A discussion of one of the previous articles (“Technology for growing mankurts”) showed that not all knowledge that should be generally used is so. The extension of the known and familiar to the general case is as “intuitive” as it is erroneous. Later I saw an example of the same thing with my own eyes. Well, in the comments on AS you can find excellent examples of statements. When someone who declares himself to be an expert on ancient history talks about how in Rus' the years were counted “from the flood.”
Therefore, I believe it is necessary to describe the story. With a claim to correctness ☺
There are four natural points in the annual cycle: the winter solstice (the shortest day), the spring equinox, the summer solstice (the longest day) and the autumn equinox. From the point of view of observations, the simplest (and most accessible) are the extreme points (solstices). “Chronolozhtsy” celebrate the sacred meaning of the calendar and the calendar reference to the date of the vernal equinox (~March 22).
So, currently in Rus' the Gregorian calendar is used ( in which the length of the year is taken to be 365.2425 days. The duration of a non-leap year is 365 days, a leap year is 366). But, since the Russian Orthodox Church continues to use the Julian calendar ( in which the tropical year is approximated by a period of 365.25 days, which gives an error of approximately one day for every 128 years. This accuracy is achieved by introducing a leap year (366 days) every three ordinary years (365 days)), people also remember about the so-called. "old style".
According to modern European tradition, the beginning of the year is considered to be January 1. The semantic reference to the date is a separate issue. I have not found a satisfactory answer.
Currently, the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars is 13 days.
Years are counted from the so-called. “New Era”, which coincides with the “Birth of Christ”.
To this day, the practice of skipping one or two first symbols of the year is quite common. It is clear to a contemporary, but after two or three centuries, restoring the complete key requires some work. It is also useful to remember that the approval of the decimal number system began no earlier than the 17th century, and certain signs of the tradition of using the “Roman” number system (from the names the question automatically follows: was Rome the first civilization to use mathematics?) are still alive, although starting Since the end of the 19th century, they have gradually given way to their place in the sun.
This is the starting point.
The last calendar reform was the transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in 1918.
Here it is necessary to remember that the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars is not a constant value, but increases over time. the period during which the difference increases by one day is 128 years.
On the same resource you can see information about the date of introduction of the Julian calendar - January 1, 45 BC. Where, taking as true the statement about the accuracy of the calendar in 1 day of error for 128 years, the difference with the Gregorian calendar at the time of entry of 10 days and the date of entry of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 by simple arithmetic operations ((1582 - (-45))/10) 162.7 is equal to 128. This is not “New Chronology”®©™, this is “New Arithmetic”! An outstanding discovery. Having turned off the trolling mode, it is necessary to state the possibility of explaining the observed result by the fact that the developers of the fairly accurate Julian calendar failed to achieve the corresponding accuracy of the calendar reference to the time scale. I propose to evaluate the credibility of the version yourself. This is where I turn off the topic.
Clarification based on the results of the discussion:
The objective (astronomical) linking of the Julian calendar is suddenly made not by the date the calendar was entered, but by the date of the first Council of Nicaea (325). But, since this clarification is absent in the encyclopedic references, the satire about the “new arithmetic” remains valid.
It was preceded by the calendar reform of 7208. In which the first European reformer of Rus' suddenly switched from the traditional chronology for the Slavs “from the Creation of the World” (I saw the expanded version “The Creation of the World in the Star Temple” only on AS and Comte, not earlier than last year, I note it as possibly important, but I do not analyze it) to already (!) The chronology adopted in Europe is “from the Nativity of Christ.” With the transfer of the new year from the Greek tradition (September 1) to the newest (?) European one (January 1). As a result of the reform, January 1, 7208 suddenly turned out to be the first day of the new year 1700, and the year 7208 itself lasted four months (from September to December).
The text of the decree (precisely the text, and brought to modern spelling, I think about the advisability of including graphics):
1736. - December 20. Personalized. - About the celebration of the New Year.
The Great Sovereign indicated to say: He knows the Great Sovereign not only in many European Christian countries, but also in the Slavic peoples who agree with our Eastern Orthodox Church in everything, such as: Volokhi, Moldavians, Serbs, Dalmatians, Bulgarians and His Great Sovereign’s very subjects Cherkasy and all the Greeks, from whom our Orthodox faith was adopted, all those peoples, according to their years, count from the Nativity of Christ eight days later, that is, January from the 1st day, and not from the creation of the world, for many differences and counting in those years, and now from the Nativity of Christ the year 1699 has reached, and from the 1st day of the next Genvar, a new year of 1700 and a new hundred-year century will begin: and for this good and useful deed, the Great Sovereign ordered henceforth the summers to be counted in the Orders and in all matters and fortresses to be written from the current Genvar with 1st of the Nativity of Christ 1700. And as a sign of that good beginning and the new centenary century in the reigning city of Moscow, after due thanksgiving to God and prayer singing in the church and whoever happens in his home, along the large and well-traveled noble streets to noble people and at houses of deliberate spiritual and worldly rank in front of the gate it is possible to make some decorations from trees and branches of pine, spruce and juniper against the samples that were made in the Gostiny Dvor and at the lower pharmacy, or to whomever is more convenient and decent, depending on the place and the gate; And for poor people, each one should at least put a tree, a branch on his gate, or over his temple; and then it would have ripened, now the future Genvar, by the 1st day of this year, and that decoration of Genvar would stand until the 7th day of the same 1700.
Respectively any stories about the events of the 1620s and earlier are simply by definition, best case scenario are later reconstructions. Or translations/adaptations.
Let me remind you that, despite the encyclopedic definitions (see the New Year in the Julian calendar), the Julian calendar was also in effect in Rus' at that time.
Here I will note that during the time of counting years from the Creation of the World, Byzantine counting in small cycles (indict, 15 years) was also used, but I have not seen any traces of it, and therefore I think it is permissible not to go deeper into the consideration.
The previous (and first reliably traceable) calendar reform - the reform of Ivan the Terrible (also Ivan the Great) was also associated with the magic of numbers and the transfer of the starting point (new year).
In the year 7000, Rus' switched from the Slavic tradition (counting the New Year in the spring, from the first of March) to the Greek one (from the first of September). Accordingly, the year 6999 lasted from March 1 to September 1 - six months.
If we accept the dating of the chronicles that have survived to the present day, the beginning of the modern tradition of chronicle writing (when the chronicler described contemporary events, and did not reconstruct in an unknown way the events of past years) in Rus' should be dated no earlier than ~6600.
But even in case of doubts about the authenticity of the primary sources, I think it would be incorrect to date the beginning of the Russian chronicle tradition later than the 6800s.
For the initial approach to revealing the topic of chronology in Rus', this is all.
The first attempts to establish the length of the year in accordance with the periodicity of celestial phenomena and to divide the year into certain periods (seasons, months) date back to ancient times. Our current calendar traces its origins to the ancient Roman calendar. The word “calendar” itself is of Roman origin. The Romans called the beginning of the month kalends, probably because at the beginning of each month the high priest convened the townspeople (in Latin to convene - “callere”) to declare the holidays of the coming month and thereby indicate the deadlines for paying debts and taxes.
In the initial period of Roman history, the year was divided into 10 months: March, April, May, June, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December. The year began in March. An echo of this calculation has been preserved to this day in the names of a number of months, for example, September - from the Latin word septem (“seven”), October-octo (“eight”), etc. By 300 BC, two more months were added - January and February. The Romans had 31 or 29 days, with the exception of February, which had 28 days. The odd number of days in months is explained by the superstition of the Romans, who disliked even numbers so much that they celebrated even multi-day holidays with “breaks” - only on odd days.
The Roman year consisted of 355 days and was close to the so-called “lunar year” (12 lunar months, the lunar month - the period of revolution of the Moon - is approximately 29.5 days). This year did not correspond to the solar one, as a result the spring equinox had to fall on different dates. To ensure that the vernal equinox (with which the Romans began the year) roughly coincided with March 25, the additional month Mercedonius was introduced, which contained 22 or 23 days and was inserted every other year, between February 24 and 25. Once every three years, after February 25, an additional day was introduced, and since the Romans called February 25 “the sixth day before the Kalends of March,” the introduced day was called the “second sixth” (bissextis). Based on the name of this day, the whole year was called “bisextilis” (hence our “leap year”). Thanks to this, over the course of a 4-year cycle, the average length of a year was 365.25 days. According to the concepts of that time, this was quite accurate, but by the time Julius Caesar became the Roman dictator, the actual vernal equinox was 90 days behind the calendar one.
During his stay in Egypt, Caesar became acquainted with the more advanced solar calendar in operation there and with the mathematicians of the Alexandrian school, one of whom, Sosigenes of Alexandria, he brought to Rome with the goal of bringing order to the Roman calendar. Sosigenes coped well with the task assigned to him, and the “Julian” calendar he created, with minor changes (or rather, distortions), lasted about two thousand years.
Already a hundred years before Caesar, the new year began to be counted from the beginning of January. The Caesar-Sosigenes reform legitimized the January calends as the beginning of the year and determined its duration at 365 days, with one extra (366th) day added to every fourth year. All odd-numbered months had 31 days, and even-numbered months had 30 days; February had 29 or 30 days. On January 1, 45 BC (or 709 “from the founding of the city of Rome,” as the Romans believed), the new calendar came into force. In gratitude to Caesar for streamlining the calendar, the flattering Senate decided to rename the month following June and previously called quintilius ("fifth") to July - after the dictator's name. Later, Emperor Augustus forced the Senate to rename the month sextilis (“sixth”) to August and add to it “for good luck” the thirty-first day subtracted from February. Since after this it turned out that three months in a row (July, August and September) each had 31 days, one day was taken away from September and added to October, and one day of November was transferred to December, completely destroying the alternation of long and short months created Sosigen.
Although the Caesar-Sosigenes reform was a great step forward, the calendar he introduced was not exactly consistent with the solar year. The fact is that the length of the year of 365.25 days accepted by Sosigenes did not quite correspond to reality. The period of time between two adjacent vernal equinoxes, called the tropical year, is actually (to the nearest second) 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. Consequently, the calendar year is 11 minutes 14 seconds longer than the average solar year. This insignificant difference in our everyday life accumulates annually and gives a whole day in 128 years, so that already in the fourth century AD the discrepancy between the calendar and the Sun became noticeable: the equinox moved by four days and instead of March 25, as established by Caesar, it fell on 21 -th number.
Subsequently, the discrepancy between the current calendar and the solar one increased more and more. During the Renaissance, the imperfections of the Julian calendar were obvious, and a number of proposals were put forward to change it. However, the church for a long time resisted correcting the calendar. It was not until 1581 that the Vatican astronomer Ignatius Danti persuaded Pope Gregory XIII to implement a reform previously developed by the Neapolitan astronomer Luigi Lilio Giraldi. It was decided to declare October 5, 1582 the 15th and henceforth not to consider leap years of round centuries, hundreds of which are not divisible by four. Thus, in the new calendar, called the “Gregorian”, out of every 400 years 97 are leap years, while in the Julian there are 100 of them, so in 400 years the Julian calendar lags behind the Gregorian by three days. The new calendar, which did not change either the number of months in the year or the number of days in them, was introduced very soon into use in almost all of Western Europe. In England and the USA it came into use in the 18th century.
In Russia, Orthodox clergy preserved the old Julian calendar and rejected all proposals for its reform. As a result, at the beginning of the century we still had the “old style”, which lagged behind the “new style” by as much as 13 days. Only after the October Revolution, the Gregorian calendar, accepted throughout the world, was introduced in Russia (from February 2, 1918).
The Gregorian calendar assumes an average year length of 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, 12 seconds—26 seconds longer than the actual mean solar year. This difference, accumulating, will give one day in 3,323 years, and during this time, presumably, they will find a way to eliminate the error. Thus, the Gregorian calendar coincides quite satisfactorily with the solar one. But it has disadvantages of a different kind: the length of the months is different, months of different lengths alternate randomly, the days of the week do not coincide with certain dates.
Calculation: what is it? Chronology is a system of counting time (in days, weeks, months, years), starting from a specific event. The chronology could differ among different peoples and religions. This can be explained by the fact that various events were taken as the starting point. However, today one chronology system has been officially established throughout the world, which is used in all countries and on all continents.
The chronology in Rus' was carried out according to the calendar adopted by Byzantium. As you know, after the adoption of Christianity in the tenth century AD, the year of the creation of the world was chosen as the starting point. To be more precise, this day is the day when the first man, Adam, was created. This happened on the first of March 5508 AD. And in Rus', the beginning of spring was long considered the beginning of the year.
Reform of Peter the Great
The old chronology “from the creation of the world” was changed by Emperor Peter the Great to the chronology from the Nativity of Christ. this was done from the first of January 1700 (or in 7208 "from the creation of the world"). Why did they change the calendar? It is believed that Peter the Great did this for convenience, to synchronize time with Europe. European countries have long lived according to the system “from the Nativity of Christ.” And since the emperor did a lot of business with Europeans, this step was quite appropriate. After all, the difference in years in Europe and in the Russian Empire at that time was 5508 years!
The Old Russian chronology, thus, differed from the modern one in the reference point of time. And the chronology before the Nativity of Christ was called the chronology “from the creation of the world.”
How it all began
When did chronology begin? There is evidence that in 325 AD the first council of Christian bishops took place. It was they who decided that chronology should be carried out from the creation of the world. The reason for this countdown was the need to know when to celebrate Easter. The date of creation of the world was proposed based on considerations and reasoning about the life of Jesus Christ.
After the Council of Bishops, the Roman Empire adopted this chronology. And after a couple of hundred years, it was proposed to switch to chronology from the Nativity of Christ. This idea was expressed by Dionysius the Small, a Roman monk, in 532. It is not known exactly when Jesus was born, but it happened around the second or fourth year of our era. It was from this year that the countdown of time began, which is now called from the Nativity of Christ. This point separates the new era (ours) from the past (designations AD and BC, respectively).
But the world took a long time to switch to a new version of time counting. This took about half a millennium, and for Russia - more than a thousand years. The transition was gradual, so often the year “from the creation of the world” was also indicated in brackets.
Aryan chronology and Slavic chronology
The chronology of the Aryans was carried out from the creation of the world, that is, different from what existed in the world. But the Aryans did not believe that the world was created precisely in 5508 BC. In their opinion, the starting point was the year when peace was concluded between the Slavic-Aryans and the Arima (ancient Chinese tribes). Another name for this chronology is the Creation of the World in the Star Temple. 
After the victory over the Chinese, a symbol appeared - a rider on a white horse killing a dragon. The latter in this case symbolized China, which was defeated.
The Old Slavic chronology was carried out according to the Daariysky Krugolet of Chislobog. You can read more about this calendar in the corresponding article. After the reform of Peter the Great, they began to say that “he stole 5508 years from the Slavs.” In general, the emperor’s innovation did not find positive feedback from the Slavs; they opposed it for a long time. But the chronology of the ancient Slavs and their calendar were prohibited. Today, only Old Believers and Ynglings use them.
The chronology according to the Slavic calendar had its own interesting features:
- The Slavs had only three seasons: spring, autumn, winter. By the way, the ancient Slavs called the whole year “summer”.
- It was nine months.
- There were forty or forty-one days in the month.
Thus, the chronology of the ancient Slavs, who were pagans, ran counter to the generally accepted Christian one. After all, many Slavs, even having accepted the Christian faith, continued to remain pagans. They were faithful to their worldviews and did not accept chronology “from the Nativity of Christ.”
The chronology became a reflection of religion, which occupied and continues to occupy a dominant position in the state, in society, in the world. Christianity today is practiced by more than thirty percent of the world's population. It is not surprising that the Birth of Christ was chosen as its beginning. It has also become convenient to distinguish the past era from the new. Peter, having changed the chronology system in Rus', made it possible to coordinate all the activities of the country with the rest of the world. It is difficult to imagine that today there would be a gap between countries of more than five and a half thousand years! Also, a positive aspect of the chronology common to all is the convenience in studying history and other sciences.
People have always wanted to remember their past. With the advent of writing, the need arose to keep time.
The very first and natural unit of measurement was the earth's day. Observation of the Moon helped to establish that one lunar phase lasts on average 30 days. And after 12 lunar phases, the repetition of the first begins. Calendars based on observation of the Moon appeared among many nationalities and, although they were inaccurate, they made it possible to keep track of years.
It remained to understand from what point to start counting. Most often, some important event in the era of the people was taken as the beginning of chronology. Such intervals became known as eras. For example, the beginning of the reign of a new leader (the Seleucid era - among the inhabitants of the Seleucid state with the accession of Seleucus to the throne), the founding of a new city (the era from the founding of Rome - among the Romans) or simply a significant event (the era from the first Olympic Games - among the Greeks).
Another method of chronology was the sequence of events. It can be represented as follows: ruler X ascended the throne 3 years after the wheat crop failed; 5 years after the start of the reign of X, the state was raided by barbarians, etc.
Almost every state had its own calendar. With the development of trade and science in Europe, the need arose to create a unified calendar for Christian countries. In 525, the Roman abbot Dionysius the Lesser proposed a new system of chronology from the Nativity of Christ. At first, the abbot's ideas were not popular, and each country continued to maintain chronology in its own way, but centuries later, at the end of the 10th century, many European countries began to switch to the calendar proposed by Dionysius. Now any date began to be written with a postscript “from the Nativity of Christ” or “from R.H.). The final ordering of the calendar occurred during the Renaissance, when the term “before the Nativity of Christ” was introduced. This greatly simplified and systematized the chronology of world events. Already closer to the 20th century, the religious phrase “from the Nativity of Christ” was replaced by the phrase “AD” and chronology acquired a modern version.
It turns out that modern humanity reckons by era, that is, it uses the same methods that our distant ancestors used. Only now we have a more accurate astronomical calendar, and the starting point for chronology is the same for all countries.
This is interesting: in Russia, the transition to the chronology “from A.D.” happened by historical standards quite recently - in 1700 by decree of PeterI. Before this, the chronology of events was carried out according to the Constantinople era, which began its countdown from 5509 BC. It turns out that according to the Old Believer calendar now (for 2015) the year is 7524. According to the results of the latest population census, 400,000 people are Old Believers in Russia.
Every person, opening the text of the Holy Scriptures in front of him, will find the first words in it: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...” (Gen. 1:1) - and thus will notice that the counting of time in biblical history begins with the creation of the world. Indeed, for many centuries it was customary among Orthodox Christians to count the years from the supposed creation of the world. Now another counting of years has become more common in the post-Soviet space - from “AD”, replacing the traditional counting “from the Nativity of Christ”. Recently, this state of affairs has become firmly established when secular society celebrates the New Year of “AD” with festivities, and The Church once again celebrates the date of the Nativity of Christ. Once upon a time, this date, set for December 25, was supposed to overshadow the pagan holiday in honor of the sun, but now the Christian holiday is in the shadow of the Merry New Year. The gaze of a worldly person is directed to the future with the hope that it will be “bright.” The church's gaze is turned to the past, it is a memory of what already happened at the beginning of the history of the Bible or the special history of the Gospel. There is a pattern here, because by reflecting on the past, we get to know ourselves.
Christian chronology originates in biblical chronology. The peoples of antiquity kept track of current events by the years of the reign of their kings. “In such and such a year of such and such a king” - this is how the usual dating began. In the Bible you can also find many examples of such counting in the books of Kings or Chronicles. But along with dating by the years of rulers, the concept of “era” is also known in ancient chronologies. This is a countdown of time from an event that, in the opinion of a number of generations, became the beginning of the history of a particular people and state or close nations and states. For example, the ancient Romans traced their history back to the founding of Rome, and the Greeks traced their history back to the beginning of the Olympic Games. There is also an important reference point in the Old Testament: the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. Every year the Jews celebrate this event as the birth of their people. The creation of the temple under Solomon, for example, dates back to 480 “after the children of Israel came out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 6:1). True, the Slavic text, unlike the Russian translation, follows the Greek and indicates the figure of 440 years.
Of course, an era represents a more developed stage in man's understanding of his place in historical eras than a simple count of kings. And in the Bible one can notice the desire of the sacred authors to highlight the time of the paradise life of the ancestors, the era before the Great Flood, the history of the settlement of people and the era of the patriarchs. In the Evangelist Matthew we find the periodization “from Abraham to David”, “from David to the migration to Babylon”, “from the migration to Babylon to Christ”. Of course, there were other periodizations of Old Testament history, St. the first martyr Stephen, for example, highlighted the time from Abraham to Moses and from Moses to the construction of the First Temple by King Solomon (Acts 7:1-47). However, in order to build a unified chronology of events, it was necessary to make a common beginning for them all. It was natural for them to create the world.
One may come across the opinion that Christians borrowed the account “from the Creation of the world” from the Jews. Indeed, among the Jews in the 2nd century. according to R.H. the treatise “The Order of the World” (Seder Olam) appeared, in which biblical events are counted in exactly this way. But the Israelis themselves, being in dispersion, moved on this point for more than one century, from the 9th to the 16th centuries. according to R.H. Before this, they counted the years either from the time of the conquest of Babylon by Alexander the Great’s general Seleucus in 312 BC, or they were guided by the year of the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans (70 AD). Therefore, it would be fairer to say that Christians began to count years “from the Creation of the world” independently of the Jews and for their own reasons.
Evangelist John opens his Gospel with the words: “In the beginning was the Word...”. The beginning in question is the same beginning as in the first chapter of the book of Genesis, i.e. world creation. In the Epistle to the Hebrews we read: “God, who at times and in divers manners spoke of old to the fathers by the prophets, in these last days has spoken to us by the Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds” (Heb. 1:1-2). Here the creation of the world (“the ages”) is placed in the same chronological order with those “last days” when God sent His Only Begotten Son to save the world. A certain theological concept emerges: God’s creation has undergone the corruption of sin, for the sake of the salvation of people the Son of God is incarnated on earth, He heralds the approach of a Kingdom of a higher order, history strives, as stated in the Creed, towards “the life of the next century.” This is how Christian chronology is built: the Creation of the world, the First Appearance of Christ, His Second Appearance and the General Judgment. Thus, Christ is “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last” (Rev. 22:13).
In the “Ecclesiastical History” of Eusebius of Caesarea (beginning of the 4th century), the following introduction is made: “Although, obviously, we are a new people and the name of Christians is really recent, just recognized by all peoples, but our life and our entire way of behavior are in agreement with the dogmas piety, not recently invented by us, but has been observed since the very beginning of mankind; the ancient God-loving people, by natural impulse, lived exactly this way... The Abrahamic faith, confirmed by deeds - and they are more significant than words - is currently observed throughout the entire universe only by Christians.” It is obvious that Christians consider themselves as heirs of the Old Testament righteous, and they also consider the history before the birth of Christ to be theirs.
It should also be noted that from the earliest times Christians entered the events of the Gospel into the historical context of the era. So St. Luke writes about the beginning of the sermon of St. John the Baptist: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was in charge of Judea, Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, Philip his brother was tetrarch of Ituraea and the Trachonite region, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene under the high priests Annas and Caiaphas. the word of God to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness” (Luke 3:1-2). The same Evangelist connects the birth of Christ with the census under the Roman emperor Augustus and the Syrian governor Quirinius (Luke 2:1). Here considerable difficulties arise in correlating the Gospel chronology with accepted dates. It turns out that Jesus was born 4-6 years “before the birth of Christ.” However, it should be noted that the calculation of the time of the birth of Christ, undertaken in the 6th century. by the Roman abbot Dionysius the Lesser, was initially approximate, based not so much on historical data as on Easter calculations.
Dionysius’ dubious calculations, however, became the basis for the “Anno Domini” (“year of the Lord”) calendar, adopted in the Catholic world at the turn of the 1st millennium. In Russia, this reference system was introduced in 1700 by Peter I for the sake of uniformity of chronology with Europe. However, such uniformity can go quite far. Under the influence of secularization in the West, starting from the 19th century, a different name began to be adopted - Common Era, Before the Common Era (CE, BCE), i.e. "accepted/common era", "before the accepted/common era". In the countries of the Soviet bloc, an even more unfortunate name was established - “our era”, an echo of the proletarian “we are ours, we will build a new world.”
Meanwhile, in the Eastern Church, the calculation of the time of the First Ecumenical Council of 325 was relevant for a long time. Then it was decided to keep the chronology “from the Creation of the world,” which was dated March 1, 5500 BC. (later the number 5508 appeared for the convenience of Easter calculations). This date diverges from the Jewish era “from the Creation of the world” (3761), which is based on other life expectancy numbers for the Old Testament patriarchs (which is also followed by the Russian Synodal translation).
It is known that the Christian chronology from Adam was adopted precisely for theological reasons (Adam was created at noon on the sixth day of creation, and for the Lord “a thousand years are like one day” - 2 Peter 3:8). In the apostolic reading for Christmas from the Epistle to the Galatians (Gal. 4:4), the appearance of Christ is associated with the “fulfillment of time” (glorified “end of summer”). It is noteworthy that the feast of the Epiphany, now associated more with the event of the Baptism of the Lord, originally in the Christian East included memories of all the gospel events from the Birth to the Baptism of Christ. The date of the Feast of Epiphany (January 6 according to the church calendar) recalls the sixth creative day on which God created the first people. The symbolism here is of fundamental importance: from the Old Adam all people inherit mortal nature, and from the New Adam, i.e. Christ - receive a renewed nature for eternal life. Thus, Christian chronology is edifying; it depicts the moral history of mankind, connects the temporal and the eternal, looks back to past centuries and indicates the future century.
Newspaper "Resurrection"
The January issue of the newspaper “Resurrection” is posted in the archive section of the newspaper.
Subscription index of the newspaper “Voskresenye” 63337
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