Huguenot-L Archives

Archiver > Huguenot > 2000-01 > 0946874611


From: "Laura Johnson" <>
Subject: Re: [Huguenot] The millennium lie ...
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 20:43:31 -0800


Depends on who you want to believe - see the following article. Can't remember which newspaper it
was in but it was from a small newpaper in PA which is online. It was posted to another list I am
on.

"Blame the madness on Dennis the Short"

"There are 367 days until the new millennium starts on January 1, 2001 - NOT
in 2000.

Dennis began his career working in Constantinople for Pope Gelasius,
translating works in the papal archives from Greek into Latin. Later, under
Pope John I, he was still translating - this time working on Easter tables
drawn up by Saint Theophilus. He decided to correct the dating system which
was then using Anno Diocletani - years since the Roman emperor Diocletian.
Diocletian was infamous for persecuting Christians. Dennis wanted to glorify
Christ, so he worked on a dating system based on the life of Jesus.

The actual date of Jesus' birth had long been lost or forgotten by the time
he started his quest, so Dennis, in his efforts to simplify the convoluted
19-year and 84-year Easter cycles, turned to the only sources he could
find - Roman ones. He used them to try and backtrack. Good idea, but his
sources were not accurate. Nor was his grasp of mathematics.

Dennis also decided the eighth day after Jesus' birth (the date of his
circumcision) should be the New Year - which is the start of year 2. (A.D.
2 - 'anno domini,' or 'year of our Lord' although modern, non-denominational
use is to say CE for Common Era). He chose this rather than the date of
Conception (March 25) or Incarnation (December 25) as his marker.

The birthday Dennis dated from was December 25, the winter solstice in the
Julian calendar. This was the same date of a pagan festival called Sol
Invictus, celebrated in Rome as the birth of the sun god. Many scholars
believe the birth date was changed to Dec. 25 to encourage pagan converts
(and give them a festival on the same day so they wouldn't have to buy new
part hats...). Until A.D. 354, Jesus' birthday was actually celebrated on
Jan. 6, but it got moved to the earlier date after Dennis. Today, many
modern authorities argue for a spring or fall birth for Jesus, based on
historical, literary and astronomical studies, so if they're right, Dennis'
date for Christmas isn't even in the right season.

Anyway, Dennis' year 1 should have been year 0, but he didn't know about
zeroes (several centuries later, the somewhat brighter Arab mathematicians
taught us about them(2). (According to some theorists, this allowed the west
to invent doughnuts - 'dough noughts' - nought being another word for zero).
Dennis, you see, was using Roman numerals, which have no concept for zero.
Roman numerals are notoriously difficult to use in calculations, so we can
excuse him a few errors (try multiplying MCMXVI by LXXXVIII and you'll see
what I mean...). But his errors were later perpetuated and compounded by
others.

And Dennis didn't just lose a year in his calculations: he lost a year and a
day because year 0 (his Year 1) would have been a leap year!

Dennis was also a little off on his reckoning - his date for Jesus' birthday
was four years too late (possibly even more, according to some recent
authorities). But his mistake was never rectified even when later church
authorities realized it. Dennis based his calculations on an erroneous
reading of the old Roman calendar, which marked time from the founding of
Rome (Anno Urbis Conditae, itself a date more mythological than correct).
His reading made A.D. 1 equal to 740 AUC, so he figured Jesus was born Dec.
25, 753 AUC. Dennis was doing his calculations in what was about 1280 AUC,
so a fair amount of time had passed since Rome was founded.

Jesus, based on the New Testament chronicles of his life, was born in
Herod's reign. According to Flavius Joseph, a reasonably good source of
contemporary history, Herod died shortly after a spring eclipse of the moon.
There are three possible eclipses around that time (5 BC, 4 BC and 1 BC - or
BCE: 'Before the Common Era' to non-Christians and the Politically Correct),
but the consensus among Biblical historians is the March eclipse, 4 BC.

Since Herod declared he would kill all the children under the age of two,
Jesus must have been under 2 years old in 4 BC - thus between four and six
years old on the date Dennis set for his first birthday.

When Pope Gregory revised the Julian calendar in 1582, a certain number of
days were omitted from his new calendar, which resulted in two separate
styles of dating among Europeans for a long time. We lost 11 days from the
calendar in 1752 when the switch was made in English-speaking countries from
the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. So Dec. 31, 1999 is really Dec. 20 by
the old reckoning.

Many objected to losing the days from October 5 to 14 inclusive simply
because the Pope decreed it. England (and her colonies) persisted in using
the "Old Style" until 1752, because of religious differences - so historical
dating through this period is very difficult at times. Thus March 8, 1735,
Old Style is really March 19, 1736 in the New Style. (Julian versus
Gregorian is better explained at the links listed below). Gregory also
declared that years ending in '00' which were evenly divisible by 400 were
leap years - the reason 2000 is a leap year.

Oh, and don't forget to calculate the impact of the 90 days Julius Caesar
inserted into the Roman calendar in 45 BCE to make the Roman holidays align
with the seasons. Dennis overlooked these, too.


And finally - the first of the year also shifted around a lot. Benedictines,
for example, celebrated the year as beginning on December 25th. Before 1582,
most calendars did not have the year starting January 1, even though the
calculation of the moveable religious feasts acted as if it did. In England,
the year "began" either on December 25th, or, more frequently on March 25th
(Lady Day), until 1752 when the "New style" was adopted with January 1 as
the start, the date we've stuck with ever since.

So if you're a stickler for accuracy, the third Christian millennium
actually began on January 1, 1997 (or if the spring hypothesis is correct,
sometime in March or April)... or more properly on Dec. 26, 1996 (or January
6, 1997 if we use the old date assigned - which means January 18 in the
orthodox calendar)... unless Jesus was born in 5 BCE, in which case this
year is really 2002... And if you calculate the days lost due to the changes
in calendars... you easily get lost trying to figure it out.

Simply put, in religious terms, the third millennium has already started by
exact Christian reckoning, but our calendars don't reflect it properly.

The US Naval Observatory, the Royal Greenwich Observatory (the world arbiter
for time), the Encyclopedia Britannica, the U.S. Library of Congress, the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Arthur C. Clarke, and the
World Almanac all state the millennium starts on Jan. 1, 2001. And they know
better than most of us. I'd certainly trust their judgment in this matter
over those of someone trying to sell me millennial insurance or an
overpriced travel package to Christmas Island to see the sun rise on Jan. 1,
2000.

But even if you have the day right, what time do you celebrate the change?

We recognize midnight as the local turning point between days, but it wasn't
so long ago people used to mark sunset as the end of the day - and that was
used in calculations about calendars. It's more logical for diurnal
creatures, but rather slippery because the exact time changes with every
day. For most of us with intact biological clocks and normal circadian
rhythms, the day starts at or around sunrise.

People are spending thousands of dollars to travel to the International Date
Line thinking they'll be the first to see in the new millennium. They're
doubly wrong: an international conference in Washington. DC, in 1884,
established that a new "universal" day officially begins at the Prime
(Greenwich) Meridian (zero longitude, not one!), not at the date line. So
look to England, not the Pacific Ocean for the change. This means the
millennium will officially start in Toronto at about 6:45 p.m., (midnight,
Greenwich time - we're at 79 degrees west longitude, so those extra four
degrees from the time zone marker mean about 15 minutes earlier). People
near the International Dateline celebrating the "first" sunrise will
actually be 12-16 hours late for the official entry of the New Year.

Note, too, that location within a particular time zone is a matter of
decision for local governments. There is no international authority to say
in which time zone a country or municipality belongs. For political or
geographic reasons, some countries have moved the date lines and time zone
lines to suit their needs. The International Date Line meanders like a drunk
to accommodate local concerns.


Celebrating the millennium on New Year's Eve 1999 is not simply foolish,
it's just plain wrong. It doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate the dawn of
the 2,000th year, just that we should be correct and precise in how we label
the party - we can ring in the last year of the millennium.

Anyone with even basic math skills should understand this (with the possible
exception of Canadian federal politicians (5), who are planning to spend
$150 million of our tax dollars on millennial celebrations for Dec. 31,
1999 - duh! With that sort of sloppy math, we'd better recheck their claim
to have eliminated the deficit!). To compound this particular stupidity, the
Royal Canadian Mint is going to release a new series of coins monthly in
1999 supposedly leading to the first year of the new millennium - but, of
course, they're out by a year. A representative of the Mint acknowledged it
to me, but he said they're just going with the flow. This is the sort of
muddled accounting we expect from bureaucrats in Ottawa who are often
appointed to the jobs because of political connections rather than their
intelligence, skills, wisdom or common sense. As a result, we have a
national celebration in the wrong year. Next thing they'll declare Christmas
is on Nov. 25.

People, however, are still making plans for big parties on Dec. 31, 1999,
just like some folks did for the year 999. And like 1,000 years ago, the
same results will probably occur: nothing special (aside from some monster
hangovers). It only goes to prove that our numeracy skills have hardly
improved since the Dark Ages and that all our efforts in science and
learning have gone for nought in the face of the imagined 'magical'
significance of a number.

We can't seem to stop the bandwagon and inject some common sense into the
proceedings, despite all the efforts of science, logic, technology and
common sense to correct a simple error in understanding how to count to
1,000. Even the normally cogent CBC Radio has fallen prey to this marketing
hype and is now saying the year 2000 is the "dawn of a new millennium" in
news broadcasts. It's proof that budget cuts at the CBC have seriously
affected the brainpower of the remaining few - and seriously hurt Canada's
credibility worldwide.

You can put a robot on Mars (well, NASA can, sometimes), you can cure
disease through modern medicine, you can look into the centre of an atom,
but the common people still cross their fingers, toss salt over their
shoulders, read the newspaper horoscope and assume the millennium starts in
2000."

Laura L. Johnson
ICQ# 13006842
Home of the Sicilian Ancestry Web Ring http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Ridge/1535


-----Original Message-----
From: ibf <>
To: <>
Date: Sunday, January 02, 2000 4:15 PM
Subject: [Huguenot] The millennium lie ...


>Sorry to state this. But doing genealogy most seriously, we all have to be
>very correct with facts, also with these facts ...
>
>To all who still believe in this stupid millenium crap:
>
>Sorry, but now was *neither* starting a new decade, *nor* a new century
>*nor* a new millennium *this* year!
>
>*** This second millennium will end on Dec. 31st, 2000 ***
>
>The proof is mathematically and that easy that my children (11 and 13)
>understood at once:
>
>Considering the fact, our Christian calendar started with year 1 (there was
>no year 0 for the numeral 0 appeared first in Indian writings in 870 and
>came to Europe later on), the year 1 ended on Dec. 31st, 1 (simply, isn't
>it?). So the first century ended 100 years later on Dec. 31st, 100, right?
>Thus the first millennium ended at the *end* of year 1000, correct?
>
>And now the solution for all the cheated and doubting in the world (this is
>*not* an American problem, in this case!): Our second millennium in fact
>will end on Dec. 31st, 2000. And not now and two days before, respectively.
>
>Millions of people worldwide still are under this illusion, 'cause they fell
>for this clever trick of all the commercial and sale strategists all over
>the world who pushed this belief in order to sell their millennium's stuff
>twice: "Oh, really? There was no millenium's change in fact? OK, then let's
>start our sales campaign again and let's sell another millions of now true
>millennium events, travels, parties, souvenirs ..." (and whatever nobody
>will need but many will purchase ...).
>
>The only importance of the turn from 1999 to 2000 (Y2k) was the supposed Y2k
>bug problem - not less and not more, either.
>
>
>For my family and me, the last days have been a quiet, nice time and totally
>normal New Year's Eve, pretty unaffected by any cheats. And the next one
>will be as quiet and easy-going ...
>
>Anyway, thanks a lot to all your as well personal as public greetings and
>best wishes; I wish you the same - no matter if there's a millennium or not.
>Have a fine year 2000 and best success in genealogy!
>
>Juergen
>
>*******************************
> Jürgen Fritsche (Germany)
>-------------------------------
> -
> -
>*******************************
>
>

This thread: