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Archiver > Huguenot > 2000-01 > 0946886605


From: Hans A.M. Weebers< >
Subject: Re: [Huguenot] The millennium lie ...
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2000 09:03:25 +0100


Thanks Laura,

great article.

Happy new year to all.

Laura Johnson wrote:
>
> oops - here is the url for that article in the Cambria news
>
> http://www.cambrianews.com/
>
> Laura L. Johnson
> ICQ# 13006842
> Home of the Sicilian Ancestry Web Ring http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Ridge/1535
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Laura Johnson <>
> To: <>
> Date: Sunday, January 02, 2000 6:40 PM
> Subject: Re: [Huguenot] The millennium lie ...
>
> >Depends on who you want to believe - see the following article. Can't remember which newspaper it
> >was in but it was from a small newpaper in PA which is online. It was posted to another list I am
> >on.
> >
> >"Blame the madness on Dennis the Short"
> >
> >"There are 367 days until the new millennium starts on January 1, 2001 - NOT
> >in 2000.
> >
> >Dennis began his career working in Constantinople for Pope Gelasius,
> >translating works in the papal archives from Greek into Latin. Later, under
> >Pope John I, he was still translating - this time working on Easter tables
> >drawn up by Saint Theophilus. He decided to correct the dating system which
> >was then using Anno Diocletani - years since the Roman emperor Diocletian.
> >Diocletian was infamous for persecuting Christians. Dennis wanted to glorify
> >Christ, so he worked on a dating system based on the life of Jesus.
> >
> >The actual date of Jesus' birth had long been lost or forgotten by the time
> >he started his quest, so Dennis, in his efforts to simplify the convoluted
> >19-year and 84-year Easter cycles, turned to the only sources he could
> >find - Roman ones. He used them to try and backtrack. Good idea, but his
> >sources were not accurate. Nor was his grasp of mathematics.
> >
> >Dennis also decided the eighth day after Jesus' birth (the date of his
> >circumcision) should be the New Year - which is the start of year 2. (A.D.
> >2 - 'anno domini,' or 'year of our Lord' although modern, non-denominational
> >use is to say CE for Common Era). He chose this rather than the date of
> >Conception (March 25) or Incarnation (December 25) as his marker.
> >
> >The birthday Dennis dated from was December 25, the winter solstice in the
> >Julian calendar. This was the same date of a pagan festival called Sol
> >Invictus, celebrated in Rome as the birth of the sun god. Many scholars
> >believe the birth date was changed to Dec. 25 to encourage pagan converts
> >(and give them a festival on the same day so they wouldn't have to buy new
> >part hats...). Until A.D. 354, Jesus' birthday was actually celebrated on
> >Jan. 6, but it got moved to the earlier date after Dennis. Today, many
> >modern authorities argue for a spring or fall birth for Jesus, based on
> >historical, literary and astronomical studies, so if they're right, Dennis'
> >date for Christmas isn't even in the right season.
> >
> >Anyway, Dennis' year 1 should have been year 0, but he didn't know about
> >zeroes (several centuries later, the somewhat brighter Arab mathematicians
> >taught us about them(2). (According to some theorists, this allowed the west
> >to invent doughnuts - 'dough noughts' - nought being another word for zero).
> >Dennis, you see, was using Roman numerals, which have no concept for zero.
> >Roman numerals are notoriously difficult to use in calculations, so we can
> >excuse him a few errors (try multiplying MCMXVI by LXXXVIII and you'll see
> >what I mean...). But his errors were later perpetuated and compounded by
> >others.
> >
> >And Dennis didn't just lose a year in his calculations: he lost a year and a
> >day because year 0 (his Year 1) would have been a leap year!
> >
> >Dennis was also a little off on his reckoning - his date for Jesus' birthday
> >was four years too late (possibly even more, according to some recent
> >authorities). But his mistake was never rectified even when later church
> >authorities realized it. Dennis based his calculations on an erroneous
> >reading of the old Roman calendar, which marked time from the founding of
> >Rome (Anno Urbis Conditae, itself a date more mythological than correct).
> >His reading made A.D. 1 equal to 740 AUC, so he figured Jesus was born Dec.
> >25, 753 AUC. Dennis was doing his calculations in what was about 1280 AUC,
> >so a fair amount of time had passed since Rome was founded.
> >
> >Jesus, based on the New Testament chronicles of his life, was born in
> >Herod's reign. According to Flavius Joseph, a reasonably good source of
> >contemporary history, Herod died shortly after a spring eclipse of the moon.
> >There are three possible eclipses around that time (5 BC, 4 BC and 1 BC - or
> >BCE: 'Before the Common Era' to non-Christians and the Politically Correct),
> >but the consensus among Biblical historians is the March eclipse, 4 BC.
> >
> >Since Herod declared he would kill all the children under the age of two,
> >Jesus must have been under 2 years old in 4 BC - thus between four and six
> >years old on the date Dennis set for his first birthday.
> >
> >When Pope Gregory revised the Julian calendar in 1582, a certain number of
> >days were omitted from his new calendar, which resulted in two separate
> >styles of dating among Europeans for a long time. We lost 11 days from the
> >calendar in 1752 when the switch was made in English-speaking countries from
> >the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. So Dec. 31, 1999 is really Dec. 20 by
> >the old reckoning.
> >
> >Many objected to losing the days from October 5 to 14 inclusive simply
> >because the Pope decreed it. England (and her colonies) persisted in using
> >the "Old Style" until 1752, because of religious differences - so historical
> >dating through this period is very difficult at times. Thus March 8, 1735,
> >Old Style is really March 19, 1736 in the New Style. (Julian versus
> >Gregorian is better explained at the links listed below). Gregory also
> >declared that years ending in '00' which were evenly divisible by 400 were
> >leap years - the reason 2000 is a leap year.
> >
> >Oh, and don't forget to calculate the impact of the 90 days Julius Caesar
> >inserted into the Roman calendar in 45 BCE to make the Roman holidays align
> >with the seasons. Dennis overlooked these, too.
> >
> >
> >And finally - the first of the year also shifted around a lot. Benedictines,
> >for example, celebrated the year as beginning on December 25th. Before 1582,
> >most calendars did not have the year starting January 1, even though the
> >calculation of the moveable religious feasts acted as if it did. In England,
> >the year "began" either on December 25th, or, more frequently on March 25th
> >(Lady Day), until 1752 when the "New style" was adopted with January 1 as
> >the start, the date we've stuck with ever since.
> >
> >So if you're a stickler for accuracy, the third Christian millennium
> >actually began on January 1, 1997 (or if the spring hypothesis is correct,
> >sometime in March or April)... or more properly on Dec. 26, 1996 (or January
> >6, 1997 if we use the old date assigned - which means January 18 in the
> >orthodox calendar)... unless Jesus was born in 5 BCE, in which case this
> >year is really 2002... And if you calculate the days lost due to the changes
> >in calendars... you easily get lost trying to figure it out.
> >
> >Simply put, in religious terms, the third millennium has already started by
> >exact Christian reckoning, but our calendars don't reflect it properly.
> >
> >The US Naval Observatory, the Royal Greenwich Observatory (the world arbiter
> >for time), the Encyclopedia Britannica, the U.S. Library of Congress, the
> >National Institute of Standards and Technology, Arthur C. Clarke, and the
> >World Almanac all state the millennium starts on Jan. 1, 2001. And they know
> >better than most of us. I'd certainly trust their judgment in this matter
> >over those of someone trying to sell me millennial insurance or an
> >overpriced travel package to Christmas Island to see the sun rise on Jan. 1,
> >2000.
> >
> >But even if you have the day right, what time do you celebrate the change?
> >
> >We recognize midnight as the local turning point between days, but it wasn't
> >so long ago people used to mark sunset as the end of the day - and that was
> >used in calculations about calendars. It's more logical for diurnal
> >creatures, but rather slippery because the exact time changes with every
> >day. For most of us with intact biological clocks and normal circadian
> >rhythms, the day starts at or around sunrise.
> >
> >People are spending thousands of dollars to travel to the International Date
> >Line thinking they'll be the first to see in the new millennium. They're
> >doubly wrong: an international conference in Washington. DC, in 1884,
> >established that a new "universal" day officially begins at the Prime
> >(Greenwich) Meridian (zero longitude, not one!), not at the date line. So
> >look to England, not the Pacific Ocean for the change. This means the
> >millennium will officially start in Toronto at about 6:45 p.m., (midnight,
> >Greenwich time - we're at 79 degrees west longitude, so those extra four
> >degrees from the time zone marker mean about 15 minutes earlier). People
> >near the International Dateline celebrating the "first" sunrise will
> >actually be 12-16 hours late for the official entry of the New Year.
> >
> >Note, too, that location within a particular time zone is a matter of
> >decision for local governments. There is no international authority to say
> >in which time zone a country or municipality belongs. For political or
> >geographic reasons, some countries have moved the date lines and time zone
> >lines to suit their needs. The International Date Line meanders like a drunk
> >to accommodate local concerns.
> >
> >
> >Celebrating the millennium on New Year's Eve 1999 is not simply foolish,
> >it's just plain wrong. It doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate the dawn of
> >the 2,000th year, just that we should be correct and precise in how we label
> >the party - we can ring in the last year of the millennium.
> >
> >Anyone with even basic math skills should understand this (with the possible
> >exception of Canadian federal politicians (5), who are planning to spend
> >$150 million of our tax dollars on millennial celebrations for Dec. 31,
> >1999 - duh! With that sort of sloppy math, we'd better recheck their claim
> >to have eliminated the deficit!). To compound this particular stupidity, the
> >Royal Canadian Mint is going to release a new series of coins monthly in
> >1999 supposedly leading to the first year of the new millennium - but, of
> >course, they're out by a year. A representative of the Mint acknowledged it
> >to me, but he said they're just going with the flow. This is the sort of
> >muddled accounting we expect from bureaucrats in Ottawa who are often
> >appointed to the jobs because of political connections rather than their
> >intelligence, skills, wisdom or common sense. As a result, we have a
> >national celebration in the wrong year. Next thing they'll declare Christmas
> >is on Nov. 25.
> >
> >People, however, are still making plans for big parties on Dec. 31, 1999,
> >just like some folks did for the year 999. And like 1,000 years ago, the
> >same results will probably occur: nothing special (aside from some monster
> >hangovers). It only goes to prove that our numeracy skills have hardly
> >improved since the Dark Ages and that all our efforts in science and
> >learning have gone for nought in the face of the imagined 'magical'
> >significance of a number.
> >
> >We can't seem to stop the bandwagon and inject some common sense into the
> >proceedings, despite all the efforts of science, logic, technology and
> >common sense to correct a simple error in understanding how to count to
> >1,000. Even the normally cogent CBC Radio has fallen prey to this marketing
> >hype and is now saying the year 2000 is the "dawn of a new millennium" in
> >news broadcasts. It's proof that budget cuts at the CBC have seriously
> >affected the brainpower of the remaining few - and seriously hurt Canada's
> >credibility worldwide.
> >
> >You can put a robot on Mars (well, NASA can, sometimes), you can cure
> >disease through modern medicine, you can look into the centre of an atom,
> >but the common people still cross their fingers, toss salt over their
> >shoulders, read the newspaper horoscope and assume the millennium starts in
> >2000."
> >
> >Laura L. Johnson
> >ICQ# 13006842
> >Home of the Sicilian Ancestry Web Ring http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Ridge/1535
> >
> >
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: ibf <>
> >To: <>
> >Date: Sunday, January 02, 2000 4:15 PM
> >Subject: [Huguenot] The millennium lie ...
> >
> >
> >>Sorry to state this. But doing genealogy most seriously, we all have to be
> >>very correct with facts, also with these facts ...
> >>
> >>To all who still believe in this stupid millenium crap:
> >>
> >>Sorry, but now was *neither* starting a new decade, *nor* a new century
> >>*nor* a new millennium *this* year!
> >>
> >>*** This second millennium will end on Dec. 31st, 2000 ***
> >>
> >>The proof is mathematically and that easy that my children (11 and 13)
> >>understood at once:
> >>
> >>Considering the fact, our Christian calendar started with year 1 (there was
> >>no year 0 for the numeral 0 appeared first in Indian writings in 870 and
> >>came to Europe later on), the year 1 ended on Dec. 31st, 1 (simply, isn't
> >>it?). So the first century ended 100 years later on Dec. 31st, 100, right?
> >>Thus the first millennium ended at the *end* of year 1000, correct?
> >>
> >>And now the solution for all the cheated and doubting in the world (this is
> >>*not* an American problem, in this case!): Our second millennium in fact
> >>will end on Dec. 31st, 2000. And not now and two days before, respectively.
> >>
> >>Millions of people worldwide still are under this illusion, 'cause they fell
> >>for this clever trick of all the commercial and sale strategists all over
> >>the world who pushed this belief in order to sell their millennium's stuff
> >>twice: "Oh, really? There was no millenium's change in fact? OK, then let's
> >>start our sales campaign again and let's sell another millions of now true
> >>millennium events, travels, parties, souvenirs ..." (and whatever nobody
> >>will need but many will purchase ...).
> >>
> >>The only importance of the turn from 1999 to 2000 (Y2k) was the supposed Y2k
> >>bug problem - not less and not more, either.
> >>
> >>
> >>For my family and me, the last days have been a quiet, nice time and totally
> >>normal New Year's Eve, pretty unaffected by any cheats. And the next one
> >>will be as quiet and easy-going ...
> >>
> >>Anyway, thanks a lot to all your as well personal as public greetings and
> >>best wishes; I wish you the same - no matter if there's a millennium or not.
> >>Have a fine year 2000 and best success in genealogy!
> >>
> >>Juergen
> >>
> >>*******************************
> >> Jürgen Fritsche (Germany)
> >>-------------------------------
> >> -
> >> -
> >>*******************************
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> >

--
Hans A.M. Weebers
http://home.t-online.de/home/weebers/start.ht

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