 Seminar 1: "Between the Testaments"
Lesson 1
DATING TIME: B.C. AND A.D. Keeping historical dates straight is sometimes confusing to the novice who is not used to seeing dates in other than our own A.D. format. A.D. means "anno domini" or "Year of the Lord" in Latin (not "after dead" as some suppose.)
It wasn't until the year A.D. 532 that a monk, Dionysius
Exiguus,(nicknamed Dennis the Short) started the Christian method of dating
events. He made his starting point the year he believed that Jesus was born, or
more precisely stated, he calculated time from the conception of Christ, nine
months before his birth. That became A.D. 1 The next year is A.D. 2, then A.D.
3 and so on. (Note there is no zero B.C. or zero A.D.) Then to designate time
prior to Christ he used the term B.C.
B.C. refers to "Before Christ." It's time line is backward counting from one to infinity. B.C. moves the other direction from A.D. 1 to infinity. So from our perspective David's time was about B.C. 1000 and Abraham lived around B.C. 2000. The farther in the past the date goes the higher the B.C. number. The proper use of the terms B.C. and A.D. is that when referring to before Christ the date preceeds the initial B.C. (for instance 1000 B.C.). In A.D. the date follows the initials (i.e. A.D. 1000) You can remember that by using this little visual:
B.C.E. and C.E.
Irish Archbishop James Ussher, (1581-1656) a renown biblical scholar, attempted to establish exact date if creation by tracing time using the biblical genealogies which recorded the years of each life span. By this method he came to the conclusion that Adam would have been created on Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. -- precisely at noon. Happy birthday Adam! Cute, but no prize. Life and history are not so simple. When you weigh in the various factors that make for the variations in genealogical tables, lunar and solar calendar differences etc. you would get a completely different picture of the true sense of time since Adam. Another renowed theologian, Dr. John Lightfoot, in 1642 stated for the record, that he believed the world was created on Sunday, September 12, 3928 and that man was created on Friday, September 17, 3928, at nine a.m..
Anyone else what to take a stab at it?
See: Gregorian Calendar and Julian Calendar
THE JEWISH YEAR Rosh Hashanah The Jewish community of course do not track time by Christ but back to the creation of the world. This year 2001-2002 is 5762 on the Jewish Calendar. The Jewish New Year is called Rosh Hashanah. (September and October on the Gregorian calendar - our calendar.) Rosh Hashanah is the only Jewish celebration that lasts for two days, signifying the importance of this date in the calendar. Rosh Hashanah -- the Creation of Adam -- is set to be Day 1 of Year 1. In this system, Year 1 begins in September 3760 B.C. or BCE if you are not a Christian. http://jewishnewyear.com/
Calculating the Beginning
DATE OF CHRIST'S BIRTH This is a clever system of dating things back and forward in time. Unfortunately, finding the precise date of Jesus birth is not as easy as our monk friend imagined. Today we know the date of Christ's birth was not A.D. 1, but was more like 5 or 6 B.C. How do we know that? We will study that more thoroughly in Seminar 2 - The Birth of Christ Through discovering the date of the death of Herod the Great, (who took the lives of the infants in Bethlehem) we now know occured in 4 B.C. and tracking the emergence of the Star of Bethlehem through independent Chinese records (we will study that later too) we can arrive at a fairly accurate date for Christ's real birthday. We also know that Jesus was born at least two years before Herod died - that would make his birth year somewhere around 5-6 B.C. Therefore we conclude, Christ's birth would have been at least one or two years before Herod's death, that is, one or two years before Herod's death in 4 B.C., making Jesus' birth date either 4 or 5 B.C. Assuming the lastest possible date for Jesus' birth then Jesus was born in 4 B.C. (that is an oxymoron - Christ was born B.C. before Christ), if not earlier. The effect of this scientific evidence is that we are about 4-5 years off on the guess of the year of Christ's birth - meaning the year 2000 would actually be the year 1995. Knowing all this would have brought comfort to those who feared the world would come to an end in 2000 A.D. Still it was not a bad guess for a short monk who lived in the dark ages. (For more discussion of dates see "The Wise Men & The Star - Seminar 2 - Birth of Christ)
AGE OF THE EARTH? Scientists, so called, are saying that the age of the earth is somewhere around 4.5 billion years old, and that the age of the universe is 6.5 billion years. Monks and bishops aren't the only ones to error by guessing the age creation. In the 19th Century, English geologist Charles Lyell predicted the Earth to be about 100,000 years old. Now we are being taught that the furthest stars are 2 trillion light years away - praytell, how does one see light that originated 2 trillion light years ago in a universe that is only 4.5 billion years old? (I just thought you would get a "big bang" out of that!)
Discuss it now!
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Archbishop Ussher's Dates