I happened to be following a rabbit hole on Wikipedia today (much like this xcxd cartoon) and the rabbit hole had something to do with the date system. You know — like A.D. B.C. and C.E. … I discovered that the original ‘Julian’ date system didn’t involve weeks — only ‘days’ in groups of months. The concept of a week was familiar to some cultures, but not to others (until fairly recently).
This is interesting to me because while the Jews who lived during the time of Jesus would have understood a 7 day week, the concept would have been unfamiliar to some Romans that lived during this time. Hebrews had a 7 day week (The creation story), but the Romans didn’t (Julian = Julius Caesar).
It seems like such an odd thing that 2 people might see the same day in two totally different concepts of time: the Julian calendar is different from the Gregorian calendar is different from the ‘revised Julian calendar‘.
This is because people kept saying, “no, that’s wrong because … ” and then changing something.
In recent history, the international ISO standards board weighed in, approving ISO 8601 in 1988, and officially solving the ‘year 2000 problem’ (remember that date snag?) 10 years before the panic.
Why is it that we as humans are so driven to re-invent the wheel?
I mean, why couldn’t we just all agree on one concept of timekeeping? I wouldn’t think it’s all that complicated, really — it just needs to account for the time of day for everyone on a spherical, rotating, orbiting/floating surface that has different seasons depending on your current location.
OK, so maybe it’s not that easy.
Why was I looking at concepts of time on Wikipedia in the first place? Well, it turns out that most of the issues with Christians and dates boils down to complications in calculating the date of Easter.
Which is really ironic. Mostly because most other languages call the day some variation of ‘Passover’, but the English, and German versions of the word ‘Easter’ are related to ancient name for the Anglo Saxon goddess, Eostre, who was celebrated during Eosturmonath, equivalent to April… not something Christian, at all.
So to sum up: We as humans like to argue about a lot of stuff, including the proper date and time for something that we’ve misnamed.
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