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S i d e b a r
Failures to Come
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This Rock
Volume 11, Number 1
 January 2000 
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There are more predictions coming down the pike that are going to fail.
For a start, some might think, "Hey, this is the year 2000; Jesus is 2,000 years old – maybe he will come back this year."
Maybe, but probably not. The Son may come back any time the Father sends him, but there is a good reason why it won't coincide with Jesus' 2,000th birthday: That date has already passed.
The current system of years was developed by a monk name Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Short), who lived in the 500s. He tried to calculate how many years it had been since Christ was born – and he was almost right. But not quite. Our best evidence indicates that there is an error in the calendar and that Jesus was not born in A.D. 1 (there is no year zero, remember) but between two and eight years earlier, Jesus' 2,000th birthday passed unnoticed some time in the 1990s.
But the age of Jesus isn't the only thing tempting some to view the year 2000 as a year of doom. There's a rare astronomical configuration that will happen on May 5. The sun, the moon, and the five planets visable to the naked eye will all be within 26 degrees of each other in the sky. They won't be "lined up" as you're likely to hear in the press, but they will be closer to each other in the sky than they have been for quite some time.
"Why the big deal?" you ask. It goes back to The Juniper Effect, a book published in 1974 by John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, which postulated that when the planets get together in certain combinations they cause earthquakes. The idea that the tidal forces generated by the sun and the moon couse cause earthquakes might not be so unreasonable, but the idea that distant planets could do it – even big ones like Jupiter – won't hold water, as shown by a similar, non-earthquake-producing alignment in 1982.
In New Age circles, one of the best-known "days of doom" is December 22, 2012, when the Mayan calendar is scheduled to (gasp) run out…before it does what all calendars do: start over. What is happening is the end of the thirteenth Mayan "Great Cycle" (a period a little over 5,999 years long) and the beginning of the fourteenth Great Cycle. The changeover no more signifies "the end of time" than the change of a millennium on the Gregorian calendar. |
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