Happy New Year… again?

Photo by Anna-Louise on Pexels.com

But what year are we welcoming?

We are now a month or so into the year we call 2022, but not every calendar agrees it is 2022.

Logo from Winter Olympics 2022

According to the Jewish calendar it is year 5782, while Muslims claim it is 1443. If you are Buddhist, this is 2166. An Egyptian might claim it is 6263, while in China it is 4719. And as we look forward to the Winter Olympics we are in the thirty-second Olympiad of the modern era.

So why are we going around saying is 2022?

Historically, years were counted from a certain event—such as the ancient Greeks counting from one Olympic Game to another.  Each Olympiad was a four year period of time and you knew if you were in the first, second, third or fourth year of the Olympiad. But each of the city-states of Greece had a political calendar based on the year of someone’s rule. The Romans based their calendar on the founding of the Roman Republic

This model of basing the year on the number of years someone had been in power was very common in the ancient world. The difficulty for historians trying to decipher when an event happened and place it on our calendar is that any time of the year could be the first year of someone’s reign. And the complications grow if there were more than two rulers in what we would consider to be a year. For example using this system in the United States, 1963 would be John Kennedy year three or Lyndon Johnson year 1 depending on when an event took place.

But wait, you say before your mind boggles, 2022 is 2022 AD or Anno Domini, counting from a specific date—a date Christians decided was the birth of Jesus. However, no contemporary person or group recorded that event. The date was determined by a man named Dionysius Exiguus.

Medieval Monk –work in public domain

We don’t know much about Dionysius Exiguus. He might have been born around 470 according to the calendar dating system he created. He was a monk, a canon, and a scholar and spent years of his life determining when the birth of Jesus occurred. Actually he was trying to come up with a perpetual calendar for Easter.

If you are curious, there are websites describing how he made his calculations, but to be honest, they make my eyes glaze over and my brain hurt.

A medieval stained glass painting depicting the birth of Christ. It originally comes from a church on Gotland but is now housed in the Swedish History Museum

There was no year zero—obviously. He decided to begin year 1 Anno Domini one week after the birth of Jesus which aligns nicely with New Year’s day on the Julian Calendar. But his math calculating the birth of Jesus was very wrong.

Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great who died (according to Dioynius’ calendar) four years earlier. Other Biblical evidence suggested that the birth of Jesus was more likely about 7 BCE. Furthermore, there is no evidence whatsoever the event occurred in December.  Shepherds out watching their flocks puts the time of year between April and September.  

The placing of Christmas in December happened during the second century and several theories have been suggested for the date. A Roman Christian historian born in 160 AD named Sextus Julius Africanus wrote a chronology of the world before he died in 240 AD. (These are the dates according to Dionysus, not the Romans.)  Sextus Julius decided the world was created on March 25^th. It made sense to him that if the creation of the world was on March 25^th, then Jesus must have been conceived on that date and nine months later would be December 25^th.

Photograph of Constantine’s statue in York by Tim Green from Bradford

At this time, the Roman Empire was not Christian, but December 25^th was set aside for a celebration called the rebirth of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus).  This holiday was marked by feasting and gift giving. It was also the birthday of an Indo-European diety, Mithra, a god of light, and a cult god of the military.

In 336, during the reign of Constantine, the church in Rome began to celebrate Christmas on December 25^th. Constantine, who was establishing Christianity as the dominant religion of the empire, may have chosen December 25^th as a way of diluting the other religious celebrations.

Illustration from”Costumes Historiques” (Paris, ca.1850′s or 60’s) in the public domain

Almost two hundred years later when Dionysius Exxigius calculated how many years it had been since Jesus was born, he used the December date, but not every Christian accepted it. The Eastern Orthodox Church used the date of January 6^th as the birth. However, it made little difference in the lives of most Christians as Christmas was not a major religious festival until the ninth century.

The festival which was important, which Dionysius attempted to calculate was Easter. Easter is still determined by a lunar calendar. It is always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

So we are using an incorrect dating system made by a monk 1500 or so years ago which is why current historians are using the terms BCE (before the common era) and CE rather than BC and AD.  More and more we are saying that we are living in 2022 of the Common Era, the dating system most of us use on a daily basis.

I am sure there are people out there who scream “WOKE” and “Political corrections run amok when I use CE and BCE, but the truth is saying 2022 AD is wrong since we know that Dionysius, as well-intentioned as he was, was also wrong.

By the way, have a Happy New Year on February 1^st when the Chinese calendar begins a fifteen day welcoming the Year of the Tiger or 4720.