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Christ's birth as base of our calendars
The roles of Dionysus and Bede
Dear Matthew Alice: I’ve checked the library; I have asked experts, but I can't find the answer anywhere. So as a last resort, I seek the wisdom of Matthew Alice. At what point in history did Western civilization begin reckoning time from the birth of Christ? — Justus Curius, Vista
I’m just as curious to discover who your “experts” were. Make a note to have them defrocked if they couldn’t answer this one. Again I warn — hang around with unlicensed know-it-alls, you get what you deserve.
The evolution of the world’s calendars is a stupefying litany of calculations and recalculations by centuries of astronomers, kings and popes, with a little superstition thrown in. The colorful 12-page thing on your wall, the one with the beach bunny nuzzling the Fram oil filter, is the Gregorian calendar. It’s a slight tweaking of the Julian calendar, the first official calendar of the Holy Roman Empire, adopted in what we’d now call A.D. 325. The year-numbering system came a little later. It was the monk Dionysus Exiguus in A.D. 525 who devised the idea of the “Christian Era,” counting years consecutively from the Annunciation, simply as a way to solve the problem of figuring the date for Easter. Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People popularized the B.C./A.D. system as a secular application for marking years, but it wasn’t widely and officially adopted for another ten centuries. Dionysus was a little off in his calculations; scholars believe Christ was actually born somewhere between 8 and 4 B.C., according to the current system.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Christ's birth as base of our calendars
The roles of Dionysus and Bede
Christ's birth as base of our calendars
The roles of Dionysus and Bede
Dear Matthew Alice: I’ve checked the library; I have asked experts, but I can't find the answer anywhere. So as a last resort, I seek the wisdom of Matthew Alice. At what point in history did Western civilization begin reckoning time from the birth of Christ? — Justus Curius, Vista
I’m just as curious to discover who your “experts” were. Make a note to have them defrocked if they couldn’t answer this one. Again I warn — hang around with unlicensed know-it-alls, you get what you deserve.
The evolution of the world’s calendars is a stupefying litany of calculations and recalculations by centuries of astronomers, kings and popes, with a little superstition thrown in. The colorful 12-page thing on your wall, the one with the beach bunny nuzzling the Fram oil filter, is the Gregorian calendar. It’s a slight tweaking of the Julian calendar, the first official calendar of the Holy Roman Empire, adopted in what we’d now call A.D. 325. The year-numbering system came a little later. It was the monk Dionysus Exiguus in A.D. 525 who devised the idea of the “Christian Era,” counting years consecutively from the Annunciation, simply as a way to solve the problem of figuring the date for Easter. Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People popularized the B.C./A.D. system as a secular application for marking years, but it wasn’t widely and officially adopted for another ten centuries. Dionysus was a little off in his calculations; scholars believe Christ was actually born somewhere between 8 and 4 B.C., according to the current system.
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