Most of us learned it in school. In the Middle Ages, people believed the earth was flat. The Church taught it, sailors feared falling off the edge, and Christopher Columbus bravely proved them wrong. It is a good story. It is also false. But the way it was exposed in the twentieth century was not entirely honest either, and the correction left out something important about what the Bible itself describes. This study looks at both rewritings of history.
The story everyone learned
Educated Europeans in the Middle Ages did not think the earth was flat. From the early medieval scholar Bede to the university textbooks of the thirteenth century, the standard teaching was a round earth at the center of the heavens. Columbus did not set out to prove the earth was round; nobody he argued with seriously doubted it. So where did the story come from? It has an author, and a date.
Where it came from: Irving, 1828
In 1828 the American writer Washington Irving, best known for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” published a popular life of Columbus. In one vivid chapter, “Columbus before the Council at Salamanca,” he showed the explorer standing before a panel of churchmen who answered his science with the Bible:
Thus, at the very threshold of the discussion, instead of geographical objections, Columbus was assailed with citations from the Bible and the Testament, the book of Genesis, the psalms of David, the Prophets, the epistles, and the gospels.
The only argument for a flat earth in the whole chapter is one about the heavens as a tent. Irving’s committee pointed out that in the Psalms the heavens are stretched out “like a hide,” the covering of a tent, and inferred that the earth beneath “must be flat.” But read Irving carefully and you find that he did not say the whole panel believed that. A few pages later he writes:
Others, more versed in science, admitted the globular form of the earth, and the possibility of an opposite and inhabitable hemisphere;
Their real objection, Irving says, was that “the circumference of the earth must be so great as to require at least three years to the voyage.” He even admits his record is thin: “We must not suppose, however, because the objections here cited are all which remain on record, that they are all which were advanced.” His only source for the scene was a Spanish church chronicle written some 130 years after the event. The “Council of Salamanca” was not a church council at all, but a royal commission of clergy and laymen, and no minutes of it survive.
How it became “history”
Irving’s scene might have stayed a colorful story, but in the late nineteenth century two influential writers turned it into a weapon. John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) told the Columbus story this way:
Its irreligious tendency was pointed out by the Spanish ecclesiastics, and condemned by the Council of Salamanca; its orthodoxy was confuted from the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Prophecies, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the writings of the Fathers—St. Chrysostom, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, St. Basil, St Ambrose.
Compare that list of Church Fathers with Irving’s: the same six names, in the same order. Draper had copied Irving’s dramatization and presented it as history. He went further, claiming that the papacy’s “traditions and policy forbade it to admit any other than the flat figure of the earth, as revealed in the Scriptures” (p. 163). No such papal position ever existed.
In 1896 Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. He made the sixth-century monk Cosmas into the great authority of the age, claiming his system “was received as virtually inspired, and was soon regarded as a fortress of scriptural truth.” Yet even White had to concede, a few pages later, that the leading medieval minds held a globe:
Eminent authorities in later ages, like Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Vincent of Beauvais, felt obliged to accept the doctrine of the earth’s sphericity, and as we approach the modern period we find its truth acknowledged by the vast majority of thinking men.
Both books served a larger purpose: to paint the whole history of the West as a war in which science advanced and the Bible retreated. They were written in the years after Darwin, and they shaped textbooks for generations. The flat-earth Middle Ages became a standard illustration of how foolish believers in the Bible had always been.
The real dispute: the size of the earth
What Columbus actually argued about was distance. He used an Arab geographer’s figure for the length of a degree but read it in shorter Roman miles, which shrank the earth by about a quarter, and he stretched Asia far to the east. On his figures, the Indies lay within easy sailing range. His critics said the ocean was far too wide. They were right. Columbus survived only because an unknown continent lay in the way.
What medieval scholars actually held
The thirteenth-century textbook On the Sphere by John of Sacrobosco was read in universities for centuries. It argues that the earth is round from eclipses and from ships at sea. Thomas Aquinas, the most influential theologian of the age, mentions it in passing as something both mathematicians and natural philosophers can prove: “that the earth, for instance, is round.” Dante’s great poem takes its travelers through the center of a round earth.
But here is what the textbooks rarely mention. The medieval earth was not the modern earth. Sacrobosco’s world is stationary at the center of everything:
That the earth is held immobile in the midst of all, although it is the heaviest, seems explicable thus.
It was a round earth, but fixed, central, and enclosed beneath the heavens, and as we will see, many of the same Christian teachers held the firmament above it to be solid. That picture has far more in common with the Bible’s enclosed creation than with a planet moving through empty space.
The myth-busters
In the twentieth century historians exposed the myth. Jeffrey Burton Russell’s book Inventing the Flat Earth (1991) traced it to Irving, Draper and White. In a 1997 lecture he summed up:
with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote that “there never was a period of ‘flat earth darkness’ among scholars,” and the historian Lesley Cormack, in the volume Galileo Goes to Jail (2009), wrote that “with the exception of Cosmas, no medieval writer denied that the earth was spherical—and the Catholic church never took a stand on the issue.” On the main point they are right. The popular story is false.
Where the debunking overreached
But the correction has its own distortions, and the same scrutiny applies to it.
The same scrutiny both ways
They misquote Irving. Russell wrote that Irving’s committee members “all” believed the earth was “flat like a plate.” Irving says neither thing; as we saw, he records a party that “admitted the globular form.” Gould, going the other way, says the real commissioners “all assumed the earth’s roundness,” which is more than anyone can know, since no minutes survive.
They splice their sources. Gould’s essay quotes Draper with an ellipsis that joins two passages three pages apart. We quote Draper directly instead.
They undercount the Scripture-based tradition. Gould dismissed the ancient flat-earth writers as “two pip-squeaks,” and Russell counted “at least two and at most five” early Fathers who denied a round earth. A major 2021 study by Benjamin Gleede shows something larger: from the late fourth century, a school of Christian teachers in the Syrian East, beginning with Diodore of Tarsus and continuing through Severian of Gabala, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Cosmas, built a picture of the world from Scripture rather than from Greek science. Its influence stayed mostly within biblical commentary, and it never won the Latin West. But it was a real tradition, not two eccentrics.
They skip the firmament. Many of the church writers who accepted a round earth still held the firmament above it to be solid. The scholar Paul Seely, who surveyed them, wrote that Origen called the firmament “without doubt firm and solid,” and that Augustine said the word was used to show it is “solid and that it constitutes an impassable boundary between the waters above and the waters below.” That belief lasted, he concluded, for “virtually everyone else up to the time of the Renaissance.”
And we will not overreach either. There is no evidence that the medieval Church secretly taught a flat earth, and we do not claim it.
The ones who did teach it
Two early writers are always named, and their words are real. Lactantius, a Christian teacher who later tutored Constantine’s son, mocked the idea of people living on the underside of a round earth:
How is it with those who imagine that there are antipodes opposite to our footsteps? … Or is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? … that the crops and trees grow downwards? that the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth? … Thus the rotundity of the earth leads, in addition, to the invention of those suspended antipodes.
Copernicus would later sneer that Lactantius “speaks most childishly of the shape of the Earth.” In the sixth century the monk Cosmas went much further, in a book called Christian Topography. Taking the tabernacle of Moses as a pattern of creation, he described the earth as oblong and the heaven as a vault resting on its edges:
The Deity accordingly having founded the earth, which is oblong, upon its own stability, … making the nether extremities of the heaven rest upon the four extremities of the earth, while on high he formed it into a most lofty vault.
We present Cosmas honestly. His system was not the teaching of the church of his day; the Byzantine scholar Photius later dismissed him as “a fabulist rather than a trustworthy authority,” and his book was unknown in Latin until 1706. But he was not inventing his reading out of nothing. He was taking the tabernacle’s pattern seriously, as Scripture calls it a figure of heavenly things (Hebrews 8:5; 9:24).
What Scripture pictures
The myth, and its correction, both leave out the most important question: not what medieval people believed, but what the Bible describes. On that question, mainstream scholarship is remarkably plain. The standard Hebrew lexicon of Brown, Driver and Briggs defines the firmament as
the vault of heaven, or ‘firmament,’ regarded by Hebrews as solid, and supporting ‘waters’ above it.
The 1915 International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, a conservative work, conceded that the Hebrews “thought of the earth as a flat surface, surmounted by a vast expanse of heaven, in which sun, moon and stars were placed.” Scholars who reach these conclusions usually go on to say the Bible was simply mistaken. We do not. We read the Bible’s description as its own:
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass?
The real turning point was not Columbus. It was a choice about how to read Scripture. Augustine, whose influence shaped the whole medieval West, wrote that it did not matter to him whether heaven was a sphere around the earth or a covering above it, and that the Spirit of God, in J. H. Taylor’s translation of his words, “did not wish to teach men these facts that would be of no avail to their salvation.” Once the description of the heavens was set aside as beside the point, the Greek globe could fill the space. That decision, not ignorance, is the hinge of this whole history. We set out the case for reading those passages as they stand in The Firmament and The Shape of the Earth.
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.
Further reading
The structure above
The Firmament
What Scripture means by the heavens God stretched out.
The larger case
The Shape of the Earth
Scripture, observation and history on the world God made.
The history
Where Did Heliocentrism Come From?
How the sun-centered model was revived, sponsored, and adopted.
The sky
Eclipses Were Predicted Long Before Copernicus
Babylon’s counting method, Ptolemy’s tables and Columbus’s eclipse.