James Ussher

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James Ussher (sometimes spelled Usher) (4 January, 1581–21 March, 1656) was Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625–1656 and a prolific religious scholar who most famously published a chronology which dated the Creation from 4004 BC.

Contents 1 Education 2 Early career 3 Early scholarly work 4 Primate of All Ireland 5 English Civil War 6 Ussher's Chronology 7 Death 8 Footnotes 9 See also 10 External links and references

Education

Ussher was born in Dublin, Ireland into a well-to-do Anglo-Irish family. His father was a clerk in chancery. His younger, and only surviving, brother, Ambrose, became a distinguished scholar of Arabic and Hebrew. According to his chaplain and biographer, Nicholas Bernard, he was taught to read by two blind, spinster aunts. He was a gifted linguist, entering Dublin Free School and then the newly founded (1591) Trinity College, Dublin on 9 January, 1594, at the age of thirteen. He had received his Bachelor of Arts degree by 1598, became a Fellow of the college 1600, and became Master of Arts 6 February 1601. In May 1602 he was ordained in the Trinity College Chapel as deacon (and possibly priest on the same day) by his uncle Henry Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. He went on to become chancellor of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin in 1605 and Prebend of Finglas. He became Professor of Theological Controversies at Trinity College and a Bachelor of Divinity in 1607, Doctor of Divinity in 1612 and then vice chancellor in 1615 and vice-provost in 1616. He married Phoebe Challoner, the daughter of a previous vice-provost, Luke Challoner, in 1613 and published his first work. In 1615 he was closely involved with the drawing up of the first confession of faith of the Church of Ireland.

Early career

In 1619 he travelled to England for two years. His only child, Elizabeth, was born in London in 1619. He became prominent after meeting James I. In 1621 James nominated him Bishop of Meath. He also became a national figure in Ireland, becoming privy councillor in 1623, and an increasingly substantial scholar. From 1623 until 1626 he was again in England and was excused from his episcopal duties in order to study church history and was nominated to become Primate of All Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh in 1625, where he succeeded his uncle.

Early scholarly work

Ussher was a convinced Calvinist and as Primate he was the head of the protestant, established Church of Ireland. Like many of his contemporaries, he was strongly anti-Catholic, and this was the focus of his early academic work. The tone of his writings reflect the starkness of theological debate during the early modern period; for instance, his 1626 "Judgement of the Arch-Bishops and Bishops of Ireland", written to bolster opposition to Charles I granting religious toleration in Ireland, begins:

The religion of the papists is superstitious and idolatrous; their faith and doctrine erroneous and heretical; their church ... apostatical; to give them therefore a toleration, or to consent that they may freely exercise their religion ... is a grievous sin.

He also engaged in extensive disputations with Roman Catholic theologians. Even as a student he had challenged a Jesuit relative, Henry Fitzsimon (Ussher's mother was Roman Catholic) to publicly dispute the identification of the Pope with Antichrist. However, Ussher also wrote extensively on theology and ecclesiastical history, and these subjects gradually displaced the anti-Catholic work. His account of the early Celtic Irish church (which he maintained was fundamentally Protestant in nature) was respected into the twentieth century. De Graeca Septuaginta Interpretum Verisone (1655) was the first serious examination of the Septuagint. He pressed for firm measures to be taken against Irish Catholics, but the story that he successfully opposed attempts to reintroduce the Irish language for use in church services has been refuted Template:RefTemplate:Ref. A traditional portrait of Ussher is of a slightly unworldly scholar who was at best a mediocre politician and administrator: in fact he was an effective bishop and archbishop, and politically importantTemplate:Ref; however, out of preference he was a scholar when he could. As well as his learning, he was also distinguished by his charity and good temper.

Primate of All Ireland

Ussher initially benefited on the arrival of Thomas Wentworth as Lord Deputy in Ireland, who re-endowed the church and settled the long-running dispute about primacy between the sees of Armagh and Dublin in Armagh's favour. However, Wentworth and the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud then set about imposing Arminianism and conformity with the Church of England on the more Calvinistic Church of Ireland. Ussher resisted, and as a result lost de facto control of the church to John Bramhall, bishop of Derry. Ussher left Dublin for Drogheda, where was his episcopal residence and concentrated on his archdiocese and his research. In 1632 he published a ground-breaking study of the Irish mediaeval church, Veterum epistolarum Hibernicarum sylloge and in 1639 the most substantial history of Christianity in Britain up to that date, Britannicarum ecclesiarum antiquitates.

English Civil War

In 1640 Ussher left Ireland for England for what turned out to the last time. In the years before the English Civil War, his reputation as a scholar and his moderate Calvinism meant that he was courted by both King and Parliament. After Ussher lost his home and income through the Irish uprising of 1641, Parliament voted him a pension of £400 while the King awarded him the income and property of the vacant see of Carlisle. Despite his Calvinism, Ussher was a royalist and supported the King and Wentworth (now Earl of Strafford) in the events leading up to the latter's execution, and a defender of the episcopacy. In the face of attacks on the institution of bishops by puritans, he wrote five books to demonstrate their existence since the earliest days of the church. The last two, treatises on the Ignatian epistles were particular scholarly achievements that have largely survived modern scrutiny.

During the Civil War Ussher committed himself to the King and remained loyal, turning down an invitation to join the Westminster Assembly in 1643. He moved to Oxford, then Bristol, Cardiff, and then to St Donat's. In June 1646 he returned to London under the protection of his friend, the Countess of Peterborough, in whose houses he stayed from then on. He became a preacher at Lincoln's Inn early in 1647, and despite his royalist loyalties was protected by his friends in Parliament. He watched the execution of Charles I from the roof of the Countess of Peterborough's London house, but fainted before the axe fell.

Ussher's Chronology

Ussher now concentrated on his research and writing, and returned to the study of chronology and the church fathers. After a 1647 work on the origin of the creeds in 1648 Ussher published a treatise on the calendar. This was a warm-up for his most famous work, the Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti ("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world"), which appeared in 1650 and its continuation, Annalium pars postierior in 1654. In this work, he famously claimed, that the Earth was created at nightfall preceding 23 October, 4004 BC. Other scholars calculated their own dates for Creation, such as that by the Cambridge academic, John Lightfoot. The time is frequently misquoted as being 9 a.m., noon or 9 p.m. on 23 October. See the related article on the calendar for a discussion of its claims and methodology.

Ussher's work is still referenced by Young Earth Creationists (who believe that the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old) and has been much ridiculed as a symbol of religious obscurantism. In fact, calculating the year of creation may seem a trivial and slightly eccentric activity to some nowadays with the benefit of geology and palaeontology, but at the time it was an important and difficult task which many Renaissance scholars, such as Joseph Justus Scaliger had attempted. Ussher's chronology represents a considerable feat of scholarship. It required the Bible to be firmly anchored in history, which needed a huge depth of learning in ancient history, including the rise of the Persians, Greeks and Romans. Then constructing a biblical chronology required expertise in biblical languages, and in-depth knowledge of the Bible. His account of historical events for which he had multiple sources other than the Bible is usually in close agreement with modern accounts; for example, he places the death of Alexander in 323 BC and that of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. The period of time between the Flood and the Creation depended on the version of the Old Testament that was used: Hebrew (1656 years), Samaritan Pentateuch (1307 years), or the Ethiopic text (2262 years). Ussher favoured the Hebrew version. Annals has recently been republished in modern English.

Death

In 1655 Ussher published his last book, on a controversy over the accuracy of the Hebrew and Septuagint texts of the Old Testament. In 1656 he went to stay in the Countess of Peterborough's house in Reigate, Surrey. On 19 March he felt a sharp pain in his side after supper and took to his bed. He died at one o'clock on 21 March at the age of 75. His last words were reported as O Lord forgive me, especially my sins of omission. His body was embalmed and was to have been buried in Reigate, but at Cromwell's insistence he was given a state funeral on 17 April and buried in the chapel of St Erasmus in Westminster Abbey.

Footnotes

See also

• Dating Creation
• Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar
• Young Earth Creationism
• Anglicanism

External links and references

• Ussher bibliography and list of secondary sources: http://www.ucc.ie/acad/classics/CNLS/bibliography/ussherbibl.html
• James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh by R. Buck Knox, University of Wales Press, 1967
• Gould, S.J., 1993. "Fall in the House of Ussher". Eight Little Piggies (New York: W.W. Norton), ISBN 0-393-03416-X.
• Pierce, L., 1998 "The forgotten archbishop", Creation 20(2):42–43.
• Ussher, J, 1650. Annals of the World: James Ussher's Classic Survey of World History ISBN 0-89051-360-0 (Modern English republication, ed. Larry and Marion Pierce, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2003)
• Sarfati, J., 2003. "Archbishop’s achievement: James Ussher’s great work Annals of the World is now available in English" (interview with editors of above), Creation 26(1):24–27
• Gribben, Crawford (2003) The Irish Puritans: James Ussher and the Reformation of the Church, Evangelical Press, ISBN 0852345364.de:James Ussher

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