DID THE EARLY CHURCH FATHERS BELIEVE in a FLAT EARTH?

From the Blog of E. T. Babinski:
Did the Early Church Believe in a Flat Earth?(The above website provides a handy list of most of the most important links on the web concerning that question. However, it is agreed upon by all the sources that at least some early church fathers did believe in a flat earth. And of course, those who believed in a spherical earth still believed that the earth did not move and that the "firmament" was solid, and Holy Scripture continued to be cited in support of those latter two assertions for centuries. Origen called the firmament "without doubt firm and solid" (First Homily on Genesis, FC 71). Ambrose, commenting on Genesis 1:6, said, "the specific solidity of this exterior firmament is meant" (Hexameron, FC 42.60). And Saint Augustine said the word firmament was used "to indicate not that it is motionless but that it is solid and that it constitutes an impassable boundary between the waters above and the waters below" (The Literal Meaning of Genesis, ACW 41.1.61).


More importantly, what the church fathers believed is not as important as what the ancients believed and there is plenty of evidence that ancient Near Eastern civilizations believed the earth was flat, based on their writings and carved pictures of the cosmos. The flat earth view was undeniably prominent in both Babylon and Egypt during the time when the Old Testament was written. Even during the intertestamental period, between the Old and New Testaments, Jewish literature like the Book of Enoch, spoke unmistakably of the shape of the earth as flat. The New Testament writers from the Gospels to Rev. also seem to take for granted the flatness of the earth. So whatever the "early church fathers" believed, such a question is not of major importance since they lived in a period that came AFTER the Old Testament, the Intertestamental period, or the New Testament, which were "flat-earth" thinking periods of Biblical composition. -- E.T.B.)