Luke 3:23-38 and the Age of the Earth

Well, if you look at the geneology of Christ as recorded in Matthew 1:1 and following take note especially of verse 17 and the number of generations stated to exist there. Then compare with the old testament version of the generations listed. You will see that Matthew left out generations. Apparantly he did this to make the numbers come out 14, which being 2 x 7, makes a double perfect number of generations.

But it proves generations can be omitted from such a list.

 

Paul, if you study anything about Hebrew history and writing you will recognize what Matthew did. Luke, however, being not only Greek, but a doctor, included everyone and yes, the geneology in Luke is of great help in dating the history of the earth.

The following link might be of interest here:
http://www.setterfield.org/ccchron/barrychron.html

 

...Adam (who..I'm assuming was created on day 6).

Not sure, since the first man & woman are mentioned in Gen1 as being created on day 6, but in Gen2, man is created first, then animals, then woman.

Eve (in Hebrew, Chavvah, meaning "giver of life") gets her proper name in Gen3 (before then, she's ishshah which refers to the female gender), but the first man that we refer to as Adam does not receive a proper name in Genesis. The Hebrew referrs to the first man as "adam" which means "the human". The KJV capitalized the word to use it as a proper name, but that's not how it was written in Hebrew (note that "the man" in Gen2 and "Adam" in Gen2 are the same Hebrew word). The only time we see "Adam" as a proper name is in 1 Chronicles.

I have no idea where the first English translations came up with "Eve" since it in no way means "giver of life".

 

Helen, the point is, if Matthew can leave out generations (based on the imperitives and permissions of his Hebrew culture, as you point out) then the original writers of the Old Testament, Luke's only source of generation information, could also have left out generations. Luke merely copied from the old testament in preparing his list.

 

John first: Genesis 2 does not contradict Genesis 1. The verbs are mistranslated in the KJV. The garden and the animals HAD BEEN formed. The Hebrew does not have that sort of past tense, so everything is put into the simple past. But to assume that these two version contradict each other would be to assume that the Jewish people were too stupid to notice that through the millennia. Genesis 1 gives the overview of the creation of everything and Genesis 2 zeros down to the two people themselves, Adam and Eve. There is some pretty decent evidence that Genesis 2:4b-5:1a were from the hand of Adam himself, and record his personal memories and knowledge.

Paul, Luke was a researcher. The detailed genealogies of the Hebrew people were available in the Temple archives until the Temple was burnt down in 70A.D. Luke's genealogy is the more detailed because Luke was a Greek historian. Matthew's, which is of Joseph (Luke's is of Mary), follows standard Hebrew abbreviated form allowing the Hebrews to know where Joseph's bloodlines were. They already knew the details!

You 'liberals' seem quite content insulting by implication the entire Jewish people and early Christian church in terms of implicitely accusing them of real stupidity. If you think they were so stupid as to not recognize the difference between Luke's and Matthew's genealogies, then please scrap the Bible altogether. For if they could not get the written records even copied correctly, best not to depend on them to get anything else straight, either!

 

There's a few possibilities besides "the Hebrews were stupid". First, the books of the NT were not immediately gathered together, so it's not likely that the contradictions were obvious to anyone, and if they were, there was a good deal of argument and discussion about which books were to be considered inspired and which not.

At any rate, the contradictions are real and retreating to "contradictions weren't really contradictions in those days" isn't a very good argument.

 

Naah. All one has to assume is that the ancients were just as facile at coming up with ad-hoc rationalizations as you are. You do this in all sincerity and so did they.

The "evidence" consists of unfounded speculation.

The generations for Abraham and preceding would have only been what is in our Bibles. These could have left out generations just as Matthew did.

I decline to disconnect from the record of God's revelation to men just because some men didn't succeed in recording all the details inerrantly.

I know you are speaking from exasperation, but in my mind there is a problem for many who are sincere seekers after truth when they are asked to give up their scientific knowledge in order to find God, and find this to be an unreasonable trade.

 

You don't have to give up scientific evidence. Just don't confuse the evidence with the interpretations, OK?

 

I agree. Consider the following data on annual layers laid down in Greenland as counted from cores that were drilled and analyzed in 1993:

ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/depthage/countage.txt

Note that there are over a hundred thousand annual layers counted before the data becomes unreliable at the greatest depths.

We're not going to re-interpret this raw data, are we?