8000th Year of Creation?

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I recently started my RCIA classes to begin the process of converting from atheism to Catholocism. I was raised Southern Baptist so my knowledge of the Church and what it believes is still rather limited, having grown up in a home in which the Catholic Church was often demonized.

Several weeks ago I heard the man in charge of my RCIA class (the Steward of Christian Initiation or something like that) mention something about this being around the time of the 8000th year of creation. That we had entered into the 8th day of creation or something very similar to that? I can’t remember this part for sure but I think he may have said something about time starting over with Christ or something like that.

I didn’t really have time after class to ask him about it and he’s been out of town since for the holidays. I’m very confused as to what he was talking about and haven’t been able to find anything online, mostly because I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for. Any help would be greatly appreciated
 
The information that you were given is not a belief or teaching of the Catholic Church. The Church has not made any official statements as to how many years ago the Universe and all it contains appeared.
 
Weird. If you add up the numbers in Genesis it comes to ~6000. Not sure where 8000 would come from.

In any case, the Church allows disagreement on this matter.
 
If God was confined to living on Earth, his day would be 24 hours long. But why would God measure his day by a speck of dust that he created, and that we call the Earth.
 
In Judaism, this is the year 5778, so I’m not sure of the 8000 calculation either.
Blockquote The counting of Jewish years, as we know it today, dates from the Middle Ages. In secular texts, Jewish time is often noted as “A.M.” — anno mundo — literally, “years of the world.” (Occasionally, “A.M.” is explained as standing for aera mundi, “era of the world.”) This system of Jewish time is called the “Mundane Era” (English for aera mundi) because those who invented it believed they were calculating dates from the birth of the world.
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(from this site: Counting the Jewish Years | My Jewish Learning )
 
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Arkansan said:
Weird. If you add up the numbers in Genesis it comes to ~6000. Not sure where 8000 would come from.

In any case, the Church allows disagreement on this matter.
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Unlike science which is crystal clear.
 
stupidisasstupiddoes said:
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Arkansan:
Weird. If you add up the numbers in Genesis it comes to ~6000. Not sure where 8000 would come from.

In any case, the Church allows disagreement on this matter.
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Unlike science which is crystal clear.
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I wonder how crystal clear science is? Is the Earth 4.5 billion years old, or are they allowing the odd fifty million years as an error range?
 
This is year 5778 in Jewish calendar that is from Creation of this world upon their own claims. But 8000 is something new. Maybe the priest in cause had some personal ideas and maybe ask him what he meant. But even if you don’t like him or his ideas don’t equal him to the entire church.
 
It’s funny how there’s absolutely zero evidence for a 6,000 year old earth other than a fundamentalist interpretation of a Jewish text. All you have it stupid comments like this one trying to poke holes in what every serious scientist believes. Creationism is about as serious to physics as the belief that Jesus never existed is to History, so think about that for a minute before saying the first thing that comes into your head.
 
Even if young earth’s believers are wrong, I don’t think it is a stupid belief. God is outside of time and he could have created a universe already with its past, that’s perfectly possible. If we think that there were no consciousness in that past, it has even more sense, because I think time is a subjective thing and it’s needed a consciousness to experience it. But I could be wrong, of course.
 
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I guess,he added up the 2000 years of Christianity,with the 6000 years of creation 😄
 
I don’t get this 8,000 year thing. There is solid evidence that agricultural societies were already well developed 8,000 years ago. Humans go back at least 60,000 years, although there is evidence to suggest we go back as much as 140,000 years
 
Arkansan said:
Weird. If you add up the numbers in Genesis it comes to ~6000. Not sure where 8000 would come from.
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The Septuagint. The numbering of ages in Genesis as found in the Greek Septuagint is different from the numbering in the Hebrew. The Vetus Latina was translated from the septuagint, whereas the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome was translated from the Hebrew. There was a bit of controversy over this in the 4th-5th centuries.

Also to the OP: this is not official Church doctrine or dogma. It never has been. It’s a mere theologoumena (theological opinion) which should be discarded in light of modern science.

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and the earth is about 4.54 billion years old.
 
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jfz178 said:
I don’t get this 8,000 year thing.
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You have to start by being intellectually incapacitated and then read the Old Testament in a translated language and with a modern context, ignore the actual context it was written in, ignore all science and logic and then you get there. It’s also called “being a fundamentalist”.
 
Or be someone born prior to the 19th century.

They had no way of knowing the earth and universe were as ancient as they are.
 
Spyridon said:
They had no way of knowing the earth and universe were as ancient as they are.
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Try telling a Chinese person the wold is ~8,000 years old, they will burst out laughing at you. their written history is almost that long and funnily enough doesn’t contain any dinosaurs walking around with them. America is literally the only country in the world where this belief can be said and people won’t roll on the floor laughing at it.
 
The early Church Father Eusebius (c. 260-340), attempting to place Christ in the chronology, put his birth in AM 5199, and this became the accepted date for the Western Church. As the year AM 6000 (800 CE) approached there was increasing fear that the end of the world was nigh, until the Venerable Bede made his own calculations and found that Christ’s birth took place in AM 3592, allowing several more centuries to the end of time.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) switched the point of focus from Christ’s birth to the Apostolic Council of Acts 15, which he placed in the year AM 4000, believing this marked the moment when the Mosaic Law was abolished and the new age of grace began. This was widely accepted among European Protestants, but in the English-speaking world, Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) Ussher calculated a date of 4004 BCE for creation; he was not the first to reach this result, but his chronology was so detailed that his dates were incorporated into the margins of English Bibles for the next two hundred years. This popular 4,000 year theological timespan, which ends with the birth of Jesus, differs from the 4,000 timespan later proposed for the Masoretic text alone, which ends with the Temple rededication in 164 BCE.
 
Many of the earliest Christians who followed the Septuagint calculated creation around 5500 BC, and Christians up to the Middle-Ages continued to use this rough estimate: Clement of Alexandria (5592 BC), Theophilus of Antioch (5529 BC), Sextus Julius Africanus (5501 BC), Hippolytus of Rome (5500 BC), Gregory of Tours (5500 BC), Panodorus of Alexandria (5493 BC), Maximus the Confessor (5493 BC), George Syncellus (5492 BC) Sulpicius Severus (5469 BC) and Isidore of Seville (5336 BC). The Byzantine calendar has traditionally dated the creation of the world to September 1, 5509 BC.

The Chronicon of Eusebius (early 4th century) dated creation to 5228 BC while Jerome (c. 380, Constantinople) dated creation to 5199 BC. Earlier editions of the Roman Martyrology for Christmas Day used this date, as did the Irish Annals of the Four Masters.

Bede was one of the first to break away from the standard Septuagint date for the creation and in his work De Temporibus (“On Time”) (completed in 703 AD) dated the creation to 18 March 3952 BC but was accused of heresy at the table of Bishop Wilfrid, because his chronology was contrary to accepted calculations of around 5500 BC.
 
Oh, they will get laughed to scorn here in America too.

It’s 2018. The scientific consensus is conclusive, definite, and overwhelming.

People absolutely must accept that the world is 4.54 billion years old.
 
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