Who's Millennium is it, anyway?

At the last meeting of the Religious Advisory Committee for the Washington prison system, I was amused to see Rabbi Friedman, the Jewish member, sporting a large white button on his sweater that read, "It's not MY Millennium!"  It put me to thinking about this whole Y2K business.

      Much has been made of the idea that at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31st., the world supposedly will come to a halt. Many of those who don't think that will actually happen, seem to be certain that the lights will go out and the food supply will be interrupted, Social Security checks stop, banks collapse, etc. all because of our reliance on computers that may think it has just become 1900 again.

      Actually, if it does become 1900 again, that will surely please Patrick Buchannan and some of the ultra-righteous Republicans among us today, but I don't think that will happen, either (nothing can please those guys!). Sure, maybe I won't be able to program my VCR because of it, but I can't do that now, so who cares?

      Let's take a long overview of the millennium business. Most of us are familiar with the Common Era (C.E.) , a secularized version of the Anno Domini  (A.D.) chronological system which dates everything from the purported birth of Christ. But when, exactly, did we start using that "milepost?" Obviously, no one in Nazareth had a calendar saying it was year 0.  In fact, it was hundreds of years later that anyone tried to recon how may years had elapsed since the birth of Jesus.

      Most of the early Christians were converted Jews, who relied on the Jewish lunar calendar, but as Christianity spread to other groups, most people continued to use the Roman calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C.E. (Before the Common Era). Caesar's calendar consisted of a 365-1/4 day year, the extra day being made up every four years, hence leap year. 

      This standardized length of the Roman year made it easy to refer to a particular date within any given year, though the years themselves were not formally numbered but most often named after the consuls who ruled at that time. Occasionally years were numbered from the founding of Rome (ab urba condita,  a date the ancients could actually be fairly certain of) in what we would call 735 B.C.E. A third way in use was to fix years in relation to the Indiction, the 15-year Roman tax cycle.

      In the fourth century, many Christians began situating themselves within the "Era of the Martyrs," which began in 284 C.E. with Emperor Diocletian's persecution of Christians.  Meanwhile, citizens of Antioch in Syria began to number years at 1 starting from 49 B.C.E. in commemoration of Julius Caesar's rise to dictatorship.

       In the fifth century, many Greek-speaking Christians started to number the years from the creation of the world (Anno Mundi) which they thought was either 5493 or 5509 B.C.E.  By the tenth century C.E., Anno Mundi (fixed at 5509 B.C.E.) dating became standard in the Byzantine Empire and thereby, the Orthodox countries of Eastern Europe.

       The first person to number years from the birth of Jesus was a scholar and abbot named Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Little). who lived in Rome in the sixth century C.E.  The pope had asked him to extend the table for calculating when Easter occurred (the old table was about to run out), so Dionysius counted backward and established what he thought was the year of the birth or "incarnation" of Christ. (He was off by at least 4 years. Modern scholars believe Jesus was actually born between 4 and 7 B.C.E.)

      Finding the date for Easter was always a problem for church officials because they relied on the Roman solar calendar, and the anniversary of Christ's death was supposedly after Passover, calculated on the Jewish lunar calendar. Dionysius then labeled the current year Anno Domini Nostri Jesu Christi (The Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ) 532.  It didn't catch on very fast, and even Dionysius didn't use it all the time.

      It wasn't until the great English churchman and historian, the Venerable Bede (673-735) began to use it systematically to describe the whole history of England that it began to catch on. His history was very influential in Europe and his style of dating began to be used in the French-speaking regions in the eighth century and in Germany in the ninth century.  Oddly, the Catholic church was not in the vanguard of the Anno Domini system, but used both the A.D. dates and the regional years of popes until the fifteenth century.

      While the A.D. system spread throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, the basic calendar remained Julius Caesar's Roman calendar of 365-1/4 days, even though it was too long by 11 minutes and 14 seconds each year. Over time, this error caused astronomical events (solstices, equinoxes, etc.) to fall out of sync with their fixed dates in the calendar. By the sixteenth century, the spring equinox was occurring ten days before March 21st!

      In the 1570s, a group of Jesuit church astronomers recalculated and proposed the length of the solar year be 365.2422 days. They were remarkably accurate, as today it is known to be precisely 365.242199 days. Since the difference between this new estimate and the old Julian calendar added up to a total of 3.12 days every 400 years, it was posited that three out of every four centennial years should no longer be leap years. (For example, 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, but 2000 will be.)  This got them a little closer to reality, and insures us that the modern calendar loses only .0003 days each year.

      In 1582, Pope Gregory XII officially adopted these changes. To eliminate the error already accumulated by that time, he also cut ten days out of October that year. By papal decree, October 4th was followed by October 14th, 1582! Gregory's reforms were ill-timed, as much of Europe was then embroiled in the Wars of Religion (1562-1598), and much of Europe, and the rest of the world as well, were unwilling to change their calendars just because the pope said so.

      With the onset of Western colonization, the Gregorian calendar gained a foothold in non-Western countries in the late 19th century, with Japan adopting it in 1873. The First World War accelerated the process, with most eastern European and East Asian countries falling in line between 1912 and 1918. Greece - and the Eastern Orthodox Church - eventually got on board in 1923.  

      This all leads us to one final question. If we're numbering years according to the life of Jesus, why don't we celebrate New Year's Eve with Christ's birth on Dec. 25th, or with his conception on March 25th (which also coincides with the arrival of Spring)? If you can't find a baby sitter for New Year's Eve, you can always celebrate it on March 25th, I guess. And if you're sick of this whole mess, you could always use the Jewish system of reckoning, making it 5761, but not until next March. Or even the Byzantinne Time and say it's Anno Mundi 7509.

      But of course, if you've already celebrated New Year's Eve on October 31st because you are Pagan, it's all moot anyway. Just enjoy. After all, "Vita Celebratio Est."  Life is a celebration.  - Pete

(Excerpted from an article by Prof. Lenora Neville in the Jan. 2000 issue of Archaeology Odyssey)