What was the year when Jesus was born?

This is an interesting one - I looked into it because it had come up on the Angry'n'Cliff podcast a month or two back and I don't like not knowing things that are distinctly knowable.

It turns out that historically the most common way to decide a year was to mark the years off of a monarch’s reign – we’re in the 57th year of Elizabeth 2’s reign, for instance. The Romans started from the founding of their Empire – around 753BC. But they had a different way of working out what a year was – various Caesars just invented months to show how great they were – July and August, for example.

The Gregorian calendar, which we use now, was invented by some bloke called Aloysius and brought in by the Pope in 1582. It started then to be used all around Europe – England didn’t sign up until 1752, and didn’t even use January 1st as the first day of the year until then either – this was brought in by Act of Parliament.

Interestingly, Scotland had moved to the system 150 years before, but everyone was already using the birth of Jesus as the year by that point anyway. If you went between England and Scotland, though, you would be flitting about between different days. Crazy.

Introducing the system caused all sorts of trouble – here we lost 11 days. It was introduced in Alaska in 1867 when the Americans bought Alaska off the Russians – they skipped 11 days and had two Fridays in a row. You’d think they could have made it two Saturdays, or something.

Using Jesus’ birthday itself for the year was brought in by Emperor Charlemagne in the early 800s – took off from there really. Other interesting fact is that in Japan although they also use the Gregorian calendar, the Emperor still gets to decide what year it is and when they’ll start counting from. The current year is Heisei 21, dating back to the last Emperor popping his Geta* in 1989.

*Those Japanese clog things