Timothy Birdnow

"It is he that sits on the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers"

Isaiah 40:22

The Book of Isaiah was written between 700 and 740 B.C. The Greeks came up with this idea of a round Earth around 500 B.C. so the ancient Hebrews knew of it for two hundred years prior. The Greeks quite possibly got the idea from the Hebrews (with whom they had some contact. The Philistines were probably cousins of the Greeks.)

The Greeks determined this by first observing that the mast of a ship remained visible on the horizon after the ship itself couldn't be seen. That suggested the ship was moving over a curve. But the real clincher was the "stick-shadow" experiment by Eratosthenes. Pythagoras had first proposed the theory based on the Earth's shadow during lunar eclipses. Eratosthenes took a stick and stuck it in the ground. and stuck sticks of the same size in other locations. He noted that at high noon the stick he stuck in the ground did not cast a shadow - but one put in the ground 500 miles north did. He then used the differences in the shadow angles to calculate the circumference of the Earth. But, as I pointed out, the Hebrews understood this before any of the Greeks. .

There has been a persistent belief that people thought the world was flat until Columbus. That is not true. If you look at the Medieval Globus Cruciger it is a cross on top of a globe - and dates back to the Middle Ages, and that was borrowed from a pagan symbol in the old Roman Empire dating back to the fourth century.

As for Columbus, the argument wasn't that the world was flat and Columbus said it was round, but rather the size of the world, which Columbus mistakenly estimated at about half the size it actually is, in contradiction to the scholars of the time. Nobody thought you could make so long a sea voyage as would be necessary.

The idea that Columbus argued the world was round was a lie invented by an atheist named Jean Antoine Letronne who put it into a school textbook during the 19th century to make the old Christian world appear superstitious and dim-witted. It worked.He was using a rather vague statement made by the writer Washington Irving to justify the claim. Irving said in one of his stories that Columbus proved the world was round in contradiction to what people thought. Latronne took this and ran with it.

It has become one of the most enduring myths of the last few centuries. .

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:43 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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