At 04:23 PM 2/28/00 EST, PHSEELY@aol.com wrote:
>Is this because the surprise was over after Columbus? Since the ocean in NT
>times and for some time afterward (even into the time of Columbus, I
believe)
>was considered too vast to be crossed, humans were not expected to exist on
>remote shores---until Columbus discovered them. (It was after their
discovery
>that theories of pre-Adamites and of a "limited Flood" came into existence.)
I don't beleive so. The voyage of Magellan surprised some because they
brought people back to Europe who lived at the antipodes--a place some
medieval christians thought no one lived. Some people early after Columbus'
trip were trying to figure out if the Americans were really human.
Afterall, the Bible didn't mention them and since no one knew of any
descendant of Adam going to the New World (which was equally unknown tothe
Bible). Some thought that the Americans were mere animals. Latourette writes:
"In 1537 Pope Paul III came out with a bull in which he
declared in unmistakable terms that the Indians were not
brutes, but men who were competent to understand
Christianity, and that they should not be deprived of their
liberty or their property. Some Spaniards, while conceding
that Indians should be baptized, held that they were so
crude that they were unfit for the heavenly bread of the
Eucharist and so denied them the privilege of communion, and
also would not admit them to confession or administer to
them the viaticum. However, the weight of official opinion
was against these restrictions. In 1658 Pope Alexander VII
condemned them." Kenneth Scott Latourette, Three Centuries
of Advance, in A History of the Expansion of Christianity,
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1967), p. 90-91
And to solve the problem of how children of Adam reached the New World, I
quote myself:
"The monogenists needed an explanation of how Indians arrived in America.
Jose de Acosta proposed it in 1589. He simply said that Indians had walked
from Asia to America. This suggestion was made 136 years before the
discovery of the Bering Strait. And in a real sense it was a successful
Biblical prediction based upon the presupposition that humanity was of one
origin." Glenn R. Morton, Foundation, Fall and Flood, 3rd ed. (The
Woodlands: DMD Publishing Co., 1999), p. 100
For references for this--buy the book :-)
And when you come to think of it, it is pretty amazing that humans were the
most widespread mammal species on earth along with his comrades the dog and
the rat.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
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