Toward the end of last year I wrote several blog posts about calendars. The blog post about the Gregorian calendar began with this paragraph.
The time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun is not an integer multiple of the time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis, nor is it a rational number with a small denominator. Why should it be? Much of the complexity of our calendar can be explained by rational approximations to an irrational number.
The post went on to say why the Gregorian calendar was designed as it was. In a nutshell, the average length of a year in the Gregorian calendar is 365 97/400 days, which matches the astronomical year much better than the Julian calendar, which has an average year length of 365 ¼ days.
In the Julian calendar, every year divisible by 4 is a leap year. The Gregorian calendar makes an exception: centuries are not leap years unless they are divisible by 400. So the year 2000 was a leap year, but 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not. Instead of having 100 leap years every 400 years, the Gregorian calendar has 97 leap years every 400 years.
Why does it matter whether the calendar year matches the astronomical year? In the short run it makes little difference, but in the long run it matters more. Under the Julian calendar, the Spring equinox occurred around March 21. If the world had remained on the Julian calendar, the date of the Spring equinox would drift later and later, moving into the summer and eventually moving through the entire year. Plants that bloom in March would eventually bloom in what we’d call July. And instead of the dog days of summer being in July, eventually they’d be in what we’d call November.
The Gregorian calendar wanted to do two things: stop the drift of the seasons. and restore the Spring equinox to March 21. The former could have been accomplished with little disruption by simply using the Gregorian calendar moving forward. The latter was more disruptive since it required removing days from the calendar.
The Julian year was too long, gaining 3 days every 400 years. So between the time of Jesus and the time of Pope Gregory, the calendar had drifted by about 12 days. In order to correct for this, the calendar would have to jump forward about a dozen years. If you think moving clocks forward an hour is disruptive, imagine moving the calendar forward a dozen days.
The Gregorian calendar didn’t remove 12 days; it removed 10. In the first countries to adopt the new calendar in 1582, Thursday, October 4th in 1582 was followed by Friday, October 15th. Note that Thursday was followed by Friday as usual. The seven-day cycle of days of the week was not disrupted. That’ll be important later on.
Why did the Gregorian calendar remove 10 days and not 12?
We can think of the 10 days that were removed as corresponding to previous years that the Julian calendar considered a leap year but that the Gregorian calendar would not have: 1500, 1400, 1300, 1100, 1000, 900, 700, 600, 500, and 300. Removing 10 days put the calendar in sync astronomically with the 300’s. This is significant because the Council of Nicaea met in 325 and made decisions regarding the calendar. Removing 10 days in 1582 put the calendar in sync with the calendar at the time of the council.
Now let’s push the calendar back further. Most scholars say Jesus was crucified on Friday, April 3, 33 AD. What exactly does “April 3, 33” mean? Was that a Julian date or a Gregorian date? There’s a possible difference of two days, corresponding to whether or not the years 100 and 200 were considered leap years.
If we were to push the Gregorian calendar back to the first century, the calendar for April in 33 AD would be the same as the calendar in 2033 AD (five cycles of 400 years later). April 3, 2033 is on a Sunday. (You could look that up, or use the algorithm given here.) April 3, 33 in the Julian calendar corresponds to April 1, 33 in the Gregorian calendar. So April 3, 33 was a Friday in the Julian calendar, the calendar in use at the time.
Some scholars date the crucifixion as Friday, April 7, 30 AD. That would also be a Julian date.