accepting the sacred text which led Luther, Melanchthon, and the great
Protestant leaders generally, to oppose the Copernican theory, fixed
them firmly in this biblical chronology; the keynote was sounded for
them by Luther when he said, "We know, on the authority of Moses,
that longer ago than six thousand years the world did not exist."
Melanchthon, more exact, fixed the creation of man at 3963 B.C.

But the great Christian scholars continued the old endeavour to make the
time of man's origin more precise: there seems to have been a sort
of fascination in the subject which developed a long array of
chronologists, all weighing the minutest indications in our sacred
books, until the Protestant divine De Vignolles, who had given forty
years to the study of biblical chronology, declared in 1738 that he had
gathered no less than two hundred computations based upon Scripture, and
no two alike.

As to the Roman Church, about 1580 there was published, by authority of
Pope Gregory XIII, the Roman Martyrology, and this, both as originally
published and as revised in 1640 under Pope Urban VIII, declared that
the creation of man took place 5199 years before Christ.

But of all who gave themselves up to these chronological studies, the
man who exerted the most powerful influence upon the dominant nations of
Christendom was Archbishop Usher. In 1650 he published his Annals of the
Ancient and New Testaments, and it at once became the greatest authority
for all English-speaking peoples. Usher was a man of deep and wide
theological learning, powerful in controversy; and his careful
conclusion, after years of the most profound study of the Hebrew
Scriptures, was that man was created 4004 years before the Christian
era. His verdict was widely received as final; his dates were inserted
in the margins of the authorized version of the English Bible, and
were soon practically regarded as equally inspired with the sacred text
itself: to question them seriously was to risk preferment in the Church
and reputation in the world at large.

The same adhesion to the Hebrew Scriptures which had influenced Usher
brought leading men of the older Church to the same view: men who would
have burned each other at the stake for their differences on other
points, agreed on this: Melanchthon and Tostatus, Lightfoot and Jansen,
Salmeron and Scaliger, Petavius and Kepler, inquisitors and reformers,
Jesuits and Jansenists, priests and rabbis, stood together