Here's a dumb question:
If our western year odometer is calibrated by the birth of Jesus Christ,
why does it start seven days later?
We all know that the actual birth date of Jesus is a guess, later
calculated from historical evidence as probaby 4 years later, but why
doesn't the year start on December 25?
I'm assuming that year's the roll-over date, which is an arbitrary date
near the Winter solstice, was already well established at the time the
Christian authorities started trying to correlate the birth date with the
calendar in use. It was customary to cite dates as "in the reign of" a
king or emperor so the new reign started from the following rollover. Or
if we wanted, couldn't we set the birth back a year? Since we don't really
know when Christ was born anyway maybe he was born on December 25, 1 BC.
If so wouldn't that make the year of his birth year 0? If Jesus was born
in 1 B.C. then wouldn't that make 2000 be the "true" millenium?
