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Genesis, Creation, and Early Man

The Old Testament Chronology

The time elapsed from Adam to the present day is no more than some 7,500 years, as the Holy Fathers never doubt. St. John Chrysostom says clearly that Christ “opened for us today Paradise, which had remained closed for some 5,000 years.”1 And St. Isaac the Syrian: Before Christ “for five thousand five hundred and some years God left Adam (i.e., man) to labor on the earth.”2 … But why needlessly quote the Fathers who all say the same thing, when every Orthodox Christian need only look at any Orthodox calendar to discover that we are now living in “the year 7482 from the Creation of the world,” according to the chronology that has come down to us from the earliest Christian times. (The Fathers, by the way, were well aware of the discrepancy of some hundreds of years between the Greek and Hebrew Old Testament chronology, and it did not bother them; they did not quibble over years or worry that the standard calendar was precise “to the very year”; it is sufficient that what is involved is beyond any doubt a matter of some few thousands of years, involving the lifetimes of specific men, and it can in no way be interpreted as millions of years or whole ages and races of men.)

Footnotes

  1. St. John Chrysostom, On the Cross and the Thief 1.2, J.-P. Migne, ed, Patrologia Cursus Completus, Series Graeca. 166 vols. Paris: Migne, 1857-1886. (PG) 49.401. ↩

  2. St. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies 19, Tvoreniya, p. 85 [trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Homily 29, p. 143] [Homily 74 in the printed Greek text edited by Nikephoros Theotokis (1770)]. ↩