I hope questions are allowed here. I am curios if there is a different sort of scientific calendar which does not use the birth of Jesus as a reference like AD and BC. For example Kurzgesagt’s calendars use the the current year plus 10000 as this represents the human better or something like that.
Would there be a way to do this more accurately? How could we, in a scientific correct way, define a reference from where we are counting years?
Also I have read about the idea of having 13 months instead of 12 would be “nice” because then we could have a even distributed amount of days per month.
Are there already ideas for this? What would you recommend to read?
Unix time. Zero is midnight UTC on 1 January 1970.
often use it as my birthday to crash poorly written scripts. zeros are fun to inject
Historians don’t use “BC” and “AD”. Haven’t for a while now.
While the arbitrary date remains the same (year zero), it’s C.E. (common era) or B.C.E. (Before common era)
FYI
Came here to say this. It’s an easy reference for most, so it makes sense why they kept it.
The start of the calendar has to be arbitrary, there’s no way around that as it’s not feasible to measure the time since the beginning of the universe with good enough accuracy.
As others commented, the Julian Day is a time measure that is actually used in astronomy, and Unix time is a time stamp standard (not really a calendar, although it could be if we got used to it) that is mostly a way to store time points, not really to consume them before converting to a more readable form.
But as a scientist who is wholly irreligious, I’m not overly bothered by using the Gregorian calendar, even though it has Christian (and a lot of pre-Christian) elements. Its annoyances (different numbers of days in each month, weeks not aligning with years, leap years etc.) are due to the fact that we decided to measure time in these arbitrary units. At least it’s universal in the modern era (often in conjunction with another calendar), and everywhere you go people understand what “August 5, 2024” means (although August might have to be translated to the target language, since the names of the months are not universal).
That’s more than you can say about non-time units of measurement (I’m looking at you, imperial and US customary units!!)
The second best thing about US customary units is that they are now defined by metric units.
The most best thing will be when they finally go away.
although August might have to be translated to the target language
Funnily enough, Augustus being a person’s name¹, anybody that uses those same months will understand without translation.
1 - Well, ok, a personal title. Even more funnily, a claim of being god… that’s completely independent from the one the OP is concerned about.
Interestingly, that is not the case. Month names can differ in different languages. I discovered the hard way that Ukrainian has completely different names for months when I had to connect to a Linux machine in Kyiv with Ukrainian locale (I can read Cyrillic, but the abbreviated month names meant nothing to me). The name for August is “serpen” by the way, and it is similar in some other Slavic languages. Also Arabic has its own month names based on Akkadian, August is “ab” but an Arabized version of the word August is also commonly used and understood. Finally, in Mandarin and presumably other Chinese languages, Gregorian months are only referred to by their number, so we are in “bayue” (lit. eight(th) month).
Birth of Jesus isn’t even accurate. Best guess is that, if it happened at all, which is up for debate, it was around 4 BC.
I’m always intrigued by this sort of hypothesis, can you recommend a good link to an alternative explanation for the early church?
Like I get that early Christians worked in a lot (LOT) of existing mythology to make Christianity palatable/ relatable to various local groups. But where could the early Christians have come from if not a Jesus like figure?
Well, I’m talking about two different things here, the first being the hypothetical date for Jesus’s birth.
A close reading of the events points to 4 BC as being the year, and the time of year being sometime in Spring “when shepherds watch over their flocks by night.”
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1978QJRAS..19..194S
As for if Jesus was real at all… well, there’s absolutely no contemporaneous evidence from his lifetime that he was ever real, no written record, no first hand account, nothing.
The first mention of Jesus was by Flavius Josephus around 93-94 AD, some 60 years after the Crucifixion, but even that may be a 3rd century insert by a Christian transcriber known as Eusebius of Caesarea.
The problem with the Josephus text is two fold: 1) We don’t have the original, just copies of copies of copies. 2) None of the works quoting Josephus prior to Eusebius make any mention of the Jesus quote which makes it highly suspicious.
The bulk of the New Testament isn’t a result of Jesus at all, it’s all because of Paul, formerly known as Saul of Tarsus.
Saul had his own thing going on, which wasn’t entirely popular, then he claimed to have this amazing conversion experience on the road to Damascus, changed his name to Paul, and started talking about this Jesus fellow.
We know Paul existed, we have his letters, other writings, and peers talking about him. How odd none of that exists for Jesus…
A couple of really good books to read about Saul/Paul and the early days:
https://whosoever.org/freeing-jesus-a-review-of-liberating-the-gospels-by-john-shelby-spong/
https://whosoever.org/rescuing-the-bible-from-fundamentalism/
Yeah I get that there isn’t much direct evidence of Jesus. But when you say “Saul had his own thing going on, which wasn’t entirely popular” aren’t you referring to his persecution of Christians?
I thought my question was pretty simple: if Jesus didn’t exist, where did the early Christians (that Saul was persecuting) come from?
We have letters from Paul, because he sent them to other Christian communities. Where did those communities come from?
The YouTube Channel Kurzgesagt has proposed a calendar based on the 'Human Era’ (HE) instead of before/after christ format.
It’s based on the first monument of large-scale human cooperation (building a temple in modern-day turkey) and is quite elegant in my opinion. It ‘simply’ adds 10.000 years to the calendar we’re all already used to. :)
Kiugessgt was good before they started listing all the ways humanity is doomed. I just can’t watch it anymore.
UNIX time uses a Julian calendar date as a reference, but is independent after that.
As for the 13 month calendar, it’s about as nice as cloverleaf interchanges: appealing because it’s symmetrical, terrible in practice. Having the days of the month always align to the same weekday means leap years would make things even worse because every 4 years the entire calendar shifts. And if you skip the leap day as a holiday then you just make calculating dates from an epoch like UNIX time even more convoluted.
Gregorian calendar, surely
Holocene Calendar is the one used by those Kurzgesagt calendars.
Maybe a calendar that starts with the creation of the Earth (approx 4 billion years ago) as it’s starting point?
Like that joke about the T-Rex that’s 65 million and 10 years old.
See the Julian day.
Very interesting. Thank you!
now could always be zero with future positive and past negative. serious refactoring
That is one interesting approach. I like it.
I don’t know of any books I can recommend, but I’d definitely be down for 13 months with one being short. We could do 12 months of 30 days each plus a 13th month of 5 (or on leap years 6) days.
As far as anything that exists today, there is the Unix Timestamp which is defined as the number of seconds since (the entirely arbitrary time of) midnight January 1st 1970 UTC. Of course, “1970” only makes sense in the context of the Gregorian calendar which still has to do with the birth of Jesus. So, it’s not exactly what you’re looking for. But maybe it’s at least more removed from “the birth of Jesus” than the Gregorian calendar we all generally use.
I guess if you’re interested in this stuff, you might be interested in learning about ISO-8601, a standard way of representing dates/times in text. And also the concept of “leap seconds” and things like Leap Smearing.
There’s also a great short story about someone trying to explain to an alien with no familarity with earth how our calendar works, but I’m having trouble finding it now. I’ll edit this post with a link if I can find it.
Chinese calendar?
13 months would be great for salaried employees too (so long as the pay per month isn’t reduced, which, well, of course it will be, but a man can dream)
CE and BCE. Same thing different name. shrug
ask ntp. they breath this stuff. https://www.ntp.org/
