So since math is so much fun, Let me take a sample of some well known ancestors and see how many generations back they are. I'm just going to choose an arbitrary pathway and count only once instead of multiple times (I mean multiple lines of descent). So we won't know where along the Gaussian or PCD the count will put us - most likely near the mean. This is much easier to do if I start counting at the ancestor end, since it was created strictly as an ancestor tree. I can count down from anyone, since they all descend down to me. But it's hard to do in reverse.
Francis I Bryan "Lord Chief Justice of Ireland" aka The Vicar of Hell
d. 02 Feb 1550 15 generations
Edward I "King of England" aka Longshanks
b. 17 Jun 1239 27 generations
William Wallace aka Braveheart
d. 23 Aug 1305 27 generations
William I the Conqueror "King of England"
b. 14 Oct 1024 33 generations
Herod I "King of Judea" during the time of Jesus
d. 11 Apr, 4 BC 74 generations
Constantine I Flavius Valerius "Emperor of Rome"
b. 27 Feb 287 61 generations
King David from the biblical story David and Goliath
d. 946 BC 113 generations
Alfred the Great "King of England"
b. 849 43 generations
Attila the Hun aka "The Scourge of God"
b. 406 D 56 generations
Conn Ceud Ceuthach "110th King of Ireland" aka "Conn of the Hundred Battles"
d. 157 AD 55 generations
Milesius of Gaul "King of Spain and Ireland"
d. 1699 BC 120 generations
Alexander the Great "King of Macedonia"
d. 3 Jul 323 BC 78 generations
Zhou Di Xin (Zi Shou) "Last King of Shang" d. 1134 BC 107 generations
Doing the math on these (a sort-of-random sample) and seeing how many years between generations, I got very reasonably close to 28.5 years. I so wish my original site hadn't crashed so these links were still good and you could interact and see for yourself. The least I can do right now, because I'm not willing to go rebuild another whole website at the moment, is to link some chapters in pdf, and the motivated reader can investigate as needed to his own satisfaction: Chapter Ancient Ireland, Chapter Egypt Greece Troy and the Bible, Chapter Rome Arabia and Persia, Chapter China.
Seriously, take a look at those, they're interesting! That's not the whole tree, just some modules and peripheral portions of it that were more manageable. I never was able to succeed in getting the whole thing to pdfs. Chapter Two in the high Middle Ages is by far the most difficult. And it's about twice as big as that now.
Let's go deeper:
How many generations to Adam? So there's a million dollar question. Before we open up Pandora's box and dive into this intensely contentious debate, let me just state what my superficial answer is, as observed from my tree: 186 generations. Naturally this comes with a Gaussian distribution, or some other PCD in which Adam would be simultaneously a 150th-great grandfather and also probably a 225th-great grandfather and everywhere in between. Is 186 the mean or median of the PCD? No, 186 is the maximum pathway that I have entered at the moment. What is the minimum? I don't know. What does the shape of the curve look like exactly? I don't know. FTM 2005 can only handle 99 generations at a time... sort of like the Y2K of genealogy software lol. I don't really feel it's worthwhile of my time to start counting various pathways and map out a distribution given by my tree (assuming Adam even existed) because what's given by my tree cannot possibly be real accurate to "truth", whatever that is. Not nominally at least, however I do assert that useful insights can definitely be gleaned. I could start counting: an NP-complete problem perhaps, but... no thanks.
I have Adam listed as being born in the year 3113 BC. Is that literally true and correct? The answer is no probably not... that's a little over-precise, but I would wager with high confidence he was born 3100 BC +/- 50 years (more on this in part 9). But ask anyone and they'll tell you it was 4004 BC. Where does the ridiculous year 4004 BC come from? Well it comes from bishop James Ussher who lived in the 17th century and used the genealogies of the Bible by interpreting them literally to arrive at that answer. These days, bishop Ussher's numbers are the most common ones recognized, so when I originally made the tree I indulged in the common wisdom (I mean lack of wisdom) and entered the ages of all the patriarchs according to 4004. I've since changed it after learning what archaeology has to say about the matter. But in my Chapter Noah to Adam from 2009, the incorrect dates I used were:
Let's get right to the point and start offending people outright: Did the biblical patriarchs live for hundreds of years the way the Bible says? The answer is emphatically, a big resounding NO!!! Of course they didn't. How do we know? Because we're not complete morons, that's how. So now that I've ruffled some readers feathers, let me slow way down out of perfunctory, and in the spirit of the no-child-left-behind ideology, lets examine this:
Reason #1 for why they did not live that long. Because humans don't live that long. In fact humans in the present have a longer life expectancy than they ever did in the past: .
Reason #2 for why people don't live for hundreds of years. Because. Science.
This is my webpage so I can say it however I want, right. The Bible isn't meant to be taken literally, and the Earth wasn't created 6000 years ago. If you believe it was, you have my condolences for setting yourself up for well-deserved criticism. Actually I'm just kidding, you don't have my condolences lol. But alright, suppose I try seriously to hold back on the harassment. Whoever you are reading this - you believe whatever you believe, and whatever I say isn't likely to change that. So let's remain calm and examine on, as objectively and reasonably as we can. The question remains: How old did the patriarchs live? Well there's no shortage of charts out there on the internet. Here are a couple: (click to enlarge)
Where does the data come from that make these charts? Anyone can tell you, "Dur, The Bible tells me so." And thus, we run into our first problem: "THE" Bible tells us so? The keyword here is "the". Which bible is that? The King James Version sitting on your shelf? Is that the best source for this information? No. For one thing, we need to divide up "the Bible" into smaller modules for clarification. Forget about the new testament entirely. Let's also for now forget about all other books of the old testament except Genesis. So only considering Genesis: What about the Masoretic Texts? What about the Dead Sea Scrolls? What about the Septuagint? The Samaritan Pentateuch? The Torah? The Vulgate? Wouldn't it be a miracle if all these different versions of the Genesis account gave the same numbers? Well I don't believe in miracles and this is no exception. All these bibles tell the same story but with different numerical mutational differences! Mutational differences? that sounds strangely reminiscent of evolution. So enter a good dose of irony - the fact that the Bibles themselves exhibit a case of evolution, which is exactly what one would expect to see anyway, had one ever given it some thought.
So long story short, I have come to believe that the Septuagint (LXX) is the best version of "the" bible to use. This is a whole other story in itself that I may eventually get around to writing about why this is so. For now, you'll just have to take my word for it (or investigate it yourself!), and thankfully we're fortunate to live in the modern era where we have the benefit of having discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls to help us confirm that the Septuagint is indeed more accurate than the Mesoritic Texts. Although we should already immediately know that the KJV sucks the most, simply because it was written the most recently. I think everyone can agree that an original is always better than a copy. And we know that a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy tends to have less fidelity than the original. The Septuagint was written several centuries before Christ, and the Septuagint is actually the bible that Jesus and his disciples used themselves. But then along came our mutual ancestor, 60th- Great-Grandfather Constantine I - Emperor of Rome, who converted Rome to Christianity for political reasons, and I'm sure you've heard about the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, and there was a culling of various apocryphal texts. And to make a very long story short, people today have come to thump unjustifiably hard on the King James Version (KJV) sitting on their shelves, which is a direct descendant of the Mesoritic Tests, which is something like a nephew or a great-nephew to the Septuagint. So we need to realize that the book actually sitting on your shelf, written in English, quantified with base10 Arabic Numerals is not the preferred source of information to call gospel.
Please repeat after me:
Aren't I aweful lol. Now I'm just being belligerent again. Here's a rough family tree of how the different versions of the Bible relate to each other:
<insert Bible's evolutionary tree here later>
(This is more non-trivial than I thought since certain books of the bible, and groups of books, and apocryphal texts etc. aren't necessarily unique indivisible modules that descended orderly in a family tree pattern? I'll try to work on this later.)
Please do your own research on most of this stuff if you are curious about it. I'm basically diving into the biggest controversy man has ever concerned himself about in all of history here, and it's beyond the scope of this website to talk about all the things that need to be discussed. The main point I am trying to make right now is to claim that the Septuagint's numbers are the most superior numbers to use that I know of. As it turns out, many people disagree - Imagine that. (Bonus question: Notice a correlation between those who disagree and those who have some sort of hegemony with a basis deriving from the Mesoretic texts? ie Rome, or Israeli Gov't)
No comments:
Post a Comment