Anthropology: The Briton Chronologies

If the Biblical record of the Flood and Babel is correct, we should see hints of it throughout the ancient cultures of the world. Innumerable legends point in this direction; however, another category of little-researched evidence also exists.

Much like the Icelandic sagas, the chronologies of the ancient Britons provide a good source for mapping the framework of history. They include not only accounts of such things as the settling of the British Isles, but also events familiar to us, like Julius Caesar's invasion.

Of interest to the creationist anthropologist are the included genealogies. These records chronicle the line of kings of the Britons from the Saxon takeover of Great Britain all the way back to Noah!

Is this genealogy a “pious fraud,” invented by Catholic monks and based upon the record in Genesis, as many claim? Or, is it an independent, factual account?

The “pious fraud” theory is based on the assumption that the "Sceaf" or "Seth" son of "Noa" mentioned in the genealogies is meant to refer to the Biblical Shem. This assumption is not true. First, the etymology of Sceaf is completely different from that of Shem. Second, the genealogies also claim that the Britons descended from Javan, a son of Japheth, making Sceaf the same as Japheth. Japheth, however, was not known to the Christianized Saxons of the supposed “pious fraud” time as Sceaf but as the Latin version of the name, Iapheth.

Another problem with the “pious fraud” theory is (ironically, perhaps) the fact that the Briton account differs on a number of counts from the Biblical one. For instance, one of Nennius (one of the compliers of the Briton history)'s footnotes states: Se Sceaf waes Noes sunu and he waes innan theare earce geboren. (This Sceaf was Noah’s son, and he was born in the Ark.) No son of Noah was born in the Ark. In fact, the Bible states that each of them even had a wife! If the Briton genealogy was really just a copy of the genealogy from Genesis, its' compilers would not have included such obvious errors.

However, the impossibility of the idea of “pious fraud” is demonstrated when one realizes that the Briton ancestry account is not some single chart floating around, but a long sequence embedded in Briton history. This sequence was cataloged around the 1000s by a number of learned men acting independently of each other; most notably Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth.

The Briton chronologies point to a young Earth and the truth of Genesis!


-R. Josiah Magnuson

If one would like more information regarding the Briton chronologies, or to learn about creationist post-Flood anthropology, a recommended resource is the book After The Flood by Bill Cooper, available at AnswersBookstore.com.