The Christian Calendar

[Wertbag]

I've heard a Christian apologist say "It's 2024 years from what?  Our calendar was made by Christians and tracks the birth of Jesus.  Our civilization is Christian based!"

This is a partially true statement that misses the vast amount of other input to our modern calendar.  Firstly, it is not 2024 from Jesus's birth.  Scholars say the biblical narrative doesn't give us an accurate date, but most point to 3AD as the most likely year while estimates can range from 3BC to 3AD.

 

It is true that the Gregorian calendar (the current modern calendar) was designed by the Gregorian monks.  It went into effect in October 1582 under instruction from Pope Gregory 13, replacing the Julian calendar.  However, the Julian calendar was a Roman invention, originally having 355 days for the year but changing to 365 once they realized it didn't match the lunar and seasonal cycles.  The Gregorian calendar further refined this to be more accurate as a year is not an exact 365 so the calendar was slowly slipping.

All this to say it was not a Christian calendar, it is a Roman one made more accurate by Christian monks 1600 years after it was first put into use in 45BC.

 

The days of the week are named after celestial bodies and various gods, often seen by ancient groups as one and the same. This practice seems to have started in Sumeria, was picked up by the Babylonians and later adopted by the Romans who named them after their gods.  When the Romans took over Germany they instructed use in the Roman calendar, but the locals changed the Roman gods to their own.  It is from these German gods that our modern English days of the weeks come.  This change would have happened around 100AD, well before Christianity reached Germany:

Saturday = Saturn Day

Sunday = Sun Day

Monday = Moon Day

Tuesday = Tyr's Day

Wednesday = Woden's Day

Thursday = Thor's Day

Friday = Frig's Day

 

The names of the months have retained their Roman origins:

January - Named after Janus, Roman god of beginnings

Febuary - Named after the Roman word februum, which means purification

March - Named after Mars, Roman god of war

April - Not known for sure, suggested as named after Aphrodite/Venus

May - Named for the Greek goddess of fertility Maia

June - Named after the Roman goddess Juno, Queen of the gods

July - Named after Julius Caesar

August - Named after Augustus Caesar

September - Sept = Seven, originally the 7th month

October - Oct = 8, originally the 8th month

November - Nov = 9, originally the 9th month

December - Dec = 10, originally the 10th month

 

Our calendar, weekdays and month names all point back to Roman origins, with language changes over time.  Only the year was later changed by Christians and even that is believed to have been wrong.  Christians did have an influence, but it was revisionary not original. 

[mwc]

     An interesting side-note to this is Dionysius started down this road as a means to investigate the end of the world.  The calendar epoch most xians were using at the time said that christ was born in AM 5500 and it was closing in on AM 6000.  What this meant was that christ was born at the eleventh hour and it was coming up on the twelfth.  It also meant that the world was about to flip over to the seventh day.  So the end of the world.  And people were getting wound up about it (like always).

 

     Anyhow, the very over simplified version of all this is as a result one of the outcomes of his calculating more dates for Easter, was he "changed" anno Diocletian (I'm not getting that quite right since it's supposed to be in Latin...but it's the dating system that was used for the year of Diocletian) to anno domini  (actually it was the year of our lord jesus christ but, again, I can't recall the Latin).  I say "changed" because he just used a new term because he didn't want to use one associated with a xian persecutor.  However, the outcome of his work was it basically showed they were only about 500 years into a new era, with ~5500 to go instead of only a few years away from the actual end of the world at 6000.

 

     Imagine how just a little fiddling with some Easter calculations and a little calendar magic can postpone Armageddon?  That's pretty amazing.  The headline should be "God hates this one little trick!"  Reframing the end of the world based on christ was a huge success.

 

          mwc