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New Year’s Day
I wonder what year it is
By
Mike Fak
[DEC.
30, 2000] The
debate over whether the Times Square ball will signal the demise of
the 20th century and the second millennium A.D. has
caused a great deal of disagreement among the world’s scholars.
Many, including England’s Royal Academy, claim the century and
millennium will officially end this Dec 31 and not last year as so
many of us ill-informed seemed to have believed. Others in the world
of academia, especially some mathematicians, claim that series of
numbers, including centuries and millennia, start at zero and
progress. Thus we were correct in our lavish celebrations last New
Year’s Eve. Well, "forgive me" to both groups of
theorists of our world’s temporal calendar, but a look into
history shows they both are wrong. Sort of.
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Historical
records show that the turn of both the 1700s and the 1800s were in
fact celebrated in the following years, when the calendar turned to
’01. Neither of these centuries, however, also had to contend with
the question of where to place the end of an entire millennium. There
also is the question of whether our ancestors really gave a darn about
such displays of affection for the end of a time period, let alone the
start of another.
How
all this confusion over a date has occurred can be traced back 1,500
years to the reign of Pope John I.
At
the time of Pope John’s reign, Europe used many different gauges to
keep track of the passage of years. John, in an effort to unify the
known world into using just one method of dating, asked a scholarly
abbot by the name of Dennis the Short to determine the precise year of
the birth of Jesus and track forward to what year A.D. they currently
were living in.
Although
a noted intellectual, Dennis had little ability to gather all the
information necessary for an accurate determination of the exact date
of birth of Jesus of Nazareth.
Nevertheless
Dennis reached his at-the-time indisputable conclusion and relayed to
Pope John and the rest of Europe that they were presently living in
the year 525 A.D.
What
positive effect did this information have on the world? None. No one,
not even Dennis, used the new system, as the year marker A.U.C. —
the birth of the Roman Empire — continued to be used by most of the
western part of the continent for another thousand years.
Western
civilization continued to use the A.U.C. system, as well as others,
until the year 1567. Pope Gregory III, recognizing the expansion of
documentation in the world as well as the problems dealing with what
to do with the one-fourth extra day it takes the earth to travel
around the sun, convened a council to solve both issues.
Under
Gregory’s guidance, a complex leap year system was augmented as well
as officially recognizing the A.D. means of marking the passage of
years.
Although
both the leap year rules as well as the gauge of time under the
"Gregorian" system have withstood the centuries, a serious
error by Dennis was either not perceived or at the very least not
considered of importance by Gregory.
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Dennis,
for reasons never to be known, started his calendar in the year 1
instead of 0. Thus, the first century, as well as all others coming
after, would suffer the effects of having only 99 years in the first
century.
With
the age of print and the monumental increase in documents and their
need to show chronology, nothing to correct the mistake is now
possible. We can’t have a repeat of a year, due to the obvious havoc
that would create. We could just write off a year, but scholars don’t
agree that is a good idea either.
It
seems we all will just have to live with the problem until there is no
longer a need to keep track of time on this planet.
In
the event a person really wants to confuse the issue, just look at the
present-day research into determining if Dennis was correct in his
calculations.
Current
historians have determined that Dennis was off in his calculations of
the birth of Christ by as much as 20 years. Authors of books on the
subject calculate Jesus was born (by our current time markers)
anywhere from 7 B.C. to 20 B.C.
That,
of course, means that a purist has no need to celebrate anything
either last year or this time around. Both the century as well as the
new millennium happened several years ago.
There
is a silver lining in this cloudy issue. A person such as myself,
finding solace in the world’s calendar being off by, say, 20 years,
can officially state they were born two decades later than their birth
certificate states. Somehow telling someone I was born in 1968 rather
than 1948 has a positive effect on my psyche. Now that is something to
celebrate this New Year’s Eve.
[Mike
Fak]
This article is re-published
courtesy of www.fakmachine.com.
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