Special Guest Blogger: Dionysius Exiguus

Back in the good old days, by which i mean the 6th Century, life was pretty good and Christianity was slowly but surely replacing the Roman Paganism as the top religion but one bone of contention was the fact that we still used the Roman Calendar based on the founding of Rome.
I had quite a good reputation after translating many ecclesiastical canons from Greek into Latin so Pope John I came to me and asked me to set out the dates for Easter from the years 527 to 626 as he was keen to produce some order in the celebration of the main Christian festival which was Easter and to use the birth of Jesus to plot the days which was a bit of a headache because nobody thought to write down exactly what year he was born and the Bible gave no clue.
Christians, with a lack of a proper date celebrated the birth of Jesus on January 6 but Christian leaders were successful at converting many pagans festivals over to Christianity by allowing them to continue the celebration and pasting our own guy in so a second-third century Christian theologian called Hippolytus had came up with the plan of moving Jesus's birthday back a few weeks to December 25th as a way of tacking it onto the end of the Roman Festival of Saturnalia, a week-long festival celebrating the Romans' gods where feasting, drunkenness, gambling and public nudity ensued.
As it was working well at distracting the Christians from the many pagan revelries occurring in late December, i worked back from that date and said Jesus must have been conceived nine months earlier on March 25th and therefore as he was perfect, he also must have died on 25th March, enjoy your chocolate Easter egg when we get around to inventing them.
With a Papal decree, March 25th became the official date of Jesus's death and in doing so cemented Christmas on the map but we still had the problem that we used the Roman calendar so i said if we take the birth of Jesus as Year 1AD, as the Roman year 753 turned to 754, January 1 should be 1 anno domini the year of our Lord in a new era of world history.
A few people did point out that the gospel account of the birth of Jesus says that Jesus was born while Herod was still King and he died in 4BC and they also show that the Census of Quirinius in Bethlehem took place in 6BC, 6 years before he was born so i did consider refining my dates and said to the Pope that maybe we should be more precise but he said it's fine, we are talking about religious people here and it's not like they are gonna kill each other over a slight difference in their religions is it.