A Somewhat Slanted Look at the History of the Christian Church – Article 44

hiterIt was pretty common knowledge at Fairdealing Elementary School, in the 1950s that Christopher Columbus believed that the world was round, but that virtually everybody else thought that it was flat; that sailing too far west would result in your falling off the edge. That’s not exactly accurate, but that sort of opinion passed for knowledge in many textbooks and too many schools until very recently, indeed. That that opinion was largely based on what passed for academic certitude in too many Colleges of Teacher preparation may not require further discussion.

In 1838, Washington Irving had published a biography of Christopher Columbus. Irving had asserted that Columbus had great difficulty obtaining funding for his voyage because Roman Catholic theologians believed and insisted that the world was flat. In fact, nearly all educated Westerners, and even more educated Arabs and other Easterners knew better, and had known better since Aristotle, at least. Bede, writing in the early 700s assumed the Earth to be a sphere, and many other Christian writers of the Middle Ages knew it, too. Celestial navigation, which uses the position of the sun and the stars in the sky, is how boats and ships had been navigating for some time, only works if one treats the earth as a sphere.

As early as the 3rd Century BC, Greek astronomers had accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth using Geometry. But, remember: the writings of the Greeks did not pass directly to the Scholars of Europe, a thousand years later. First, they were translated from Greek into Arabic, and only then into Latin and modern European languages. The Dark Ages really were dark. Only after about 1200 AD did Greek learning start to seep back into Europe. These translations led to serious misinterpretations. For instance, Arabic “miles” were seriously different from Roman “miles”. As a result, Columbus himself seriously underestimated the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan. Columbus thought it was only a little over 2,000 miles. In fact, it is over 12,000. Many scholars, mostly Churchmen, accepted the larger figure, and knew perfectly well that no ship then in existence could carry food and water to go that far. That’s one reason the Church opposed the trip for a long time.

What neither knew, of course, was that whatever the distance (and the larger figure was very close), there was the matter of two American Continents sitting exactly in the way of navigation. It took many years to figure that out, and by then Columbus was dead and the church was into a whole new field of endeavor: The Reformation!