Immaculate Misconceptions
Mar. 25th, 2009 03:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vovatToday is the Feast of the Annunciation, the day of the conception and incarnation of Jesus. This is not to be confused with the Immaculate Conception, which was the conception of Mary, and celebrated on 8 December. This means that her birth is celebrated on 8 September, making her a Virgo, which I'm sure wasn't accidental. See, there's some logic behind these dates, but it's logic that doesn't completely take the historical record into account. The people who came up with the dates for these various aspects of the Gospel story might well have known there wasn't much (if any) evidence to support them, but they had to come up with SOMETHING to replace the old pagan holidays.
This provides a good transition into something else that I'd wondered about for some time, which is how the beginning of the Anno Domini era was calculated. Well, from what I've been able to find, it was determined by the sixth century monk Dionysius Exiguus, based on Luke 3. Luke 3:1-2 tells us, "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tibe'ri-us Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturae'a and of the region of Trachoni'tis, and Lysa'ni-as the tetrarch of Abile'ne, Annas and Cai'aphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zechari'ah in the wilderness." It goes on to describe John's baptism of Jesus, and then mentions (in Luke 3:23) that "Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age." The conventional wisdom is that Dionysius ignored the "about," and decided that Jesus was EXACTLY thirty in the fifteenth year of Tiberius' reign. This would mean that Jesus was born after the death of Herod the Great and before the first imperial census, hence contradicting both Matthew and the earlier chapters of Luke. Oh, well. You can't say Dionysius didn't try, and he was actually trying to calculate the dates of previous Easters. I believe the Anno Domini system really began to gain prominence when Bede used it to date occurrences in British history. And we'll be seeing Bede again in conjunction with Easter, so don't forget about him! {g}
This provides a good transition into something else that I'd wondered about for some time, which is how the beginning of the Anno Domini era was calculated. Well, from what I've been able to find, it was determined by the sixth century monk Dionysius Exiguus, based on Luke 3. Luke 3:1-2 tells us, "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tibe'ri-us Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturae'a and of the region of Trachoni'tis, and Lysa'ni-as the tetrarch of Abile'ne, Annas and Cai'aphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zechari'ah in the wilderness." It goes on to describe John's baptism of Jesus, and then mentions (in Luke 3:23) that "Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age." The conventional wisdom is that Dionysius ignored the "about," and decided that Jesus was EXACTLY thirty in the fifteenth year of Tiberius' reign. This would mean that Jesus was born after the death of Herod the Great and before the first imperial census, hence contradicting both Matthew and the earlier chapters of Luke. Oh, well. You can't say Dionysius didn't try, and he was actually trying to calculate the dates of previous Easters. I believe the Anno Domini system really began to gain prominence when Bede used it to date occurrences in British history. And we'll be seeing Bede again in conjunction with Easter, so don't forget about him! {g}
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Date: 2009-03-25 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-25 09:20 pm (UTC)Yes, and the fact that there's no year zero, while it makes sense in a way, is mathematically confusing.
Why even try to change the system if the dates are still based on the medieval/Renaissance Christian calendar?
That's what I figure. We can't really pretend that our calendar is supposed to be secular, because it was clearly based on the birth of Jesus, however badly calculated the date was. If people are really interested in a new calendar, why not start with a date of more secular significance? (If they wanted to keep it around the same time, they could go with the beginning of the Roman Empire, I suppose.)