What Does The Bible Say About The Flat Earth Theory?

You may have, at some point in your life, thought that everyone believed that the Earth was flat until Columbus, against all wisdom and sanity, tried to sail around it to reach India (and got lost in the process). Jon Sorenson, writing in Catholic Online, certainly admits that he once thought so. That is not true, however. The ancient Greeks had figured out that the Earth is round (or perhaps more accurately, had written it down) a few centuries before Jesus of Nazareth was born. Just about anybody who lived near the ocean or who had ever set foot on a sailing vessel would have known this. This would include the early Christians and, later, the Catholic Church’s leadership.

The Catholic Church, which dominated Western thought and philosophy for over a millennium, has certainly had its moments when its dogma conflicted with science. Perhaps most famously, the Church persecuted Galileo and Copernicus (albeit posthumously in Copernicus’ case) for suggesting that the Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun, as Inquiries Journal reports. But the Church never held that the Earth is flat, and it certainly didn’t try to talk Columbus out of his journey, as a few sources have (falsely) suggested. “Certainly belief in a flat Earth was never a test of Christian orthodoxy, and definitely not a doctrine of the Church at large,” notes Sorenson.