Why Did Christ Wait So Long to Come Into the World When Men Had Been in the World For 200,000 Years? A Catholic Article About This

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A question of Faith: Why did Christ wait so long?

Q: Why did Christ wait until approximately 2,017 years ago to appear on Earth when man (Homo sapiens) is about 200,000 years old? A: Theologians call this theological issue the “scandal of the particular.” Which is to say, Why did God reveal Himself in Jesus in a particular time and ...
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This article has many things to say, and one of them is that after Christ died, he descended to all the dead who came before him to preach to them and offer eternal life, even to Adam and Eve.
 
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Personally, I think humans have only been around since the end of the last Ice Age. So, about 12,000 years… Of course, I don’t believe we evolved from apes either.

It’s quite simple actually, we were tossed out of Paradise through a wormhole.
 
Christ came in the fullness of time. The Roman Empire with its vast reach made possible the spread of the gospel, as well as the widespread use of Greek as the trade language.
 
To elaborate on what Dan said above, ask yourself, could Christ have come at another time? Civilization was advanced enough for his gospel to travel the world, but not so sophisticated that he would have been written off as a kook as so many in today’s society are wont to do. After all, his “miracles” would have been written off as fantasy, fabrication, and outright black magic. I think Jesus came at the only time in human history (give or take a few centuries) where he could have had a fair hearing from those he touched.
My two cents.
 
Well, if we are to believe it is the Jewish God that was the progenitor of Christ, then we’d have to start with the Jewish experience with God. The issue is that the earliest parts of the Bible do not adequately address this timeline in my opinion. Adam, Eve, Noah, and the like are tales used to explain our relationship with God. Science has proved these stories couldn’t have happened literally. The Babylonian Exile, about 550 years before Christ, is when many of the books of the Old Testament are understood to have been written down. This might be a good starting place and might represent the establishment of the Jewish religion as we know it today. Prior to this there could not be a Savior sent from the Jewish God as there would be no human context for Jesus.
 
Cruciferi said:
Personally, I think humans have only been around since the end of the last Ice Age. So, about 12,000 years… Of course, I don’t believe we evolved from apes either.
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Always this facility to believe what the scientists say. Adam and Eve have existed 4000 years before Christ! this is what God teaches us. We must believe what God tells us and not what the “wise men” of the world tell us
 
Mboo said:
Always this facility to believe what the scientists say. Adam and Eve have existed 4000 years before Christ! this is what God teaches us. We must believe what God tells us and not what the “wise men” of the world tell us
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It’s passages like this that make the Creation story hard to believe in my mind:

Genesis 1:6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

Genesis 1: 14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.

Sometimes vault is translated as dome. We know for a fact there is not a body of water in the sky, in fact there is very little since it basically a vacuum. I’m not sure how to account for things like this given we’ve sent people to the moon and space probes to the outer reaches of our solar system. We also know the stars are many light years away, not fixed in the sky (we also know they move in the night sky). We also know for absolute certainty that the moon is not a light, it’s a rock in the sky.

This is why I have a hard time with Genesis being real.
 
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That 4000 year number came from someone trying to figure out the numbers for how long it will be until the end of time. 7 days of creation, a thousand years is as a day. Hence … total of creation = 7 thousand years. Since we are 2 thousand years after Christ and some believe that there will be a thousand year “peace” with Christ reigning before the final end… there must have been 4000 years before Christ to complete that godly 7 days. (At least this is briefly what I remember reading in some book that wasn’t Catholic some time ago.)

This is neither science nor the teaching of the Catholic Church nor what God has taught.
 
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mdgspencer said:
A question of Faith: Why did Christ wait so long?

Q: Why did Christ wait until approximately 2,017 years ago to appear on Earth when man (Homo sapiens) is about 200,000 years old?
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Time is really irrelevant when talking about God. 200,000 years or 2,000,000 years. God has all the time in the world, He created it.
 
Men have not existed in the world for 200,000 years.
The planet Earth may have existed for billions of years (I think the scientists are right about that) but that’s not the same thing.
The human race began with a literal Adam and Eve, some thousands of years ago. How many thousands, I think we don’t know. But it is thousands, not hundreds of thousands.
PJH_74 said:
Sometimes vault is translated as dome. We know for a fact there is not a body of water in the sky, in fact there is very little since it basically a vacuum
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The Creation account in Genesis is not meant to be a modern physics text, not was it written to satisfy our curiosity as to how God made the world. It was written by barbarians to record truths in a fashion they could grasp but that we, living thousands of years later, would also understand.

To paraphrase the first few verses of Genesis:
“In the beginning God created the universe and the Earth, but (at some point a few thousands years ago) the Earth was a chaotic wasteland, and covered by darkness. Then God set the world to rights, put everything where it ought to be, and finished by creating the first man and the first woman.”

Why the Earth was a chaotic wasteland is a separate question, and again Scripture was not given us to satisfy our scientific curiosity.
 
Zaccheus said:
The Creation account in Genesis is not meant to be a modern physics text, not was it written to satisfy our curiosity as to how God made the world. It was written by barbarians to record truths in a fashion they could grasp but that we, living thousands of years later, would also understand.
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Then what are we to make of the Egyptians, archaeology, and the like? If you are to believe in modern science, radio carbon dating must be accurate. Did animals pre-date humans? That would be an issue with Genesis.

Clearly Noah could not gather animals he didn’t even know of, nor every sub-species of animal. How would you stuff the wide diversity of food required to feed animals (and the waste generated)? Could one extended family even perform such tasks? It takes days to load a modern container ship even with all of the machinery and efficiency of such a system. If rain introduced that much water it would be fresh water and dilute the sea water so much as to kill off many salt water species, similar for fish that cannot survive in an open ocean. Where did the water come from? Even melting the polar ice sheets would not supply enough.

Honesty I find the incredible universe we live in a fascinating subject of creation itself. Due to the properties of light, I doubt that we’ll ever be able to directly observe the creation of the universe in the first place, I see a place for faith there. Interestingly the first real proposal of the Big Bang Theory was a Catholic Priest, Fr. Georges Lemaître.
 
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PJH_74 said:
Then what are we to make of the Egyptians, archaeology, and the like? If you are to believe in modern science, radio carbon dating must be accurate. Did animals pre-date humans? That would be an issue with Genesis.

Clearly Noah could not gather animals he didn’t even know of, nor every sub-species of animal.
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Archaeology teaches us a great deal about the past; but I don’t have to agree with every conclusion reached by every scientist in order to respect science as a whole.
As to the Egyptians I’m not sure what your point is.
Radio carbon dating is useful, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of errors or mistaken conclusions. Could you be more specific about what you believe carbon dating proves?

As for animals pre-dating humans:
(a) Genesis was composed thousands of years ago by people who wouldn’t have comprehended modern science. That doesn’t make what they wrote lies; it means they expressed their meanings in ways we’re not familiar with. Interpretation is not always easy.
None the less Genesis gives us a coherent account of God forming the world we know, and completing the process by creating the First Man and the First Woman.

(b) The second sentence of Genesis 1 tells us the earth was a chaotic wasteland. Why would God begin the creation of the world by making a wasteland?
My own take on it is that life existed for a very long time before that; then some form of world-wide disaster reduced the world to a wasteland.
Then God reformed the world, setting things to rights, and finished the process by creating Mankind.
This allows room for animals to have existed for millions of years, possibly billions of years, before whatever disaster caused the chaos. Then God created new life as He reformed the world.

So what disaster, and why did God allow it?
I don’t know. The Bible is not meant as a scientific history of the world. It’s meant to tell us the things we need to know to serve and obey God and save our own souls. For that purpose we don’t need the complete history of the world.

That being said I admire scientists for their work in revealing so much of God’s creation to us. It’s good that we can know about dinosaurs. 🙂

As for Noah and the Ark:
I don’t know how he could do that. I don’t know for sure that he did do that, at least in the way we read the description. We may be misunderstanding the meaning of the Flood account, and/or mistaking metaphorical descriptions for literal ones.
 
No more absurd than the other rubbish touted. We truly are not of this world.
 
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Zaccheus said:
None the less Genesis gives us a coherent account of God forming the world we know, and completing the process by creating the First Man and the First Woman.
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My apologies, I just sense a lot of contortions to accept science and doubt part of Genesis while holding onto Adam and Eve. In my view, if you select what parts of Genesis you want to believe and partially or completely reject others, you open yourself to believing somethings might have been added or are fantastical. Then you have no way of identifying what is real or not. I can’t see a choice other than to accept all as fact or a story explaining our relationship with God.

Now, to feed you something that science does believe, using mitochondrial DNA, which is a great indicator where people have come from, all of the human population may have descended from a small group of people in southern Africa.
 
No. We are from this world. God created this world. God also came into this world. God set us apart from other creatures in this world but we are truly from this world. We are dust.

God took the dust from this world and made us lol
 
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Where’s Eden or the Paradise that Elijah and Enoch were translated to?

They will return to oppose the Antichrist you know…
 
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