Maybe is the answer.
The historical Jesus most likely considered the armchair questions of geology to be a complete waste of his time. But assuming he did in some idle moment of reflection wonder about it, then his brain albeit ancient and likely illiterate was definitely capable of asking a straightforward question of arithmetic: “how old is the world in, ya know, actual numerical years?”
And his answer, assuming someone PowerPointed him the requisite background knowledge of chronologies in the Jewish Law and Prophets, may very well have concluded the world was only 4 or 5 thousand years old.
Plenty of early Christians did. Theophilus, Irenaeus, Barnabas, Hippolytus, Augustine and others counted the literal age of the earth, some of whom believing the world would end in its literal 6000th year, precisely because of literal counting. The inauthentic Peter riffing the psalmist proof-texted the math of God to a simple equation. A day to the Lord = a thousand years. 6 days of creation thus equals 6000 years of existence followed by a day of rest i.e., the eschaton or end of the world. Theophilus for example used a literal year counting of Genesis apologetically to mock Plato's guess of a much older earth.
Whether Jesus *would have* considered the question and the relevant texts literally vs metaphorically or typologically is anyone’s guess, but all these options were on the table. To suggest he *could not have* because he was ancient is a bridge too far and contradicted by the evidence.
This covers the "Young Earth" bit.
The "Creationist" bit is a similar story. Ancients were fully capable of wondering if "Life, the Universe, and Everything" was caused or self-existent. In principle so was Jesus.
The historical Jesus most likely considered the armchair questions of geology to be a complete waste of his time. But assuming he did in some idle moment of reflection wonder about it, then his brain albeit ancient and likely illiterate was definitely capable of asking a straightforward question of arithmetic: “how old is the world in, ya know, actual numerical years?”
And his answer, assuming someone PowerPointed him the requisite background knowledge of chronologies in the Jewish Law and Prophets, may very well have concluded the world was only 4 or 5 thousand years old.
Plenty of early Christians did. Theophilus, Irenaeus, Barnabas, Hippolytus, Augustine and others counted the literal age of the earth, some of whom believing the world would end in its literal 6000th year, precisely because of literal counting. The inauthentic Peter riffing the psalmist proof-texted the math of God to a simple equation. A day to the Lord = a thousand years. 6 days of creation thus equals 6000 years of existence followed by a day of rest i.e., the eschaton or end of the world. Theophilus for example used a literal year counting of Genesis apologetically to mock Plato's guess of a much older earth.
Whether Jesus *would have* considered the question and the relevant texts literally vs metaphorically or typologically is anyone’s guess, but all these options were on the table. To suggest he *could not have* because he was ancient is a bridge too far and contradicted by the evidence.
This covers the "Young Earth" bit.
The "Creationist" bit is a similar story. Ancients were fully capable of wondering if "Life, the Universe, and Everything" was caused or self-existent. In principle so was Jesus.
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