Smarter than any one of them.
It has nothing to do with being smart and everything to do with being around to see the evidence.
I see this from yeshiva people all the time – anytime you bring up the idea that X did not know Y, they take it to mean that you think that X is stupid (or less intelligent than modern people who do know Y). But that’s not the case — it’s simply that we, today, live in a society that has the infrastructure and knowledge base to know Y while X did not.
To give a simple example: Could Rashi have constructed an airplane? The answer, very simply, is no. And that’s not because Rashi was stupid — on the contrary, Rashi was extremely intelligent. But he lived in a society and a time where it would have been impossible for *anyone* to build an airplane. Rashi did not have access to the physics and engineering that we have today. If he lived today, could he have done so? Maybe — but we’ll never know for sure. But to say that he couldn’t do it is not to say that he was stupid or any less intelligent than today’s engineers.
Similarly, the chachamim that you mentioned, Joseph, did not have access to the scientific evidence that we have today regarding the age of the universe. That doesn’t make them “less intelligent” than Charlie – it just means that they went with whatever information and evidence that they had at the time – just as we do so with the evidence that we have today.
The Wolf