I don't know what this means, but I'm all goofy right now... here... chew on this that Robo and Cosmi sent in....
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
The Royal Greenwich Observatory in Cambridge, England, has decreed that the first day of the third millennium falls on January 1, 2001. This is the conventional view which has been backed by the Library of Congress and the National Bureau of Stands and Technology -- not to mention Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Dr. Stephen Hawking, among numerous others.
The modern calendar did not start with a "year zero."
The modern calendar was devised by a sixth-century monk named Dionysius Exiguss (Dennis the Short) who was commissioned by Pope St. John I to create a chronology of time. Dionysius estimated Christ's birth at 753 A.U.C. (from the founding of Rome), and then restarted time beginning with the year of Christ's birth as Year 1 A.D. When Dionysius created our current measure of history, the concept of a "zero" did not exist.
Since we started with year 1, the first year was completed at the end of year 1, the first century at the end of A.D. 100, the first millennium at A.D. 1000, and the second millennium at the end of A.D. 2000. On January 1, 2001, we will have completed exactly two thousand years and will enter the third millennium.
But wait -- it gets better...
Dionysius was wrong. Although no one is certain exactly when Jesus was born, the generally accepted time frame is somewhere between 7 to 4 B.C. Most scholars believe that it was 4 B.C., the year Herod the Great died.
Dionysius created our current chronology of time in 525 A.D., over 500 years from the birth of Jesus. He used the Gospels of Matthew and Luke as guides in calculating the birth of Christ. According to Matthew and Luke, Jesus was born the year that Herod the Great died, which scholars agree was in 4 B.C. The nearly contemporary historian Flavian Josephus reported the death of Herod to have definitely occurred shortly after the lunar eclipse of March 12 and 13, 4 B.C.
Two thousand years from December 31, 4 B.C. is December 31, 1997 (remember there was no year zero, hence the seeming addition error). By this reasoning the second millennium from the birth of Christ was concluded on December 31st, 1997.
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Robogeek & El Cosmico
