> What a tempest in a teapot!  Intellectual arguments, but
> irrelevant because:
>
> 1.  No one is sure of the date of the birth of Christ (most
> probably in the Spring of 4 BC, by our current calendar.

Completely true, and this "argument" certainly comes up often in these
discussions, but it's a bit of a red herring. Actually, it's more than
that--it's completely irrelevant. The century/millennium issue is unrelated
to when JC was actually born. Whether that was in 4 B.C., 1 B.C., or some
other time doesn't matter, because the fixed reference point for
century/millennium measurement is not that event--the fixed point is the
"first" year, which is 1 A.D. It's similar to the original definition of a
meter (one ten-millionth of the distance from Paris to the North pole)
compared to the current definition--the original value may or may not still
match, but it doesn't matter, because the current definition (1,650,763.73
wavelengths in a vacuum of the orange-red line in the emission spectrum of
Krypton-86 last time I checked) is fixed and independent of its birth.
Likewise, it doesn't really matter how far Philippides ran (or didn't)--the
length of a marathon is now defined as 26 miles + 385 yards.

As long as "first", "second", etc. and "century" and "millennium" retain
their current definitions (and we lack a year "0 A.D."--anyone up for
another calendar redefinition?), the "third millennium" starts immediately
after the completion of the first two spans of 1000 years--i.e. at the start
of 2001.


Steve


Steve Dirickson   WestWin Consulting
[log in to unmask]   (360) 598-6111