This had been an established fact for centuries.
During those centuries Christian faith and dogma suppressed the useful image of the world that had been so slowly, so painfully and so scrupulously drawn by ancient geographers.” However, in spite of this, the scholarly consensus is that during the high Middle Ages (twelfth to thirteenth century), “all educated people throughout Europe knew the earth’s spherical shape and its approximate circumference.” īy the time of Columbus, his fellow sailors and even his critics understood that our world is a globe. afflicted the continent from AD 300 to at least 1300. Daniel Boorin states, “A Europe-wide scholarly amnesia. Īs history marched on, views about the shape of the earth were questioned. Randall Younker and Richard Davidson study the primary and secondary sources related to the Babylonian, Greek and Jewish literature and conclude that none of these ancient peoples believed in a flat earth with a solid dome or vault. The Hellenistic world generally acknowledged that the earth was spherical in shape. Aristotle (384–322 BC) provided evidence for the spherical shape of the earth on empirical grounds by around 330 BC. By the fourth century BC, a spherical Earth “became widely accepted among educated people.” How far this acceptance may have trickled down to the formally uneducated majority is uncertain. The sixth-century Greek philosopher Pythagoras is acknowledged as the first person to contend that the earth is a globe. We will provide a brief history of the idea and a brief outline of principles of interpretation, present the evidence, critically engage with it, and present our findings. This article examines the purported biblical evidence brought forward to support this view. Television documentaries, internet posts, and entire websites are devoted to the idea. There has been a recent resurgence in the belief that the earth is flat. This article was originally published on the October 2019 issue of the BRI Newsletter "Reflections," available for download here.
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