Does the Bible actually state that the Earth is only 7,000 years old? I have not seen this in my reading of the Bible. Is it just implied in the text?

It seems odd that you know the age of the earth was calculated as around 7,000 years but have never bothered to ask where this figure comes from. It’s not exactly a secret. I learned this at school decades ago.

In 1650, James Ussher, an archbishop and a professor at Trinity College in Dublin, added up the ages of all the characters in the Bible and announced that the earth was created at "the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October... the year before Christ 4004".

It seems not too much was known about archaeology in 17th century Dublin.

This odd crackpot notion has somehow seeped unquestioned into the consciousness of many fundamentalist Christians.