LXX versus MT Chronology and What did the Early Church Fathers

The early Church Fathers spoke Latin and Greek. A very small minority of the eastern Fathers spoke Aramaic and possibly had access to the Hebrew available at the time. Even most Jews spoke Greek and very few spoke Hebrew. The Septuagint was the Bible for both the early Christians and most of the Jewish population. The LXX was dominant even in the synagogues.

Consequently, most of the ECFs who dealt with chronology used the much longer ages in Genesis 5 & 11 in the LXX simply because that was what they had available to them. The Hebrew OT did not become available to most of Christianity until Jerome used it as the base for his Latin Vulgate translation around AD 405. But by that time “Chiliasm” had long since been replaced by Amillennialism. This was for 3 reasons:
1. The “educated” Alexandrian Church Fathers rejected Chiliasm’s literal interpretation of prophecy, preferring an allegorical method in order to maintain the “heavenly destiny” interpretation of many of the prophecies (eg. the restoration of Jerusalem in the prophets is an allegory of heaven, etc.). And this allegorical method was used because it allowed the prophecies to be bent in such a way as to agree with Plato’s philosophy of 7 heavenly spheres, and man’s alleged ascent to eventually reach God. It was a compromise with Gnosticism.
2. Some early writers who were devout “Chiliasts” attempted to reconstruct a chronology from the LXX in order to understand how far off Jesus’ return was. But because of the LXX’s much longer ages in Gen. 5 & 11, they thought that the 6-days (6 millennia) was nearly expired, just a couple of centuries or so away. (One calculated that the current year was about 5,500).
So when the 6,000 years had passed by all calculations based on the LXX, and Jesus had not returned, the Amillennial interpretation became more dominant especially as popular writers such as Origen had so thoroughly blended Christianity with Platonic philosophy.
3. Constantine’s alleged conversion in AD 312 and his subsequent making Christianity the semi-official religion of Rome, and elevating Christian bishops to high positions, blended the Platonic philosophy and its Amillennial eschatology with the political climate of the time. Since Constantine ended the persecution of Christians by Rome, he was seen as ushering in the “Kingdom” as Christ’s “vicar” (representative). This idea quickly morphed into the theology of Roman Catholicism, that the Roman Catholic Church is the Kingdom of God thanks largely to Augustine’s massive work “The City of God.”

A form of Chiliasm actually survived within Amillennialism for a time after Constantine, (that the 6 millennia had expired, and that the current Roman Catholic “Kingdom” was the 7th millennium. Of course, that notion was impossible after 1000 years of Roman Catholicism had expired (somewhere around AD1300-1500).

Grace & Peace, Tim