How to be born before your birthday

 

[Image credit: https://pixabay.com/photos/written-art-monastery-church-4934081/]

This essay won the inaugural WBGS Fuller Research Prize Competition in 2021

JOE MCHUGH

When was Jesus born?

At face value, this question seems like a simple one to answer.

The day? the 25 th .
The month? December.
The year? Well, if the year now is AD 2021, then surely Jesus was born 2021 years ago.
So, December 25 th , 2021 years ago, making that the year 0?

However, the Anno Domini system of dating years we use in our calendar, the
Gregorian calendar, does not include a year 0. Instead, it skips from 1BC to AD 1.

The contemporary consensus on Jesus’ birth year is c.4BC. How can someone be
born four years before their own birthday?

This date bases itself on the historical figure in the Bible, King Herod, the Roman
client King of Judea from 36-1BC. 1 In addition to ancient historians, astrological data
about the presumed Star of Bethlehem in Mathew 2:1-2 also concludes c.4BC. The
lunar occultation and heliacal rising of Jupiter, which would have caused the planet
to appear much brighter than usual, occurred in 4BC using known orbital patterns. 

The question remains, however, how and why did he end up being born before his
birthday?

Primarily, the blame is on Dionysius Exiguus. Dionysius was a monk born in Scythia
Minor (modern-day Romania and Bulgaria) in c.470 BC, famous for devising the
date of Jesus’ birth or Anno Domini.

The Christian system of dating years used when Dionysius was writing was the
Diocletian Anno Martyrium (Diocletian Era of Martyrs). Diocletian was the Roman
Emperor famous for carrying out the last persecution of the Christians in the Empire.
The year of his coronation, AD 284, was the start date for the Era of Martyrs, as it
paid respect to those Christians killed under Diocletian.

However, Dionysius believed that the Diocletian Anno Martyrium seemed to
commemorate the Emperor more than the persecuted Martyrs. He changed the
calendar to revolve around the birth of a person worth memorialising, Jesus Christ.
In doing so, the year 247 Anno Martyrium became Anno Domini 532, which resulted
in, as Tom Holland writes, “time itself becom[ing] Christianised”.

At the time of his writing, however, the more popular way of dating years was by
using the names of the Roman consuls who served in that particular year, i.e. “In the
consulate of Gaius Caelius and Lucius Pomponius” (AD 17). 4 Because of this,
Dionysius references the birth of Jesus in this way, rather than through Anno
Martyrium. In his calendar, he wrote, “the present year” was “the consulship of
Probus Junior”, “525 years since the incarnation of Christ.” 5 In essence, this
reference to Probus Junior is fundamentally the basis of today’s calendar because
this is how Jesus’ birth year is ‘known’. But how could Dionysius know that Jesus’
birth was 525 years before him?

Ultimately, he gives no justification of how he came to this date. Scholars are forced
to play a guessing game over how Dionysius concluded on 525 years. The Gospel of
Luke says that during the “15 th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar (AD 29) […] Jesus
was around thirty”. This leads most to agree that Dionysius subtracted 30 years from
the known date of Tiberius’ rule. Without the historical and astronomical data that
we have, his estimate of 525 years, most likely based on the Gospel of Luke, is
probably the best he could have achieved. When subtracting 30 years from AD 29, we
get 1BC, three years off the agreed birth year of Jesus.

Here, therefore, is how you end up being born before your birthday, by having a well-
intentioned monk make a minor mathematical error over your date of birth.

Even so, how did this flawed system, based on somebody born before their birthday,
become popularised to the point that we still use it today?

Anglo-Saxon historian; The Venerable Bead’s Ecclesiastical History of the English
People (published 731) is an early example. Bede accepted Dionysius’ dating of
Christ’s incarnation. Frequently, his references to early events of British history use
it, such as “In the year of our Lord, 46, Claudius, being the second of the Romans
who came to Britain [...] added the Orkney islands to the Roman empire”. 6 He marks
a transition away from the Roman tradition of using Consuls - like Cassius Dio does
while referencing Claudius’ invasion of Britain - to using Dionysius’ dating of Christ.

Anno Domini only spread further in the 9 th century as the dating system endorsed by
Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire (AD 800-888). The spread of the Empire across
Europe cemented the system’s use in medieval historiography. Charlemagne’s
authority over the papacy served to set Dionysius’ dating of Christ’s birth as the de
facto official one, increasing its use. Portugal in 1422 was the last western European
country to adopt it. By the 19 th century, European colonialism had spread Dionyisius’
system globally.

Over the last few years, there has been much debate surrounding continuing the use
of a flawed calendar.

Most know the change Before Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE), which
correspond to BC/AD, again based on Dionysius’ incorrect dating of Jesus’ birth.
This system still places Jesus’ birth as the singular event for human history to revolve
around. The use of ‘Common’ is also inherently vague. Surely, what constitutes as
‘Common’ in this system is the pivotal event of Jesus’ birth; implying that what
makes us human is a belief in Christ, in effect repeating Anno Domini’s faults in
representation.

A more recent idea is the Holocene Calendar, where the system of years begins in
10,000 BC, the begging of the so-called ‘human era’ when civilisation first began. Its
originator, Cesare Emiliani, says that it solves the problems of Anno Domini. In
particular, he chooses a ‘universal’ human event that is representative of all human
history. The Holocene Calendar adds 10,000 years to Anno Domini, so 2021 AD
becomes the year 12,021 Human Era. Although I find the Holocene Calendar is vague
and promotes a metanarrative that human history is solely about progression, it is
undoubtedly more representative than Anno Domini. It promotes the frankly
positive idea that history is for the human species, not Europeans or Christians.

But is a change to Dionysius’ system worth the hassle?

Ultimately, whilst Dionysius made “time itself […] become Christianised”,
perpetuating a falsity that Jesus was born before his birthday, changing the calendar
will probably result in even more confusion than the situation we are already in. The
criticisms of inclusivity in placing Jesus’ birth at the centre of history are valid.
Nevertheless, rather than modifying our dating of history, surely exploring all areas
of the past will create the comprehensive history of humanity wanted.

Bibliography
1 Josephus, The Jewish War, 1.21.1. Dates based on Herod’s reconstruction of the
Temple Mound in Jerusalem.
2 Michael R. Molnar, The Star of Bethlehem: The Legacy of the Magi, Rutgers
University Press, 1999
3 Tom Holland, Dominion (London: Abacus, 2016), xxiv.
4 Tacitus, Annals 2.41
5 “The Nineteen Year Cycle of Dionysius” Michael Deckers, accessed April 21, 2021.
Archived Feb 17, 2019.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160617013428/http://hbar.phys.msu.ru/gorm/chrono/pas
chata.htm
6 The Venerable Bede, The Eclasstical History of the English People, 24.1.3.
7 Cassius Dio, Roman History, 60.19-22.