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History 151 > Introductory Essay Example

Introductory Essay Example

Dionysius Exiguus-and His Calendrical Gift to the World Dionysius Exiguus (his Latin name, usually translated as Dennis the Little) was the 6th century monk who devised the dating system dividing events of history before the birth of Jesus Christ and after. Today his A.D. (anno Domini, that is, in the Year of Our Lord) time frame still functions worldwide. But before the turn of the new 3rd millennium, Dionysius was a name barely recognized. ..........In 525 A.D., Pope John I asked Dionysius to determine the dates for Easter, the Christian Church's principal holy day since the time of Emperor Constantine's conversion in the 4th century. As abbot of a monastery in Rome, Dionysius had earned an illustrious reputation as a scholar of canon law and as a learned linguist of classical Greek and Latin. Thus, he set about his task with a holy resolve. ..........During the process of determining the exact dates for Easter for the years 527 to 626, he also established the precise date of Christ's birth. In his time, Christian scholars agreed that God had created the planet earth on March 25. Taking this given date, Dionysius reasoned that Jesus. the Son of God, was no less perfect than his father, the Creator, so Jesus must have been conceived on March 25, a liturgical event known as the Incarnation of the Virgin Mary. Thus, he postulated that nine months later Jesus was born on December 25-a date that had been acknowledged as the birth of Christ since the 4th century. ..........Next he had to determine the first year of Our Lord (that is, 1 A.D., or anno Domini). By calculating the date Rome was founded and counting forward, he declared 753 as the year of the birth of Jesus. Jumping ahead a few days, he established January 1, 754, as the first day in the first year of Our Lord, thus beginning the legacy of dating events before and after the birth of Jesus Christ in the West. ..........Dionysius, however, was a product of the age he lived in and bestowed on future centuries two major errors that befuddle celebrants who were preparing for 2000. They squabbled online and in the printed media about when the new millennium truly began-2000 or 2001. First, Dionysius paid no heed to the biblical account that Jesus was born during the reign of King of Herod. That would make Christ's birth in the year 4 B.C. or before according to the calendrical computations of Dionysius. His second mistake derived from his own unavoidable ignorance. The concept of zero did not arrive in Europe from Arab merchants who had been taught by Indians for another 200 years. By announcing that the "year one" began in 754, he was unaware that there must be a preceding "year zero." Correct mathematics dictates that centuries ending in a zero begin with the digit one. So logically the year 2000 was the end of one millennium, and the new millennium did not begin until 2001. ..........Be that as it may, the Christian Era spread quickly through the Roman Christian world of Western Europe. By the 9th century, Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman emperor, was the first to use it officially. And today it is the preferred dating system for all international transactions in spite of its defects even though current usage prefers B.C.E. (before the common era) and C.E. (common era) as a more generic form. The Western civilization, nevertheless, prevails and so does its preferred system of dating time-events before the birth of Christ and after, or as Dionysius decided "in the year of Our Lord." NOTE: Your paper should be double spaced - this web page is unable to display in double space. updated 1.26.2004