Move over Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the Pope is the latest Mythbuster in town… when it comes to Christian traditions that is.
You may have heard the news yesterday of how the nativity scene we all know and love doesn’t accurately depict the birth of Jesus Christ? Well, that’s according to Pope Benedict XVI and his new book.
As if ruining the nativity scene wasn’t bad enough for the pontiff, his new book also claims that the current calendar we use today is slightly off… by roughly seven years.
“The calculation of the beginning of our calendar – based on the birth of Jesus – was made by Dionysius Exiguus, who made a mistake in his calculations by several years,” the Pope writes in his new book, ‘Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives’.
“The actual date of Jesus’s birth was several years before.”
Basically, if we were to accurately gauge today’s date off of the birth of Jesus then it would currently be 2019. In fairness, that wouldn’t be too bad seeing as it means we all survived December 21, 2012. In your face Mayans.
The blunder was made back in the 6th century when Dionysius decided to draw up a new calendar based off of the birth of Christ instead of using the old system, which had been invented by an emperor everyone hated.
However, Dionysius knew about as much as Jesus as the rest of us and he used vague references from the Bible to guess the birthday of the Lord. So that’s why we’re a bit behind…
