Time being what it is - a necessary fiction - the year 2000 is based on a calendar (another fictive device) that rests on an arbitrary division of time itself: the years before the birth of Christ (B.C.) and the years after the ““anno Domini’’ (the ““Year of Our Lord,’’ or A.D.). But if modern scholars are right, Jesus was actually born four to six years ““before Christ,’’ which means that we are already well into the third millennium.
Where did the calculations go wrong? No one can blame Pope Gregory the Great, the 16th-century Roman pontiff who worked out the calendar used by most Western societies today. Thanks to Gregory, we have a system of months and days so accurate that only 26 seconds separates the Gregorian calendar from the solar year. A better candidate is Dionysius the Short, a monk who lived a millennium earlier. Dionysius was commissioned by Pope John I in 525 to develop a standard liturgical calendar so that Christians everywhere would celebrate Easter and other feast days of the church on the same date. Dionysius was a canon lawyer as well as a mathematician and an astronomer. But all he had to work with was the Emperor Diocletian’s version of the Roman calendar, which dated the years ““ab urbe condita’’ - from the founding of Rome. Since Diocletian had unleashed one of the worst persecutions of Christians, Dionysius decided to create a new calendar numbering the years from the birth of Jesus. Using the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as guides, the monk calculated - erroneously - that Jesus was born in the 753d year of the old Roman calendar, which eventually became the year 0 B.C. in the Christian West.
Able though he was, Dionysius was not blessed with the tools of contemporary historiography. According to Matthew and Luke, the only two Gospels that mention his birth, Jesus was born when Herod the Great was King of Judea. But today most Scripture scholars reckon that Herod died in 4 B.C. That alone suggests Dionysius was off by several years in calculating the birth of Jesus.
Luke adds a further confusion. He places the birth of Jesus ““while Quirinius was governor of Syria,’’ an area that included Judea. But historians now know that Quirinius was not appointed governor until A.D. 6 or 7. According to Roman records, however, a Roman legate named Quintilius was in charge of Judea from 6 to 4 B.C. If Luke, who wrote his Gospel some 70 years later, got the names confused, that would place Jesus’ birth nearly six years ““before Christ.''
Short of discovering a notarized birth certificate, historians will never know for sure exactly when Jesus was born. Even the dating of Christmas, which celebrates his birth, is arbitrary. The church selected Dec. 25, scholars believe, to coincide with - and religiously counter - pagan celebrations of the winter solstice.
Even without the work of Dionysius, there would be ample opportunity to celebrate other millenniums. According to the Jewish calendar, which attempted to count from Creation itself, this is already the year 5757. The Islamic calendar, which begins with the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in A.D. 622, follows the cycles of the moon rather than the sun. Since the Islamic year is only 354 days long, the year is now 1418. If the Chinese calendar governed, we’d be preparing to celebrate the 17th year in the 78th cycle. Those who plan to drink in the new millennium in Jerusalem may have to wait a day to celebrate. In 1999 Dec. 31, New Year’s Eve, falls on a Friday night, the start of the Jewish Sabbath. That’s a conjunction of time and the eternal that even Jesus might have relished.
