"Othniel, forty years. Cadmus introduced letters into Greece."
"Deborah, forty years. Apollo discovered the art of medicine and invented the cithara."
"Gideon, forty years. Mercury invented the lyre and gave it to Orpheus."
Reasoning in this general way, Isidore kept well under the longer date; and, the great theological authority of southern Europe having thus spoken, the question was virtually at rest throughout Christendom for nearly a hundred years.
Early in the eighth century the Venerable Bede took up the problem. Dwelling especially upon the received Hebrew text of the Old Testament, he soon entangled himself in very serious difficulties; but, in spite of the great fathers of the first three centuries, he reduced the antiquity of man on the earth by nearly a thousand years, and, in spite of mutterings against him as coming dangerously near a limit which made the theological argument from the six days of creation to the six ages of the world look doubtful, his authority had great weight, and did much to fix western Europe in its allegiance to the general system laid down by Eusebius and Jerome.
In the twelfth century this belief was re-enforced by a tide of thought from a very different quarter. Rabbi Moses Maimonides and other Jewish scholars, by careful study of the Hebrew text, arrived at conclusions diminishing the antiquity of man still further, and thus gave strength throughout the Middle Ages to the shorter chronology: it was incorporated into the sacred science of Christianity; and Vincent of Beauvais, in his great Speculum Historiale, forming part of that still more enormous work intended to sum up all the knowledge possessed by the ages of faith, placed the creation of man at about four thousand years before our era.(182)
(182) For a table summing up the periods, from Adam to the building of
the Temple, explicitly given in the Scriptures, see the admirable paper
on The Pope and the Bible, in The Contemporary Review for April, 1893.
For the date of man's creation as given by leading chronologists in
various branches of the Church, see L'Art de Verifier les Dates,
Paris, 1819, vol. i, pp. 27 et seq. In this edition there are sundry
typographical errors; compare with Wallace, True Age of the World,
London, 1844. As to preference for the longer computation by the fathers
of the Church, see Clinton, Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii, p. 291. For the
sacred significance of the six days of creation in ascertaining
the antiquity of man, see especially Eichen, Geschichte der
mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung; also Wallace, True Age of the World,
pp. 2,3. For the views of St. Augustine, see Topinard, Anthropologie,
citing the De Civ. Dei., lib. xvi, c. viii, c. x. For the views of
Philastrius, see the De Hoeresibus, c. 102, 112, et passim, in Migne,
tome xii. For Eusebius's simple credulity, see the tables in Palmer's
Egyptian Chronicles, vol. ii, pp. 828, 829. For Bede, see Usher's
Chronologia Sacra, cited in Wallace, True Age of the World, p. 35. For
Isidore of Seville, see the Etymologia, lib. v, c. 39; also lib. iii, in
Migne, tome lxxxii.
At the Reformation this view was not disturbed. The same manner of 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.