What is the Western Calender based on?

Question

I thought it was based on Jesus Christ's birth but someone told me that wasn't true. Please let me know if you have any information on this. Thank you.

Answer 1

It is based on a bad estimate of Jesus' birth. A monk named Dionysius Exiguus was asked by Pope Gregory to rejig the old Roman calendar in a way more compatible with Christianity.

So he looked back into history for some of the key events that happened while Jesus was very young, such as the death of Herod and astronomical phenomena, to try and get the appropriate year.

He also tried to keep the new dating system as compatible as possible with the then current date schema, and rather than declare December 25 as the start of the year, chose the circumcision of Jesus (which was supposed to have been 8 days later) as the start of Year 1.

The errors:

- They had not yet figured out zero based math, so there was no year zero, as a proper system would have required.

- They got Herod's death wrong

Answer 2

It was, but the guy who created it got the dates wrong. He set it so that Jesus would have been born on December 25, 1 BC (there is no year zero, so 1 BC was followed by 1 AD). It didn't get created until the 4th Century (prior to that, they used the old Roman calendar, based on the founding of the city of Rome).

Most scholars believe Jesus was born between 4 and 6 BC, probably in the Autumn, though that's another story.

Answer 3

The calendar that is in widespread use currently in the USA is the Gregorian calendar, which came from the Roman Empire influence. It was founded first on a solar basis, as compared to the lunar calendar the Jews and Muslims use. Also it originally had 10 months not 12.
An attempt was made to go A.D. and B.C. but that appears to be off a little bit, (roughly about 4 years).
Further, two of the Caesars had months named after them.