History of Christmas: The Year – How Could Jesus be born 4 B.C.?
Dionysius Exiguus. Image: Wikipedia
HISTORY OF CHRISTMAS: THE YEAR
It’s common knowledge that Jesus was born on December 25, A.D. 1,
Right?
Well, not so fast.
OK then, was it in Year Zero?
No, there wasn’t a Year 0; the calendar went from 1 B.C. to A.D. 1.
We know that Herod the Great (who killed all the babies in Bethlehem younger than two years of age) died in the Spring of 4 B.C., according to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus 1.
The king was quite alive during the Wise Men‘s visit in the Nativity story in the Gospel of Matthew. So Jesus would have had to be born before this time, anywhere from 7 B.C. to 4 B.C. (Before Christ, or before himself!)
Why is there a gap of this much time in our modern calendar?
Christmas Calendar Gap
We owe this to a Roman monk-mathematician-astronomer named Dionysius Exiguus, or Dennis the Little, but known to his close friends as Dennis the Humble. In the 6th century, he unwittingly committed history’s most significant numerical error related to the calendar.
Originally from Scythia Minor, north of the Danube River delta as it flows into the Black Sea in modern Romania, he relocated to Rome. He was best known for translating many ecclesiastical canons from Greek into Latin, including the famous decrees from the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon, and Sardica.
A.U.C. vs A.D.
Image: Abbreviations.com
However, he is best known as the inventor of the Anno Domini dating system – A.D. for short, Latin for “in the Year of our Lord.” He tried to reform the Western calendar to center around Jesus’ birth. But he erroneously placed the date of the Nativity in the year 753 “from the founding of Rome” (753 A.U.C., or Ab Urbe Condita), even though Herod the Great died only 749 years after the founding of the city of Rome, as everyone knows, it was in all the papers.
The cumulative effect of Dionysius’ calendar error, the same Gregorian Calendar we use today, was to give Rome’s founding the correct traditional date. Ultimately, however, the calendar is at least 4 to 7 years off for the birth of Christ.
Did you celebrate the Y2K change of the Millennium in 1997?
1 Some recent research suggests that the dating of Herod’s death might be up for debate and could be dated 1 B.C. The argument is either that the counting of his reign was off, or there was a typesetting error in all editions of Josephus since 1544. I tried to get to the bottom of this by researching an earlier edition of Josephus at the British Library in London, but could only get my hands on a French translation from 1492. Regrettably, I couldn’t read medieval French.
Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com
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