Changeling by David Wood, Sean Ellis Read Free Book Online Page B

frown. “What do you mean by ‘added’?”
    “Four centuries after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity,” Roche explained, “and about seven centuries after Christ was thought to have walked the earth, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II, along with Pope Sylvester II and the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, made a pact to change the calendar system in such a way that their respective reigns would coincide with the end of the millennium.”
    “Like a kid tearing out pages in a calendar in the belief that he can make Christmas come sooner,” Professor said.
    “The deception endures to this day,” Roche went on. “You see, it is not actually the 21 st century AD, but rather the 18 th .”
    Jade gaped at him. “People actually believe that?”
    “Not nearly enough people,” Roche said, gravely. “Most have been completely hoodwinked by the great hoax.”
    “Phantom Time is the hoax,” Professor countered. “The entire hypothesis rests on an alleged error during the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar in the year 1582.”
    “Oh,” Jade said. “Well, that clears everything up.”
    “According to the Julian system,” Professor continued, “the solar year was 365.25 days long.”
    “That’s why we have a leap year every four years.”
    “Right, but the solar year is actually 365.2425 days long. I know it sounds like a meaningless difference, and practically speaking, it is. About ten minutes a year. But over the course of a few hundred years, it adds up.”
    “The Julian Calendar was introduced in the year 46 BC,” Roche said. “The error was known even then, but it was thought too insignificant to correct. Ordinary people lived by the turning of the seasons, not some arbitrary system of time-keeping. The Church however was very concerned with dates since it was necessary for Easter to coincide with the vernal equinox, so Pope Gregory instituted the calendar system we use today, which corrects the problem by skipping a leap year at the turn of each century, except in years divisible by 400.”
    “Which is why we had a leap year in 2000,” Professor supplied.
    “Instead of twenty-five leap years per century, there would be ninety-seven leap years in every four hundred year period. However, to adjust for errors in the preceding years, it was necessary to delete the days that had been inadvertently added over the course of the centuries, so Thursday, October 4, 1582 was followed by Friday October 15, 1582.”
    “That part really happened,” Professor said. “It’s well documented in history. Unlike the so-called Phantom Time conspiracy.”
    “The Gregorian calendar adjustment accounted for ten extra days,” Roche said, ignoring the barb as he closed in on the crux of his argument. “Counting forward from 46 BC, there should have been 394 leap years, but under the Julian calendar, there were 407. But if it was really the year 1582, the correction should have been thirteen days. Gregory knew this, and he knew what his predecessors had done. That’s why he only moved the calendar forward ten days. He knew it was really the year 1183.”
    Roche delivered this pronouncement with such gravity that Jade almost felt guilty for not caring.
    “See what I mean,” Professor said. “It’s pretty thin soup.”
    “Look, this is really interesting,” Jade said, openly disingenuous. “But it seems like something that should be pretty easy to prove or disprove.”
    “There is surprisingly little physical evidence against the hypothesis,” Roche said.  “The Church was the accepted time-keeping authority in its day. The historical record relies heavily upon medieval chronicles, which were fabricated for the sole purpose of reinforcing the deception. Many of them, such as the so-called contemporary accounts of Charlemagne, are little more than romantic fiction, but scholars do not question their veracity. To do so would undermine everything we think we know.”
    Asserting that