Did the early Middle Ages really exist? According to the Phantom Time Hypotheses – it did not.

The theory proposes that when the Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 to supplant the Julian calendar 297 years were added.

The Phantom Time Hypothesis suggests that the early Middle Ages (614-911 A.D.) never happened, but were added to the calendar long ago either by accident, by misinterpretation of documents, or by deliberate falsification by calendar conspirators. This would mean that all artifacts ascribed to those three centuries belong to other periods, and that all events thought to have occurred during that same period occurred at other times, or are outright fabrications.

The theory stems from a claim regarding the relation between the Julian calendar, Gregorian calendar and the underlying astronomical solar or tropical year. The Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, was long known to introduce a discrepancy from the tropical year of around one day, for each century that the calendar was in use. By the time the Gregorian calendar was introduced in AD 1582, Illig alleges that the old Julian calendar “should” have produced a discrepancy of thirteen days between it and the real (or tropical) calendar. Instead, the astronomers and mathematicians working for Pope Gregory had found that the civil calendar needed to be adjusted by only ten days. From this, Illig concludes that the AD era had counted roughly three centuries which never existed.

In fact, the Gregorian reform was never intended to bring the calendar in line with the Julian calendar as it had existed in AD 1, but as it had existed in 325, the time of the Council of Nicaea, which had established a method for determining the date of Easter Sunday by fixing the Vernal Equinox on March 20 in the Julian calendar, and not with the Julian calendar at the time of its introduction by Caesar. By 1582, the astronomical equinox was occurring on March 10 in the Julian calendar, but Easter was still being calculated from a nominal equinox on March 20. The Gregorian reform was never intended or purported to restore the relationship between calendar date and astronomical equinox to what it had been at the time of the institution of the Julian calendar in 45 BC, 369 years before the council of Nicaea, when the astronomical vernal equinox took place around March 23. Illig’s “three missing centuries” thus correspond to the period between the fixing of Anno Domini reckoning to begin at AD 1 and the fixing of the Easter Date at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

Vox – Phantom Time Hypothesis – State University of New York from Vox Photon on Vimeo.

For more strange collations of history check out New Chronology.

Taking this into account…

Happy 1714 Everyone!

(By the way of astronomical calculations, the year is what we believe it to be – the Year of Transparency.)

Illustration and idea revelation by Michael Paukner.