Did Jesus Christ, our Lord, during His physical ministry on Earth, in his truly mortal body, believe in Young Earth Creationism?

This question is particularly important because every time I was in discussion regarding this issue, our Christian brothers who believe in the literal Young Earth Creationism always bring this point up: “Do you believe that Jesus believed in a 13.8 billions years old Universe? Would you dare to confront Christ?”

With respect to Mark 10:6, “But at the beginning of creation God made them male and female”, His assertion for monogamy was not poetic but rather literal.

No.

No such position as YEC existed.

As for what Jesus knew about… at the very least, knowledge of the answer to a question would require Him to ask the relevant questions. And there is no evidence that He asked such questions. You might as well ask about whether He knew some obscure theorem from Number Theory.

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My counter to them would be: “So would you dare to put known falsehoods into Christ’s mouth?” … “do you not believe that Christ would have accepted the old testament teachings that we are to use honest weights and measures in our observations of things?”

We may all legitimately feel some fear for what all we attempt to attach Christ’s name to. But in regard to this, the YEC has no moral high ground whatsoever. Quite the opposite in fact.

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Whenever I have an argument with our Christian fellows who believe in YEC, they always asked: “So, what do you think Jesus would believe? A 13.8 Billions years old Universe?”
And, I am still appalled by this question.
As a once Creationist, I truly believe Jesus would have believed in YEC as they were implied by the Scriptures.
Not only YEC but some passages might imply a flat circular earth (not spherical/globe), and some might imply geocentrism (the Joshua long day problem).
I might cover these on a later post.

With the current disagreement over the value of H0, it might be ~13 GY instead (if ~73km/s/MPc is correct).

Persian, not Babylonian. Babylonian was pretty much the standard ANE polytheistic option.

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That is the big question: how can we know or be sure that Jesus didn’t adhere to the YEC interpretation.
These people have tons of arguments to defend their point especially that Jesus did believe to YEC.
“How can you be so sure about the 13.8 billions years? Nobody has measured the speed of light, C correctly (in 1 way)!”, said a Professor of Physics who co-authored many papers in Physical Review D and Physical Review Letters.

Thanks.
Persian.

These alleged “tons of arguments” evaporate whenever brought out into the light for scriptural inspection. (At least none have ever been able to survive any scrutiny that I’ve seen here.) It’s revealing when they are forced to try to hide (or smuggle in) modern YECism into areas of doubt or places where science is still refining or even unsure of some things. But what they ignore is all the mountains of measurements and observations where science has spoken and does observe in the many areas where highly different fields and techniques have independently converged on remarkably precise conclusions regarding deep time.

In short, YECs have neither science nor scriptures to protect these erroneous conclusions. They may be faithful and exemplary Christians - ones to look up to in every other possible way even! But all that would be in spite of their YECism, not because of it.

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That is not very sound reasoning in my view. That Jesus doesn’t use the name Adam in one blurb in the Gospels where he is taking about divorce and remarriage means he didn’t accept Adam as historical is a very poor argument from silence.

We have probably about 2% of the total of Jesus’s actual dialogue and teachings in the Gospels and even then it’s a translation and not his exact words by author’s framing things theologically. Exegesis based on things not said or known is highly speculative.

Looking at how Jesus used the Hebrew Scriptures and how his contemporaries did, the answer to this on exegetical grounds is probably yes. The only reason to think otherwise is to presume the incarnate Son of God who didn’t know the day or hour, who had to grow in knowledge and who didn’t know who touched his robe, was somehow omniscient despite clearly not being such.

Christians today should know better. People back then really couldn’t know better. Most people couldn’t read, had to work hard to live and probably didn’t have access to the two creation stories at home in written form or a library of other ancient creation myths to compare these stories to. And they certainly did not have the next 2,000 years of scientific developments.

Vinnie

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It’s rather anachronistic to ask if Jesus believed in YEC. The question probably never came up, and if it did, he would have believed what his fellow Jews believed. Nobody had the knowledge to establish the age of the earth back then and it was not relevant to the faith. btw, modern YEC comes from Seventh Day Adventist prophet Ellen White and her visions, and the book Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris

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That’s how I see Jesus’ view.
I used to be a Young Earth Creationist and keep asking that question and can feel that Jesus did believe in the 6000 years age of the Universe and the 6 literal days of creation as His contemporaries did.
I was quite surprised when I found the majority of the people in this forum think otherwise.
If Jesus had already been transcendental in knowledge, the gospel must have reported that.
God did equipped Him supernaturally with many knowledge not known to human but this time, He did believe in 6-day creationism.

The term Young Earth Creationism could be first coined in the 19th centuries but the idea itself is as old as the Bible.
There is no way a human incarnated Jesus would be possessed with Quantum Mechanics unless supernaturally.
I am definitely sure that He, in His finite human form, share the same view as many of his contemporaries that is a 6-day creation.

Yes. The Jesus in the gospels strike me as someone who would believe what the Father is telling us in all the information from the earth and sky. He teaches quite a few times that using our eyes, ears, and brain to understand things is the sort that God is looking for and God will abandon those who do not to their own willful ignorance.

Which tells us that what the Bible means by the word used is not the same as what we mean by “Earth.” Take a small section of the planet and you get something shaped like a table. So the conclusion is that the Bible says nothing about Noah’s flood covering the whole planet.

As a scientist I saw nothing of the sort in the Bible. Which just goes to show the truth of the observation by psychologists that our beliefs play a role in the process of perception.

I don’t think the issue was a concern of Jesus though. It was just conventional knowledge. Jesus was not a YEC, someone who is accepting a young earth over the idea of an old earth. That debate didn’t exist. Jesus was not a YEC or OEC. He was just a Jew as opposed to Pagan. Hebrew texts were his sacred scriptures. He lived in a time, to use Marcus Borg’s terminology, of “pre-critical naivete” when it came to scientific ideas.

And yes, I have found it to be a sore spot on this forum that many rightfully denounce a young earth but then bottle up when it comes to Jesus and parts of the NT simply being incorrect on this. Trying to savage a historical Adam from a fairy tale. Their exegesis is just as bad as the wooden literalists. It’s a shame because it stifles the true interpretive issues in my opinion. Adam and Eve have more to do with the exile than some kind of original sin or “sin entering the world through one man.” The modern Christian interpretation of A&E just seems very bad all around. The science is accepted but we aren’t following it through to its conclusion here! Even for some who profess to not accept “inerrancy” the doctrine is hard to kill. The desire for certainty is hard to let go of.

Vinnie

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Not so sure, but I doubt Jesus believed in a literal 6-days of creation.

There are at least two reasons:

  1. Jesus wasn’t here to correct people’s view of history. To do so would have distracted from His mission.
  2. Jesus knew the scriptures, and He knew there were two creation stories. The first has six days. The second has 1 day. The first has the order of creation as plants, animals, man and woman, The second has the order of creation as man, plants, animals, woman. Both cannot be literal history, as they literally disagree.
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Some answers in this thread even explicitly say that Jesus fully knew that the Age of Universe is 13.8 billions years.

This sort of exegesis only exists because we now know the account is wrong and the two different flood stories mashed together in Genesis are just two fictitious flood stories amidst many other ones. Not only that but it seems clear that the Genesis flood myths borrowed extensively from older food myths in the region. The details are pretty compelling.

The Bible most certainly relays a global flood. Conservative fundamentalists are absolutely correct on this point. The localized flood is just making scripture say what you want it to because some need it to be accurate because Jesus.

“For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, 39 and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man.”

Vinnie

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It is not the first time I have seen such agreements between the different extremists. The most unreasonable interpretation is convenient for both those who would have us discount the science and those who would have us discount the Bible.

Confirmation bias writ large.

We obviously see what agrees with what we believe.

But your declaration of what YOU see obviously cannot change what I see.

We can use that same logic on every young earth Christian and Christian in general who was literate with a printed Bible. Apparently no Christian ever believed in a young earth, past, present or future. People today with word processors and digital Bibles will harmonize those contradictory details in creative ways.

That is just wishful theology.

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