The Western Calander has very little to do with the birth of Jesus of
Nazareth. The western calandender dates back to the reign of Julius Caesar,
and was created to resolve differences between the calander year and the time
of the seasons. The aim was to keep the equinoxes on March 21st and Sept
21st, and to keep the Solstices on June 21st and Dec. 21st. (It does this by
adopting a basic 365 year with leap years every 4 years. (Later it was
tweaked to exclude years evenly divisable by 100 from leap years unless the
year is evenly divisable by 400). My understanding is that years in the
roman empire were given in AUC (Ab urbe conditia, from the founding of the
city--the legendary founding of Rome in 753 b.c.) And this wasn't changed to
the current A.D. (anno domini, year of the Lord) until centuries later.
Contrary to what you hear, Christmas wasn't meant to be the birth of
christ, rather if you look at the obvious etymology of the word, it is the
mass of Christ. Dec. 25 wasn't picked at random, however, this was an
attempt to redefine the pagan ceremonies typical at that time celebrating the
solstice (which in the north of course means the lengthing of days, or in
pagan perspective victory of the god of light over the god of darkness)
So the answer to the question why doesn't the year start on Dec. 25 is
just as you suggest, the traditional Roman start of January 1st is used. (I
believe the Roman new year started on March 21st) As you suggested the years
past could of course be redefined so that the millenium starts on 2000, but
the amount of confusion wouldn't make it prohibitive. (All B.C. dates would
have to be moved back 1 year to accomodate the year 0.)
In a message dated 12/24/99 10:54:19 PM Atlantic Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< 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?
>>
