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Jewish authors Philo and Flavius Josephus as well as many Church Fathers (such as Justin Martyr, Theophilus of Antioch, Tertullian, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo) firmly believed in a global extent of the flood. The dimensions of the Ark were speculated as allegorical by Hippolitus, who understood them as a sign for the timing of Christ's coming after 5500 years from Adam, while Origen invented or reconstructed a pyramidal form for the vessel.
Many Christian authors identified the landing place somewhere in Armenia or Arabia: Mt.Qardu seemed to be favoured by Hippolytus of Rome and Ephrem the Syrian while Epiphanius identified it with Mt. Lubar.
== Historicity of the text ==
Creationists and biblical literalists tend to recognize this passage as historical and accurate. Proofs from Tradition and from the words of the Old and New Testament give credit to some historicity of the account, but many varying opinions have grown to speculate on the why's and how's of the Deluge.
The main two categories of interpretation are the global flood theory and the local flood theory.
The first exegetical school teaches that a catastrophic world-wide submersion of the dry lands really occured, so that no survivors escaped the cataclysm except for those on the Ark. The second position states that either humanity was concentrated in Mesopotamia so that a local flood in the Tigris-Euphrates valley would have wiped out all humans, or on the contrary that by "all the earth" the Bible understands "all the region" requiring the extinction of only one civilization.
That some planetary flood or dramatic climatic changed brought many civilizations to extinction is indeed possible. There are lots of independent flood myths around the world, with a variety of data which doesn't separate these texts from the Biblical narrative too much, so that a common origin for this myth is to be looked for in the geological history of the earth.
