What year is it? I write this in the year 2024. But you may be reading th. Whatever year it currently is for you, I have strange news for you. It’s not really that year. You need to add another five or six years to it. For me in 2024, it’s really 2029 or 2030 but most people don’t realise it. It all stems from a medieval miscalculation regarding the year of Jesus’ birth.
I must stress that this is hardly a profound spiritual or theological issue. It’s not going to change your life in any way! It makes no practical difference to our beliefs or to the way we go about our lives. It is a mere chronological curiosity, but one which may interest some people who, like me, have a propensity to ponder strange and inconsequential facts. If you are not one of those people, you may want to skip this chapter. But I include it in this book simply because a discussion of chronology and years has at least some relevance to the title of this book, “Jesus In Space And Time”.
You may be aware that the system of numbering years that is most commonly used in the western world numbers our years consecutively from the birth of Christ. Thus, when I say it is the year 2024, it is a declaration that it is 2,024 years since the birth of Christ. This is why the years since Christ have traditionally been referred to as “A.D.” (from the Latin “Anno Domini”, meaning “in the year of or Lord”) and the years prior to Christ’s birth are referred to as “B.C.” – before Christ. The secularisation of these suffixes in recent years has led to them being changed to BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).
This system of numbering the years in reference to the date of Christ’s birth is known as the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, who instituted it in 1582.
But the Gregorian calendar is not the only system of numbering the years. Not everyone chooses to number their years from the birth of Christ. Other cultures and traditions number their years from other significant events in their histories. Below is a chart showing the various dating systems which show the corresponding year number as of 1st January 2024:
Thus, according to the Assyrian calendar, it is the year 6,772, while in the Persian calendar it is the year 1,402. (The French revolutionary calendar was only in vogue for about 10 years, but it is included as a curiosity.)
While all this is mildly interesting, there is a curious problem with our Gregorian calendar. When they were calculating the year of Christ’s birth, from which all years before and after were to be numbered, they got it wrong! The historians whom Pope Gregory XIII engaged to calculate the precise year of Christ’s birth knew that he had been born during the reign of Herod. The only problem was that they inadvertently identified the wrong Herod. They calculated Jesus’ birth to have occurred during the reign of Herod Archelaus rather than the earlier reign of his father, Herod the Great. It was a simple mistake of arithmetic based upon a misidentification of Herods. In other words, they didn’t go back far enough.
Herod’s son, Archelaus, reigned from what we now call 4 BC to 6 AD (eventually being deposed by the Roman Emperor because of his capricious and unreliable reign). Herod the Great, Archelaus’s father, reigned from 37 BC to 4 BC, his reign coming to an end at his death. Jesus was born during the reign of that original Herod, and as we saw in the previous chapter, his family had to flee to Egypt for a couple of years until news of Herod’s death reached them.
Thus, because of an inadvertent miscalculation by historians in the 16th century, we now have the curious situation that Jesus was born in about 5 or 6 BC. In other words, according to the existing Gregorian calendar, Christ was born five or six years before Christ!
I hope this won’t keep you awake at night.