Jesus Was Born Before Jesus Was Born, Says Ratzinger

The entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation, the Pope has declared, as he claims in a new book that Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed.

Jesus was born between 6 and 4 BC. So what’s the Pope think? He thinks the same thing… He doesn’t (and honestly, who DOES) believe that Jesus was born in year 0 or year 1.

“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 the book, which went on sale around the world with an initial print run of a million copies. “The actual date of Jesus’s birth was several years before.” The assertion that the Christian calendar is based on a false premise is not new – many historians believe that Christ was born sometime between 7BC and 2BC. But the fact that doubts over one of the keystones of Christian tradition have been raised by the leader of the world’s one billion Catholics is striking.

Many? How about all. I’m not sure who Mr Squires of the Telegraph has been reading all these years, but it isn’t any New Testament exegete known to me. Seriously, this isn’t even news to anyone even REMOTELY familiar with the subject. The Telegraph must be having a slow news day.

Via Milton A.