The dope peddling conman Sportin’ Life who lived on Catfish Row in 1930s Charleston, South Carolina, in Porgy and Bess poses the question:
Methuselah lived 900 years
Methuselah lived 900 years
Who calls that livin’
When no gal will give in
To no man what’s 900 years
And he concluded, commenting on the biblical mystery:
It ain’t necessarily so
It ain’t necessarily so
The things that you’re liable
To read in the Bible,
It ain’t necessarily so.
His solution was:
To get into heaven, don’t snap for a second
Live clean forget your faults
I take the gospel whenever it’s possible
But with a grain of salt
The mystery does not end with Methuselah; he was just the oldest of the biblical characters. The Sefer haYashar gives Methuselah’s age at death as 960. Adam lived 930 years; Mahalalel lived 895, Jared 962, Noah 950. And those are just the people important enough to rate an eternal place in the scriptures. Sarah died at the age of 127 years—the oldest woman in the Bible. She had a baby (Isaac) when she was 80. God ordained that man should not live longer than 120 years; Moses was 120. Seth lived 105 years, then he became the father of Enosh. The reason Noah lived for so long is that his genetic make-up was what gave him the potential to live such an extraordinarily long life. For 1,500 years after creation, men lived such long lives that most were either contemporaries of the first man, Adam, or personally knew someone who was. The ten patriarchs (excluding Enoch) who preceded the Great Flood lived an average of 912 years. Lamech died the youngest at the age of 777. Enoch and Elijah never died at all.
Establishing the chronologies is complicated by the fact that the Bible was compiled by different authors over several centuries with lengthy chronological gaps, making it difficult to do a simple totaling of Biblical ages and dates. One prominent theological perspective suggests that the long lifespans reflect the ideal conditions of the pre-Flood world. According to this view, God created a perfect environment for humanity, free from the effects of sin and decay. However, Cain lived 730 years despite being a murderer; so, that theory has some flaws or at least exceptions.
The changes after the Old Testament came because God shortened man’s lifespan so that we may hope in His mercy and long for His promised redemption in Christ. Additionally, it is a mercy for God to take believers away from this wicked and fallen world, so goes the believers’ theory. The Bible says about 70 years of age that it is the number of given to us [Psalms 90:10]. Some even live to eighty. The Virgin Mary [mother of Yeshua/Jesus] lived to age 60. Mary Magdalene was 58. But even the best years are filled with pain and trouble; soon they disappear, and we fly away.
To convey his point that the Bible was not error free, Sportin’ Life sang his famous refrain to what sounds like a Jewish melody–and not just any melody at that. The melody that Sportin’ Life used is essentially the same as that commonly invoked for the blessing before the reading of the Torah portion: Bar’chu et Adonai Ham’vorach [Bless Adonai the blessed One].
The Bible teaches quite plainly that the early patriarchs often lived to be nearly 1,000 years old and even had children when they were several hundred years old. But even a life span of nearly 1,000 years is sadly abbreviated when we consider that God initially created us to live forever.
Similar claims of long-life spans are found in the secular literature of several ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Indians, and Chinese). Reasons for such longevity in those other cultures is not known or studied.
Modern scientists indicate that the people of Moses’ and Abraham’s time lived on average about 70-80 years, and the average life expectancy was around 35 years in the time of Jesus, largely due to the high infant mortality rate. That jibes with this author’s experience with people for the last 85 years, and with his medical training, albeit noting exceptions. The oldest person ever whose age has been independently verified was Jeanne Calment (1875–1997) of France, who lived to the age of 122 years and 164 days. Jiroemon Kimura (1897–2013) of Japan who lived to the age of 116 years and 54 days. As of January 2025, the oldest person on record as still living is Inah Canabarro Lucas of Brazil, aged 116 years, 219 days. The next oldest known living persons are Ethel Caterham and Okagi Hayashi, both at 115 years old; Marie-Rose Tessier at 114 years old; and João Marinho Neto of Brazil lives on aged 112 years, 100 days.
The president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–and a living example of the value of good and healthy living–just turned 100 with little evidence of slowing down. There are genuine and verified mysteries of our time: it is a fact that a 92-year-old woman delivered a 60-year-old baby. Huang Yijun, 92, of southern China, delivered a child which she had been carrying for well over half a century. The baby was not born alive, unfortunately.
Even allowing for the long-lived persons whose ages are verified, it stretches the imagination of one with a scientific background beyond reasonable limits to accord the persons of the Bible described earlier ages far beyond any verified people of the present day. So, how did those ages become part of the Bible and still accepted by a large portion of religious persons even now?
It is easiest to start with the King James Version of the Bible and its chronologist, The Most Reverend James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, Professor, Trinity College Dublin, and its chronologist, Chancellor, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and Prebend of Finglas created a chronology of the world based on a literal interpretation of the Old Testament. His chronology is usually associated with young Earth creationism–which holds that the universe was created only a few millennia ago by God as described in the first two chapters of the biblical book of Genesis–as opposed to evolution and old earth more modern theories.
James Ussher was born to a well-to-do family, January 4, 1581, in Dublin, parish of St. Nicholas Parish, Ireland, and died March 21, 1656, in Reigate, Surrey, England. His maternal grandfather, James Stanihurst, had been speaker of the Irish parliament. His father, Arland Ussher, was a clerk in chancery who married Stanihurst’s daughter, Margaret. Arland asserted that he descended from Neville, who came over to Ireland with King John in the capacity of usher and changed his name to that of his office. Ussher’s younger and only surviving brother, Ambrose, became a distinguished scholar of Arabic and Hebrew.
James received his formal education at Dublin Free School run by Scottish Protestants and Trinity College Dublin at age eight. He then entered the staunch Calvinist Trinity College Dublin at age 13, earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1598, his Master of Arts in 1601, Bachelor of Divinity in 1607, Doctor of Divinity in 1612 and became a fellow of Trinity College, then Vice-Chancellor in 1615, and went on to become Chancellor of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin in 1605. He was a gifted scholar, linguist, and theologian. He married his cousin, Phoebe, in 1614. Ussher published his first work in 1615 and he was directly involved with the drawing up of the first confession of faith of the Church of Ireland, the Irish Articles of Religion.
King James I nominated Ussher to be the Bishop of Meath after Ussher gained the king’s favor during a visit to England in 1619. That favor undoubtedly went far to assure the appointment of Ussher as the church chronologer. Archbishop Ussher increasingly devoted his time and attention to a thorough study of Biblical chronology. He used his skills in Hebrew and other Semitic languages to study the original ancient texts.
Ussher started out with an intention to lay a firm foundation for presuppositional apologetics. As his starting presumption, Archbishop Ussher took the Bible to absolutely inerrant, complete, and inspired, even in the minute historical details of chronology and history. Instead of basing his dating system upon an Egyptian or Sumerian calendar, he carefully dated the world’s beginning and passage of time by using only the inspired texts of Scripture.
Ussher painstakingly comparing Scripture with Scripture and numbering the days of the ancient kings of Israel and the lifespans given in the Old Testament genealogies, Ussher arrived at the inflexible date of October 23, 4004 B.C. at nightfall, for the date and time of day of the creation of the world. The first day of creation began at nightfall preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C. in the proleptic Julian calendar. He established this as Anno Mundi 1. That makes the world of this year to be 6,026 years old. He established a precise date for every important event known to man leading up to the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. He integrated Egyptian and Chaldean histories, including the writings of Greek historians such as Herodotus and Roman historians such as Josephus, but always subjugated them to the superiority of Scripture.
The dating system devised by Ussher continued to be relied upon by conservative Bible scholars who have held firmly to the view that God created the world in six literal days about 6,000 years ago. The Bible-believing Christians believe that all the world owes a debt of gratitude for helping people to understand human history in the light of eternity. It is their presumption that history is not a random collection of scattered events; on the contrary, it is planned and orchestrated by an eternal God working in an orderly way to accomplish His redemptive purposes in the world.
To accomplish that system of dates required several leaps of faith by Ussher and the Christians—including religious scholars—who followed him. First, lacking any other evidence in the Old Testament—such as other, unmentioned, prophets, and governmental figures—as having lived. Secondly: therefore, the ages of the known figures had to be stretched beyond anything reasoning people might infer. In fact, in a later writing, Ussher was even more precise. In his Epistle to the Reader in his Latin and English works, he offered the conclusion, “I deduce that the time from the creation until midnight, January 1, 1 A.D. was 4003 years, seventy days and six hours,” i.e. 6 pm. The more precise the dating and timing, the conclusions of Ussher and his Christian following has made it all the harder to accept by the general public.
There is an amusing cartoon found in an article written to debunk divine creativity over evolution and geology. A professor stands at his blackboard chalking his conclusion that creativity is the answer. To his left is a complex set of mathematical equations; next on the board is the statement “and then a miracle occurred” followed by a confused skip to the right side of the board and its equations and conclusion. It would seem that the same kind of miraculous occurrence had to have been in play for such ordinary historical human beings to have achieved such incredible longevities. Most scientific minded modern educated people believe that those calculations are just that… incredible.
For one thing, in the traditional King James Bible, where there are dates given in the margins for various key events, Genesis 1, the creation of the world, is given as 6004 BCE. It was because Ussher realized full well that there was a problem with his “modern” calendars. The calendar we—and Ussher–used was invented in the sixth century CE by a Christian monk named Dionysius Exiguus (whose name, in English, translates as “Dennis the Short”).
Dionysius began the new era–C.E. or A.D.–with the year 1. He had no option to that since the concept of zero was not mathematically worked out yet in the sixth century, and so the first year could not have been 0. But even more than that, Dionysius Exiguus miscalculated the date of Jesus’ birth, from which the era had its beginning.
For if Jesus was in fact an infant during the reign of King Herod–as related by both Matthew and Luke in the New Testament – then he must have been born no later than 4 B.C.—and, likely before–the year of Herod’s death. This creates a problem, of course, for those who continue to work with the abbreviations A.D. (anno domini: Latin for The Year of our Lord) and B.C. (Before Christ)–since, as sometimes noted, according to the calendar we use–Jesus was actually born at least four years Before Christ.
The larger problem, though, for literalistic Christians who believe that the universe came into being not some 13 billion years ago, as modern astronomers maintain, but in 4004 BCE–as Ussher claimed–and who think that is that the world is supposed to exist for exactly six thousand years, based on the six days of creation in Genesis, it should have ended already, by noon on October 23, 1997.
