History: Problems of dating

 Many of us will remember the debate from 25 years ago as to whether the millennium should begin on January 1st 2000 or 2001; opinion being overwhelmingly in favour of the former. This debate was ultimately dependent on the work of a 6th century monk called Dionysius Exiguus - or, in English, little Dennis.

  The Bible is notoriously short of dates, and Dionysius was commanded by the Pope to calculate the date of the birth of Jesus. Using Roman sources, Dionysus estimated that the Nativity occurred near the end of the year 753 years after the foundation of Rome, and that Year One should thus begin on January 1st a few days later. There was, therefore, no Year Zero. From his calculations we derive what used to be called dates A.D. and B.C. and  what are now, presumably for reasons of political correctness, labelled as C.E. and B.C.E.

 (Incidentally, there is absolutely nothing in the Bible to tell us at what time of the year Jesus was born, but it always seemed appropriate the the Holy Child should be born at the winter solstice, having been conceived at the spring equinox - the Feast of the Annunciation, when the archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary, on March 25th. This was when the new year started in England until the calendar was reformed in the 18th century, and it is still when the financial year starts - March 25th, plus 11 days added for reasons we won't go into here - and also the astrological year, which starts with Aries the Ram in mid-March)

(Another incidentally: it has always surprised me that the church went to these lengths to calculate a date for the nativity, but has never been interested in establishing a date for the Crucifixion. It shouldn't have been too difficult for Paul, or Luke, or some other early follower of Jesus, to estimate a date - the 18th years of the Emperor Tiberius, perhaps? - but they were not historians in the sense that the term is understood now.) 

Having established a date for the Nativity, later scholars used the Old Testament to count backwards in order to calculate a date for the creation of the world. The most famous estimate was by Archbishop Ussher in late 17th century Britain, who calculated that the world was created just 4,000 years before the Nativity (starting on October 23rd, incidentally: I'm not sure why). But not everyone agreed with this: the Russian church, for instance, dated the creation more than 1,000 years earlier.

Unfortunately, as centuries passed and knowledge of Ancient Roman history increased, it was realised that Little Dennis had go his sums slightly wrong. This was hardly his fault, until Julius Caesar reformed it after his victory in the civil war, the Roman calendar was a dreadful mess, with far too few days in a year of just 10 months. Caesar instituted a new calendar, with a year of 365 1/4 days, starting on January 1st, leap years and inserting two extra months: July & August (which is why September, October, November and December, which by their names should obviously be the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months, are actually the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th)

Dennis's mistake remains visible today, in the story of the Three Kings in St Matthew's gospel. The problem is that they meet King Herod; and in the corrected Roman dating. Herod died in 4 BC. How to reconcile this? it couldn't be done! So Archbishop Ussher's only solution was to date the creation, not at 4,000 BC but at 4,004 BC: a date still believed by American fundamentalists to this day!