Tampering with Time

Where did Muller come up with a date as late as 1000 B.C.E. for a scripture Hindus themselves considered much older? It turns out that unlike the Hindus who believed the universe was billions of years old, as a christian Muller believed the world had been created in 4004 B.C.E. By adding the ages of the patriarchs listed in the Bible who lived between Adam and Noah, Muller could calculate the number of years that had passed since the creation and the Great Flood. This brought him to 2448 B.C.E.

Now, Muller was no fool. He knew it would take time for Noah's descendants to immigrate to India, repopulate the subcontinent, and create the hundreds of different languages and distinctive cultures flourishing  there. This, he figured, must have taken at least 1,200 years, maybe as much as 1,400. Ergo, the earliest Hindu scripture could not have been written earlier than 1200 B.C.E. University text-books uncritically repeated this date through the mid-1990s!