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Archbishop James Ussher

1581–1656

 

Though his name may not be widely known today, James Ussher, the Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh in the early seventeenth century, is among the most influential men who ever existed.  For millions of Bible Christians, he is the one who settled the date of creation of the world, which they find printed in the margins of their King James translation of the sacred scriptures.

      Though most people today accept that the world is many millions of years old, for those who hold a literal, fundamentalist view of the Bible, the date of 4004 B.C., which he put forward, is not to be gainsaid.

      James Ussher was born in the parish of St Nicholas, in the city of Dublin, on 4th January 1581, a generation after the Reformation had begun.  From an early age his education was keenly Protestant.  He was sent to a school which had been set up in the city by two political agents of James VI of Scotland, the Presbyterian heir apparent to the English throne, who wished to establish a Presbyterian party for himself in Ireland in the event of Queen Elizabeth's death.  His education continued at Trinity College, then an almost new establishment, which had been founded with the blessing of Queen Elizabeth I by his uncle Henry Ussher.  He entered the college at the age of thirteen.

      He was admitted as a fellow of Trinity in 1599, earning his master's degree in 1600, and was ordained both a deacon and Anglican priest in 1601.  In 1607 he was given his bachelor in divinity.  He was chancellor of St Patrick's Cathedral and rector of Finglas, just outside the city.  In 1607 he was also appointed regius professor of divinity at Trinity, and received his doctorate in 1614.

      His education had filled him with enthusiasm for the Reformation, and he began an extended and intensive study of the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church (such early scholars as St Augustine and St Jerome) in order to defend its positions.  In 1613, his first publication, though not his first composition, was a history of the church between the sixth and thirteenth centuries.

      He was vice chancellor of Trinity in 1614 and 1617.  During a two-year period in London he was presented to King James (now monarch of England as well as Scotland), was appointed bishop of Meath, and preached before the House of Commons at Westminster.  In 1625 the king transferred him to Armagh as archbishop and primate of all Ireland.

      Ussher was bitterly opposed to Catholicism.  In 1626 he prevented the viceroy from granting Catholics partial relief from the penal laws.  He objected to the use of Gaelic in the services of the established church, which was being promoted by William Bedell, who had made the first Gaelic translation of the Bible to be printed.  He was largely responsible for the Calvinistic canons drawn up for the Church of Ireland in 1634, though these were never accepted.  But he was also opposed to efforts to make the Church of Ireland conform in all points of teaching with the Church of England, which he felt was still tainted with Catholic ideas.  He was perhaps largely responsible for the austere outlook of the Church of Ireland, which was faced with a largely Catholic population in Ireland.

      He had a European reputation as a scholar and Protestant theologian.  He made many trips to England, searching out books to build up the library at the new Dublin University.  He was on friendly terms with such scholars as Sir Thomas Bodley, Sir Robert Cotton and the antiquarian William Camden.  While in England on a scholarly research trip the Great Rebellion broke out.  This was in 1641, and Ussher never returned to Ireland again.  During the rebellion he lost his house and property in the city of Armagh.  He had pleaded with Charles I not to abandon Strafford, but in vain.  He remained in England, and to compensate him for the loss of Armagh he was given the monies from the vacant see of Carlisle.  He refused a seat in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster in 1643 and never held office again, but spent his time preaching and writing.

      During the civil war he left Oxford and sought refuge in Wales.  He returned to London in 1645, and in 1647 he was appointed preacher to the lawyers at Lincoln's Inn.  In 1648 he discussed the question of the episcopacy with Charles I on the Isle of Wight, but the following year he witnessed the execution of the king at Whitehall.

      His greatest scholarly achievement was his work on the epistles of St Ignatius of Antioch.  In 1644 he added an authentic text of the seven genuine surviving letters, eliminating the spurious ones and later interpolations.

      By temper, Ussher was a Calvinist.  As a young man, his association with Walter Travers, the provost of Trinity, had given him Puritan sympathy with their position against the Anglicans.  His work Reduction of Episcopacy was written as a conciliatory attempt to prevent the outbreak of the civil war when tensions increased in both England and Ireland.  It proposed a scheme by which the Anglican and Presbyterian traditions could be united into an established church throughout the British Isles.  However, it was published only after his death.

      His works were eventually collected by the Irish scholars C.E. Elrington and James H. Todd (between 1847 and 1864).  The most influential of these was his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, published in two volumes in Dublin between 1650 and 1654.

      His lengthy studies gave rise to his famous chronology of the Bible, which placed the creation of the world in 4004 B.C. by calculating the lives of the patriarchs as given in the texts.  The chronology he proposed was shortly after inserted into the margins of the authorized King James Bible, though by what authority it is not known.  Later it was even included in some editions of the Catholic Douay Bible, an indication of how wide its acceptance was.

      As A.D. White comments in the History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, it was 'soon practically regarded as equally inspired with the sacred text itself'.  (In a less famous work published in 1642, Dr John Lightfoot of Cambridge suggested that 'man was created by the Trinity on 23rd October 4004 B.C. at nine o'clock in the evening'.  This chronology was widely accepted and could be found in many influential books, such as Joseph Hadyn's Dictionary of Dates, well into the nineteenth century.  Though historical and geological research during that period completely undermined his chronology, it is still widely accepted by many Protestants.

      Ussher died at Lady Peterborough's house at Reigate in Surrey, and was buried in Westminster Abbey by order of Oliver Cromwell.  His personal library, amounting to some ten thousand volumes, among which were many manuscripts in Gaelic and Oriental languages, was purchased by the state and eventually donated to Trinity College in Dublin.  But his real memorial may be in the millions who still follow his chronology and accept his date for the creation of the world unhesitatingly.