Rare books 11: Miguel de Jesus Maria y Hualde

We all have our own idea of when the world began but Bishop James Ussher calculated the date: the 22^nd of October 4004 BC. Most people nowadays find this date unrealistic. Ussher (1581-1656) was a more courageous forerunner of the science represented in the two books pictured here: chronology. Courageous in that he forthrightly published his findings, based on scrupulous attention to all time frames stated in the Bible. His was part of the emerging Enlightenment’s fixation on evidence, that would choose to read the Seven Days in Genesis as a literal scientific statement rather than a beautiful sequenced Hebrew hymn in praise of Creation. One of these number crunchers was a Carmelite from Navarre named Miguel de Jesus Maria y Hualde, a polymath whose works are a snapshot of religion and science happily adventuring together after quixotic proofs. Both books were published in Madrid in 1765, the first a complex analysis of dating of biblical events using different calendars, the other a comprehensive arithmetical disquisition with the backing of scholarship on the timing in the life of Jesus Christ. Page 48 arrives at the date of his Passion and Death: the 3^rd of April 33 CE. This kind of thorough evidence-based research was sure to dispel the increasingly popularised image of the Bible as “crude and bloody, with the nobler sentiments of some of the New Testament seen as overlaid with inconsistency and falsehood,” to quote John Barton in his highly recommended ‘A History of the Bible’ (London, 2019). The cataloguing of such treasures is a delight. Father Miguel goes in for long, comprehensive titles and lots of graphs and folding maps. Thus far I have not been able to locate his dates, flourished in the late 18^th century to judge from his holdings in the Biblioteca Nacional de España. Nor is there anything much about him in English online, only copious Amazon versions from suspect reprint outfits.

A folding chronology of the Julian calendar and consequent details up to

 and including its head-on collision with 1583, in very exact detail.