Scientific ACCURACIES in the Bible

[Justtristo]

That, and when power shifted to Rome and a church based in Latin, fewer people were around to translate the old texts from Greek into Latin, so the texts were still around, but nobody could read them. The situation in Muslim countries was a little different, so there were Arabic translations of the Greek texts, and some of the Latin translations of Greek texts were from the Arabic rather than the original Greek.

Actually much the same process as I have described occurred in the Greek speaking Eastern Roman Empire as well, though to a lesser extent. For example a codex containing works of Archimedes found in what is now Istanbul had Christian prayers overwritten on it.

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The Greeks, of course.

Eratosthenes

Eratosthenes (276–194 BC) estimated Earth's circumference around 240 BC. He had heard that in Syene the Sun was directly overhead at the summer solstice whereas in Alexandria it still cast a shadow. Using the differing angles the shadows made as the basis of his trigonometric calculations he estimated a circumference of around 250,000 stades. The length of a 'stade' is not precisely known, but Eratosthenes' figure only has an error of around five to fifteen percent.[17][18][19] Eratosthenes used rough estimates and round numbers, but depending on the length of the stadion, his result is within a margin of between 2% and 20% of the actual meridional circumference, 40,008 kilometres (24,860 mi). Note that Eratosthenes could only measure the circumference of the Earth by assuming that the distance to the Sun is so great that the rays of sunlight are essentially parallel.

I once heard a preacher/university campus evangelist on a local Gospel radio station talk about Eratosthenes and how Isaiah beat him to the punch around 400 years earlier. The man quoted Isaiah 40:22 to make his case.

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;

Isaiah 40:22 (English Standard Version)

I don't he realized despite his four year education at a bible college, that the verse actually implies a flat earth. Which can be confirmed by reading other biblical verses which describe the Earth in the same way.