THE YEAR

"Everyone knows" Jesus must have born on December 25, A.D. 1, but it is not quite that simple, and certainly this date is wrong. Herod the Great (who killed all the babies in Bethlehem younger than 2 years of age) died in the spring of 4 B.C., and the king was very much alive during the visit of the Wise Men (Magi) in the Christmas story. Therefore Jesus would have been born before this time, anywhere from 7-4 B.C. (Before Christ, or before himself).

Why then is our calendar about 5 years off? It was a sixth-century Roman monk-mathematician-astronomer named Dionysis Exeguus (Dionysis the Little) who unknowingly committed what has become history's greatest numerical error in terms of cumulative effect. In reforming the calendar to pivot around the birth of Christ, he dated the Nativity in the year 753 from the founding of Rome (753 a.u.c.), when in fact Herod died only 749 years after Rome's founding. The result of Dionysis' chronology, which remains current, was to give the correct traditional date for the founding of Rome, but one that is at least 4 to 7 years off for the birth of Christ.

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian