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In 1572 a former
professor of law from Bologna named Ugo Buoncompagni became Pope
Gregory XIII; ten years later the Gregorian calendar was introduced.
The Julian calendar, founded sixteen centuries earlier by Julius
Caesar, was inaccurate and the need for reform was widely
recognized. Its principal failure was the discrepancy between the
mean length of its year, 365.25 days, and the tropical year, then
averaging 365.24232 days. This is nearly eleven minutes and four
seconds shorter than the Julian year, a small discrepancy which
continued to accumulate until it was no longer a matter of minutes
but days. By the time of the Gregorian reform, this error had grown
to eleven days. Understandably, this was of concern to the Pope; if
the calendar had continued unchanged, Easter would eventually be
celebrated in the summer.
The attempts at
reform set off a wide range of debates, both academic and religious.
At one point excommunication was threatened by the Pope against
anyone who refused to accept the new calendar. The details and
controversies created by the reform are presented beautifully in an
article in the May 1982 issue of The Scientific American by Gordon
Moyer entitled, "The Gregorian Calendar."
Readers of The
URANTIA Book should find the calendar reform and methods of
measuring time interesting. In part four of the book, The Life and
Teachings of Jesus, there are numerous references to dates. Dates
and weekdays are listed unequivocally. Is there any way to check on
these dates? Was April 14, A.D. 2, really a Friday as stated? Would
it make any difference if the dates and weekdays did not correlate?
Would The URANTIA Book be true if major discrepancies
existed? Whether or not one accepts or rejects The URANTIA Book
is determined more by its spiritual impact rather than possible
scientific correlations. Still, it would be nice to know if there
existed independent verification of these dates and times.
Using information
obtained from the book, Astronomical Formulae for Calculators
by Jean Meeus, a program was written to calculate dates and
weekdays. The program takes into account the Gregorian calendar
reform. All dates are first converted to Julian Day numbers and the
results are divided by seven to obtain weekdays from the remainder.
A calendar is then generated using this information. Even by
computer standards, it is a rather tedious process.
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