He writes:
"...given their depth of interest and investment in understanding the heavens and earth, ancient peoples would have known that Earth's shape is at least approximately spherical. So, what was the origin of the idea that ANE peoples, ancient Hebrews and Bible believers up through the Middle Ages believe in a flat earth?
Two historians, Jeffrey Burton Russell and Christine Garwood, have independently documented the fact that this rumor was conceived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Russell credits antireligious scholars, intent on discrediting Christianity, for starting the rumor. Garwood credits biblical hyperliteralist sects for advancing it. Both Russell and Garwood exhaustively scoured books, articles and letters written by scholars from early antiquity until the Renaissance, searching for comments on Earth's size and shape. They found that only a few obscure individuals thought Earth to be flat. A broad consensus, historically and geographically, saw Earth as an orb.
In a written summary of his lecture at the 1997 conference of the American Scientific Affiliation, Russell made this observation:
'The falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad).'"2
To learn more about what the ancient peoples did believe about the Earth, I encourage you to pick-up Dr. Ross' latest book.
For those who are interested in investigating whether or not the Bible is a flat-earth book, check out Dr. Ross' helpful article here.
Courage and Godspeed,
Chad
Footnote:
1. Dr. Hugh Ross, Rescuing Inerrancy - A Scientific Perspective, p. 149 [Kindle].
2. Ibid., p. 149-150.
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