To quote from a book I have: it is [ AEONS, the search for the beginning of time ] by Martin Gorst...I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in "beginning of the world" chronology. It is the story of man's search for the origins of the earth and the universe.
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In 1642 the Jesuit missionary Father Martino Martini arrived in China. For ten years he travelled the country, mapping its towns and villages, learning its language, and preaching the Catholic faith. (...) However, the more he learnt, the more he realised the scale of a problem that had dogged the Jesuit's attempts to teach Christianity since they had first arrived in the country seventy years earlier.
The problem was one of chronology. When the first Jesuit missionaries had arrived in China, the Chinese had greeted their account of world history - drawn from the Hebrew Bible - with disbelief. The cause of this dissent was the story and date of the biblical Flood, the fearsome deluge in which, according to Genesis, all the people of the world had drowned except Noah and his family. According to the missionaries, this punishment from God had occurred in or around the year 2300 BC. The Chinese, however, dismissed this as impossible. Their own written history stretched back hundreds of years before this date, and made no mention of a worldwide flood. (...)
Determined to correct this ignorance, Martini resolved to write a history of China himself. As he read through the (chinese) texts, however, Martini realised that the Chinese chronology posed a serious threat to the authority of the Bible. The dates of the Chinese Imperial dynasty indicated that the first emperor, Fu Hsi, had begun his rule in 2952 BC, some 600 years before the Hebrew date for the Flood.
The Chinese records appeared more detailed and reliable than those of any other culture, including the Jews. They contained no bizarre myths or unbelievable legends, the lengths of the emperors' reigns were clearly documented, and even the earliest accounts had been <copied verbatem> by contemporary authors. With the intellectual honesty typical of his Jesuit training, he concluded these records to be genuine, and resolved to break the news to Europe.
Like the response <..to an earlier reference published three years before...>, the reaction to the news that China's history pre-dated the Flood was overwhelmingly hostile. Most academics immediately assumed that the Chinese had exaggerated their history out of national pride.
After the death of Martini himself, the contraversy he left behind continued to simmer for nearly a century. In response to the claims of the European scholars that the Chinese had fabricated their history, the Jesuits in China scanned the ancient texts for records of eclipses. By 1729 they had found 26 solar eclipses that "according to calculation fell on the exact year, month, and day indicated by the Chinese authors".
For the Peking Jesuits, this proved that the Chinese chronology was correct, but it wasn't enough to convince their European colleagues. Nothing could even dent the Europeans widely held conviction that the world was less than 6000 years old.
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Amazing, is it not, how an established religion can take upon itself the illusion of having all complete and true knowledge, and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, just continue off in a stubborn pursuit of their own beliefs. "Intellectual Honesty" seems to be a concept which they do not posses.
I think we have at least one such "celebrated Watchtower Scholar" here on this site!
James
