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Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”.

The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth”

According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the Earth out of nothing.

Prof Van Wolde, who once worked with the Italian academic and novelist Umberto Eco, said her new analysis showed that the beginning of the Bible was not the beginning of time, but the beginning of a narration.

She said: “It meant to say that God did create humans and animals, but not the Earth itself.”

She writes in her thesis that the new translation fits in with ancient texts.

According to them there used to be an enormous body of water in which monsters were living, covered in darkness, she said.

She said technically “bara” does mean “create” but added: “Something was wrong with the verb.

“God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?”

She concluded that God did not create, he separated: the Earth from the Heaven, the land from the sea, the sea monsters from the birds and the swarming at the ground.

“There was already water,” she said.

“There were sea monsters. God did create some things, but not the Heaven and Earth. The usual idea of creating-out-of-nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a big misunderstanding.”

God came later and made the earth livable, separating the water from the land and brought light into the darkness.

She said she hoped that her conclusions would spark “a robust debate”, since her finds are not only new, but would also touch the hearts of many religious people.

She said: “Maybe I am even hurting myself. I consider myself to be religious and the Creator used to be very special, as a notion of trust. I want to keep that trust.”

A spokesman for the Radboud University said: “The new interpretation is a complete shake up of the story of the Creation as we know it.”

Prof Van Wolde added: “The traditional view of God the Creator is untenable now.”
God is not the Creator, claims academic

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God, creation, science, religion: the conflicts
An academic has claimed that the Bible passage saying God created the Earth has been mistranslated. Here are four other times when science and religion have clashed.



Geocentrism
He has fixed the earth firm, immovable. (1 Chronicles 16:30)

The idea that the Sun orbited the Earth – rather than the other way around – was the common position throughout antiquity. The Bible, in verses like the one above, seemed to support it.



While it made intuitive sense – the Earth feels solid, while the skies seem to move – close observation of the heavens raised serious questions. The ‘wandering stars’ – now known to be the other planets – periodically seemed to change direction and travel backwards, rather than continuing on a smooth orbit.



Copernicus and Galileo, using new technology like the telescope, suggested that the Earth went around the Sun. The Church, angered, condemned Galileo to lifelong house arrest on “grave suspicion of heresy”.

By 1835, in the face of overwhelming evidence, the Church had dropped all opposition to heliocentrism, and in 1992 Pope John Paul II gave an official apology for his treatment. There are now plans to build a statue to Galileo inside the Vatican walls.

The age of the Universe
One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day (2 Peter 3:8)

While the Bible never explicitly states the age of the Earth, many Bible scholars attempted to deduce it using the dates and ages of its characters.



While there were problems with this approach – the chronology becomes confused after King Solomon – several attempts nonetheless came up with strikingly similar figures. The Venerable Bede suggested that the Earth was created in 3952BC, while Johannes Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton said 3992BC and 4000BC respectively.



The most famous, however, was the Ussher chronology, put forward in 1650 by the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. With almost comical precision, it claimed that the first moment of creation was in the evening of 22 October, 4004BC. Scientists point out that all of these dates would mean that the planet came into existence a full thousand years after the domestication of the guinea pig.



Radio dating using lead ores suggests the Earth is around 4.54 billion years old, while the age of the Universe has been put at around 13.7 billion years. This has been established partly by looking through powerful telescopes at distant stars; the Hubble Space Telescope’s Deep Field Image (pictured) shows galaxies over 13 billion light years away, in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.



If the Ussher date was correct, we would only be able to see stars 6,000 light years away, or about six per cent of the way across our own galaxy.

Creation and evolution
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:27)



The 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s great book detailing his discovery of the processes of evolution, caused the greatest split between the Church and empirical science since Galileo. The idea that man was not created in God’s image, but evolved from an ape-like ancestor, appalled many Christians.



While not all clergy were opposed to the theory of evolution, some were furious. In the famous debate at the Oxford University museum, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, asked “Darwin’s Bulldog”, Thomas Huxley, whether he claimed descent from the apes on his mother’s or his father’s side.



The argument rages to this day, although the weight of evidence is overwhelmingly in favour and very few biologists now question the basic idea of evolution.



However, some Christians - those who believe that God created the world as described in Genesis – have called for Creationism or “Intelligent Design” to be taught alongside evolutionary biology in school science lessons.



The Church of England issued a posthumous apology to Darwin last year, saying that it showed too much “anti-evolutionary fervour” when his book was published.

Noah, the Great Flood, and fossils
Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. (Genesis 7:2)



In the early 19th century, a young girl called Mary Anning discovered a strange beast in the rock of the cliff-face in Lyme Regis, Dorset. It was a fossil ichthyosaur – a marine reptile that lived at the time of the dinosaurs.



Other fossils were being found in their hundreds, in Britain, the United States and elsewhere. The fact that many of the creatures being found did not seem to exist on Earth led to problems with another of the Bible’s teaching: that God, through Noah, had saved all the animals of the world from the Flood.


Taken together with the belief that God had given Adam “dominion over every living thing that moveth over the Earth”, it was widely believed that it was impossible for animals to go extinct. Anning’s discovery, and the arguments of Georges Cuvier and other scientists, made that position untenable.


Another, greater problem for literal readings of the Bible was that if Noah had saved the dinosaurs, humanity must have coexisted with them.

While some still argue this, most theologians have backed away from taking Scripture literally. The Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales says: "We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision".
God, creation, science, religion: the conflicts - Telegraph