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By Root 1509 0

the front. No one chiseled his words into stone like emperors or Pharaohs. He lived before the printing press, newspapers, tape recorders, radio, TV, or any modern method of keeping records of the spoken word. When he died, his friends said they did not know him, and his death went unrecorded in any official record we know about. It seems the only thing owned when he died was the clothes on his back which were filthy, blood-soaked rags after his scourging and crucifixion. He died alone, childless, no wife, without money, without worldly power or position on the dusty outskirts of Roman civilization. Before his crucifixion, he made a strange statement: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matt: 24:35). His statement was confirmed, at least in the short run, when Gutenberg published the Gutenberg Bible, because the man who spoke those words was Jesus Christ. The most printed book on planet earth is the Bible carrying the words of Jesus Christ who suffered scourging and crucifixion outside the gates of the city of Jerusalem so long ago.[107]

Yet, the printing press did not seem to be a friend of religion so long as it printed the words of men scouring the earth and the heavens for answers to the mysteries of life. The acceptance of the scientific method was the key to advancing empirical knowledge, and the advance of mankind’s empirical knowledge grew spectacularly in Europe. This was the scientific revolution that was throwing out old ideas of an earth-centered universe through the work of Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler. By explaining the movement of the planets in the sky they were able to prove that the sun was the center of the solar system. It was the start of a new way of thinking. Before, people looked to the past or the books of Aristotle or Ptolemy to explain the world, but now people would not read the classics to see what was fact or fiction. Now people tested it for themselves, and if the classic view failed the test, rejection was the result. New ideas based on tested facts became the accepted view, and any new empirically proven “facts” survived only so long as they withstood testing. This brave new empirical world started during the Renaissance and zoomed ahead during the 1600s and 1700s in Europe. And its growth never stopped accelerating.

The new scientific and practical advances were astounding: Peter Heinlein invented the first pocket watch in 1500; in 1515 the first rifles were developed; Isaac Newton described the laws of gravity in 1665 and in his publication of Principia Mathematica (1687) united gravity, inertia, and centrifugal force; William Harvey discovered how blood circulated in the human body by 1628; Fermat put forth the statistical theory of probability in 1659; John Kay invented the flying shuttle loom in 1733; and so on. After laying the foundations of science, more discovery and invention followed until a tidal wave of progress swept the Western World.

The Arts—Painting

During this period, painting began to advance as never before. Michelangelo (1475 to 1654), Titian, Durer, Raphael, Jan van Eyck, El Greco, Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt (1606 to 1669), Holbein, and many others brought painting away from the stiff and unrealistic styles of the Middle Ages to the vibrant, realistic, and almost-animated paintings of 1400 to 1600. The artists were using new colors based on oil paints invented in 1400, and painting on new material (canvas) with new techniques founded on perspective drawing (perspective discovered about 1434) that brought the paintings alive. There was still an enormous amount of symbolism, but the depiction of the world became very real. Oils allowed new techniques of paint application including the layering of color where very thin coats of multiple colors were laid on over a long period. This allowed light to enter through the layers of thin paint and then bounce back to the viewer’s eye, imparting a glow to the paintings that made the colors iridescent. Nothing like this had ever been seen before.

Speed of Change

Due to the printing press