The Origin and the End with James Ussher The Origin In his influential The Annals of the World, James Ussher included an introduction to the work itself, The Epistle to the Reader. That brief note establishes that people in the ancient world thought that calculating the age of the earth was beyond human reach. Consider this excerpt from The Epistle to the Reader in The Annals of the World: It is not strange that the heathen, who are totally ignorant of the Holy Bible, should despair of ever attaining to the knowledge of the world’s beginnings. Even among Christians, that most renowned chronographer Dionysius Petavius, when asked his opinion concerning the creation of the world and the number of years from creation down to us, made this disclaimer: “The number of years from the beginning of the world to our time cannot be known, nor in any way found out, without divine revelation.” {Petravius, De Doctrina Temporum, l. 9. c. 2.} Philastrius Brixiensis agreed with him and called it...