority opinion" (in certain areas, roughly corresponding to where something we would consider "expertise" was already recognised as such).*

Obviously, he refers to the "Magisterium" as source of CCC 283, which I disagree on. Trent said we can't go against what the Church "tenet atque tenuit" - meaning a magisterial position has to be traceable to earlier magisterium. CCC 283 clearly isn't.

Again : "if that's the only question you are interested in, you are never going to settle it, unless you acquire 6 PhD's" ... Jimmy Akin clearly stated a layman has a right to read and interpret the Scriptures, the law by Trent session IV has sometimes been viewed as a doctrinal condemnation of "Scripture with individual interpretation" and Jimmy tells us it isn't so, but for some reason, he can't abide with the human reason side of questions getting the solution "experience and logic and individual interpretation" - that's a no no. I think we see some lopsidedness of criteria. Ordinary magisterium of 1500 years and more by bishops counts less than "ordinary magisterium" of 150 years and less by secular scientists.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Quinquagesima Lord's Day
27.II.2022

* Latin has no word for expert. It has words for various types of experts, like "medicus, faber, architectus" and in the Middle Ages, you get the idea that an "artifex" is an expert on his "ars" - but obviously an astrophysicist is not an "artifex" on stars, there is one only who actually made stars, and that's God. "Omni artifici de sua arte loquendo credendum est" rhymes better with Biblical than with Scientific inerrancy on stars.

Newspeak in Nineteen - Eighty ... er Sorry ... Ninety-Four

1) Newspeak in Nineteen - Eighty ... er Sorry ... Ninety-Four, 2) Mark Shea Recommended David Palm Who Misconstrues Bible Commission of 1909, 3) Would GKC have Agreed with MkSh that KH was a Bible Idolater?, 4) Correspondence of Hans-Georg Lundahl : With Jonathan Sarfati PhD on Fall and Inquisition, 5) New blog on the kid : Quarterlife is a Bad Term, 5b) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Answering Bill Nye, the Science Guy on a few points, 5c) New blog on the kid : Phil Provaznik/Dalrymple on Potassium-Argon and on Principle, more on Fission Track and Isochrons (a debunking of...), 6) [Back to Creation vs. Evolution :] Scenario impossible, 7) Karl Keating Out of His Depth?, 8) Three Kinds of Proposition, 9) Is Flat Earth Belief Heretical?, 10) HGL's F.B. writings : Between Palm and Sungenis, 11a) HGL's F.B. writings : On Helios in Christian Geocentrism, 11b) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Rivers Clapping Hands, Anaximander, Greek Philosophy at time of Ecclesiasticus ... , 12) Assorted retorts : ... on Geocentrism with Raymond Doetjes and "Imdor"

I was visiting Mark Shea again and saw this:

Merry Christmas
[on Catholic and Enjoying It]
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2013/12/merry-christmas-2.html

Proclamation of the Birth of Christ

Today, the twenty-fifth day of December, unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth and then formed man and woman in his own image.

Several thousand years after the flood, when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant. ...

I commented under it and got an answer:

Hans-Georg Lundahl

"unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth and then formed man and woman in his own image"

Roman Martyrology has year 5199 ... (and 2957 after the Flood)

Merry Christmas!

BillyT92679 > Hans-Georg Lundahl

Mark used the proclamation as stated in the OF.

[OF = Ordinary Form]

WesleyD > BillyT92679

The revision is actually more recent than that: it first appeared in a USCCB text published in 1994. Perhaps only in the USA are there two different versions?

An argument in favor of the new version can be found here*, and an argument in favor of the new version can be found here**. Silly me -- I like them both.

I tried to reply to the WesleyD:

[Quoting from his first link*] In this and similar cases, less precision is actually better, since it more closely reflects contemporary church teaching and biblical scholarship. Proclaiming exact numbers of years inevitably gives most people the impression that we know exactly when these biblical events took place, thereby unwittingly reinforcing a type of biblical fundamentalism or pseudo-historical literalism that does not conform to the principles of Catholic biblical interpretation. Considering how long ago these events are said to have taken place and how few historically reliable sources we have for events of the distant past (especially anything before the time of King David), it is better not to give the impression that dates are or can be known with great precision. I do not think the commentators cited in the Haydock Comment would have agreed. And I do not think they agree from Heaven either. Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Whose Work - Humanly Speaking - is the Haydock Commentary? http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2013/12/whose-work-humanly-speaking-is-haydock.html I have no idea who condemned "biblical fundamentalism" as a heresy, only it was NOT Pope Pius IX or Pope Leo XIII or Pope St Pius X. Also I have no idea when "the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth" became loaded with issues such as "contemporary church teaching"... I think Kent Hovind might enter heaven well before Fr. Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D. - if the latter gets there at all, that is.

Then I tried to post this, all I wrote above.

You do not have permission to post on this thread

Then I looked from Fr. Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D. to Jimmy Akin. The comments are already closed, so I cannot answer there.

Here is a quote from the blog post:

The dates he gives for the earlier events in the Chronology are probably not right, and in any event we wouldn't claim today to be able to establish these dates with the exact precision that he did. In one case–the date of the Exodus–modern biblical scholars have generally dated it a couple centuries after the traditional date.

Here is in full a publicity on top of his blog. It also includes my answer to the quote I just gave, so I will quote it:

Start reading Jimmy's best-selling book The Fathers Know Best in under a minute!

If you believe that The Fathers Know Best, you will obviously support anno mundi date 5199 against Ussher's 4004 fr the birth year of Our Lord. But you will equally support it against the "unknown ages" stuff.

Now, there is a problem also with the Exodus revision. Dating Exodus to 13th C. BC implies more or less making Ramses II the Pharao of the Exodus - which arguably he was not. He has a grave in Egypt, not a corpse in the Red Sea for one. And for another, the Hyksos invasion fits in very well with an Egypt that lacks an army, while the Hyksos tyranny was the perfect occasion to forget traumatisation by the Ten Plagues brought on by Moses through traumatisation by a harsh tyranny. A "fundie" Egyptologist has identified Moses as Amenemhet IV (up to when he hit the Egyptian, that is, and probably rather than with perfect certainty***) - which if anything would bring the Exodus further back than 1510 years BC. His conclusion is that Egyptian time line needs crushing. With Exodus in 1510 BC Egyptian timeline still needs crushing but less than according to Protestant or Jewish Bibles.

I can relate this issue to my general distaste for "OF", since "OF" also removed a few Saints from the Calendar, not as was suggested on a morning when I was too tired to really notice because names were little in use, but in reality because some Saints, such as Philomena or Christopher or Barbara were deemed by commissionaries as "too uncertain", which they had obviously not been to the judgement of previous Catholic scholarship of previous centuries. And Christopher and Barbara are a bit more popular than Paphnutius (who would however sound better in French than in Anglicised Latin form).

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Rainer Maria Rilke Library
St Sylvester, Pope
[who may well have cured
Constantine of leprosy]
31-XII-2013

* Christmas Proclamation
[on Catholic resources, by Fr. Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D.]
http://catholic-resources.org/ChurchDocs/ChristmasProclamation.htm

** Bad Liturgical News, Folks
[on Jimmy Akin's blog]
http://jimmyakin.com/2011/05/bad-liturgical-news-folks.html

*** CMI : Egyptian history and the biblical record: a perfect match?
By Daniel Anderson
Published: 23 January 2007
http://creation.com/egyptian-history-and-the-biblical-record-a-perfect-match

I usually link to articles in the above format, same for CMI as for any other link including my own, but since they have a logo, for linking, here is one to their site in general. I have some cautions, notably when they defend Malthus and Galileo, and of course they would prone Ussher rather than Septuagint based Chronologies like Roman Martyrology, or rather actually do so, but often they are a very good resource:



Just think of it, if George Orwell had waited to 1949 with publishing and called the novel 1994, he would have hit the nail for the "newspeak" date!