Creation History

James Ussher (4 January 1581 – 21 March 1656) was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656. He was a prolific scholar and church leader, who today is most famous for his identification of the genuine letters of the church father, Ignatius of Antioch, and for his chronology that sought to establish the time and date of the creation as "the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October... the year before Christ 4004"; that is, around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.  Ussher published several works on chronology and tables of world history for the Old and New Testament periods.  These are available from Master Books in one volume Annals of the World.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new finds in Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian archaeology caused Ussher's chronology to fall out of favor with Christian scholars in favor of the latest theories.  Edwin Thiele published a book (1951) on the chronology of the Hebrew kings which attempted to make the Bible fit with some popular synchronisms in Assyrian history.  Later Jack Finegan (1964) and Andrew E. Steinmann (2011) both wrote chronology textbooks based on Theile's work.

Floyd Nolan Jones published "Chronology of the Old Testament" in 2005 which corrects two small errors by Ussher, and updates his chronology of the Old Testament.  We refer to Ussher's chronology as modified by Jones as the "Ussher-Jones Chronology."