I asked this very question to a somewhat notable Catholic theologian that I met right after I left the Witnesses. It was after a christening at a large Catholic Church in central California. He was in the area to give a series of lectures on Catholic/Christian/Jewish history vs. secular history.
After we introduced ourselves, he asked me if I was a Catholic. My response was, "Well, my mother was a Catholic most of her life, but then she converted to Jehovah's Witness and the rest of the immediate family followed. I left for good when I was about 22, but I married a Catholic girl."
"Oh, so you are a Catholic by marriage?" he asked. I replied that I never became a Catholic; my wife converted from being a Catholic to a Jehovah's Witness. We're divorced now. She eventually went back to being a Catholic."
He asked me if I was still a "believer," and if not, why not. I told him that I was agnostic about god, but felt the Bible had no real credibility. When he asked me for an example, I mentioned Genesis. "The earth, sun, moon, animals, plants, humans, etc. all created in 6 24-hour days? A flood that topped Mt. Everest in less than 40 days, but drained away in just a few months? And where did all that water go?"
"Well," he replied, "time periods in the Bible can not be taken literally. Early manuscripts indicated that every early civilization only had one time piece - the sun. It came up and it went down. The next day it came up. The concept of weeks, months and years is really a much later development. So early writings speak of seasons based on the stages of the moon, so they may have considered each full transition of the moon as their 'year.' Calendars are a relatively late development and did not really appear until numbers and writing became universal. Early humans simply did not think in terms of numbers and letters - they thought in terms of day and night, warm and cold, etc."
He admitted that much of Christian belief was based on "faith, not facts." "You'll go crazy if you try to convert every word in any Bible into absolute fact. Most of it was not even written until about 500 years before Jesus."
I had a lot of respect for what he had to say. He had that little twinkle in his eye that told me that his belief was tied more to his job than his actual beliefs, but he likely truly believed in God and Jesus. I guessed that he was a reasonable man who knew more than he was willing to divulge. But those few minutes made an impression on me that still makes up a part of my own philosphy. But the point was that he apparently did not believe that a Biblical "year" was the same as a modern "year."
So if you take some of those old patriarchs and change their life spans from years into months, then someone who lived to be 950 years old would have actually been around 80 - a far more reasonable number of years.
JV
