The Four Horsemen of the Slightly-Belated Apocalypse (A. Dürer)
With all of my friends laughing it up over the failure of the much-anticipated apocalypse to appear yesterday, I was rereading some of the stuff on Camping’s (various) predictions, and I came across his statement that, “From April 1, 33 to April 1, 2011 is 1978 years”.
But it isn’t: it’s 1978 years less ten days.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII instituted our modern calendar, now known as the Gregorian calendar, as a replacement for the then-used Julian calendar (named for Julius Caesar). The problem with the Julian calendar was that it assumed that the year was exactly 365.25 days long, an annual error of about eleven minutes. By 1582, the spring equinox was falling as early as the 11th of March, thanks to a millennium or so of accumulated error. Several adjustments to leap years were made, but the main gross adjustment was to declare that March 11, 1582 was now March 21, 1582, by Papal decree.
Seems as though Camping forgot about this in his calculations (he may know the Bible better than I do, but I apparently know calendars better than he does). The world’s not ending until May 31st.
Oh, ye of little faith! If you were all excited about the Rapture yesterday and all depressed this morning, some angel is putting your name on a list right now, you betcha.
