Clivedurdle

Remember the tale of Douglas Adams about the puddle?

Well, Melvyn Bragg has produced the best of In Our Time as a book, and one of the discussions is about the Calendar, and they discuss the invention of AD.

Measuring time has always been complex with solar, lunar and sidereal calendars, and one of the important cycles is a nineteen year one. This gives a quite good resolution of different calendars but not quite accurate. Victorius of Aquitaine found that a nineteen times 28 cycle is even more accurate.

That makes 532.

Then comes along Denis the Small. He does some arithmetic and finds Christ was born 532 years ago.

In other words the moon and the stars and the sun are in exactly the same position in the year he does the calculations as the year Christ was born.

And we are now in 2010 AD, with a slight alteration in the 1700's.

The date of the birth of Christ is an arithmetical sleight of hand?

Vampyroteuthis

Yeah MM!

Toto

This may be true, but that does not make mountainman correct. I think that most people see the actual birth date of Jesus as somewhat undetermined.

Mountainmain goes well beyond this and claims that Jesus was invented in the fourth century. I don't see anything in the OP that would support this.

Clivedurdle

I left a bit out - that until then all xians dated themselves to Diocletian. For Denis the Small he was in 287 after the succession of Diocletian.

Toto

Please explain how that affects anything.

Dennis the Short a/k/a Dionysius Exiguus was a 6th century monk.

Clivedurdle

Wiki is incorrect

It is known how it was calculated - he was looking for a perfect time and he got it - nineteen times twenty eight. Robert Poole, Reader in History, St Martin's College, Lancaster, author of Time's Alteration, Calendar Reformation in Early Modern England.

http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

Toto

Yes, but he didn't rewrite the gospels to fit that magic number. Pete still loses.

mountainman

And the "puddle" was Denis the Small.
He happened to be in the right spot at the right time.
He was ensconsed in a "Christian Regime" with a "history"
These things do happen.
The numbers added up.

Unfortunately I dont think this deals with Eusebius's "history" and the assertions about events in "the rule of Augustus".
The Christians (who ruled the masses) in the epoch of Denis the Small just chose that epoch to recalibrate years.
It was a time of great celebration for those in charge. They were despots and gangsters.

As much as I appreciate the thought, the real events of "Christian Origins" had already been battled out in the 4th century. The succession of the imperially appointed "Bishops" had been augmented with "Natural Selection" (ie: military might and numbers of troops - see Damasius) and the church was obviously still being controlled by gangsters.

There is a very visible relic of this battle left in our 21st century world. Constantine and the Zero Ayanamsa estimates - the divergence of the Tropical and Sidereal Zodiacs

youngalexander

Geez Clive,
As a skeptic I would say that 'anyone' may be Korrect!

But MM certainly aint.

Clivedurdle

The headline got attention!

What I am arguing is how the timeline may actually have been invented by Denis, and these pre existing stories - that do read like Greek Jewish versions of the fictional life of Socrates - about Jesus were placed in time by Denis.

It doesn't take much to play with a few ideas in the story in the first place.

I think we are looking at probably a series of messiah cults some of which got bashed by Diocletian and then Constantine used it as a one god idea - copying the Persians.

Denis probably fixed Jesus as a historical character. The Logos was not a problem before that. What caused the hassle was the arguments about fixing Easter.

And what better solution than god becoming man at the appointed time?