Anna Rides Again

I spoke in an earlier blog about my favorite student, Anna Chronism.

My first encounter with her was in a humanities class. After a discussion that included reference to the pre-Christian world, she came up after class and asked innocently, "How did people who lived before Jesus know to count backwards to his birth?"

I may have written about this before. Very few experiences have stood out in my mind as indelibly as this.

Part of its force is that I had to think a minute: either all the ancients knew intuitively that the Savior of Mankind would be born on such-and-such a day (most likely from inerrant Biblical prophecy [which, of course, they knew nothing about]) or there had to be some other explanation. I opted for the "other explanation": the ancients counted forward, just like we do. It didn't take too much research to discover that, in the Jewish calendar, the counting still goes forward, the Messiah not having appeared yet. Likewise, in the Muslim calendar, the counting is some 600 years "off," Muslims beginning their dating with Muhammed. Then I found out that one of the popes changed the whole counting system sometime in the sixth century in honor of the Savior of Mankind's birth.

And here we are.