Auditability

The tools that are available on this website set out to definitively solve a specific problem with accountability and auditability. It helps to understand the problem, and how these tools set out to fix that problem.

I am a computer programmer by training, and for whatever reason have always been good with numbers. When I was a young believer I sat in a church presentation dealing with the what the speaker claimed were day-accurate predictions dealing with various events in Jesus’ life. This was interesting, but I knew enough that I could tell the story he was telling was "cooked." There was no way to audit the dates given in the presentation.

The problems spring primarily from problems with the calendars used in the world today. The current calendar, the Gregorian Calendar, goes back in the English speaking world to the time of George Washington. (In other parts of Europe it goes back to 1585.) For those with an English heritage the transition was simple, and uncomplicated, but in other parts of Europe the transition was quite complicated, with various local calendars and partial conversions. If you are trying to take original historical records and figure out the date when they happened, there is a veritable field of land mines that must be traversed to get the right answer.

Before the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar there was the Julian Calendar. That calendar was stable in its definition only since the year 5. Any date earlier than the year 5 AD is either artificially calculated backwards using either the Gregorian or Julian calendar, or it rides atop a set of increasingly difficult calendar problems going back to around 700 BC. Before that point, there is no sense of Roman calendar at all.

The Jewish calendar, a popular alternative, was defined in the 300s (318 by some sources) and at that point was not defined in a stable way. It was only in the 900s (on the Julian system) that the Jewish calendar gained the stable mathematical terms used in its calculations. Indeed, the Roman world’s calendar can be run back day-accurately to the start of 46 BC, and that is the oldest such calendar that can be trusted.

Astronomers have recognized this problem for many, many years and their solution was to assign day numbers to each day. Instead of counting days by year, month, and day, they simply counted days by number. This is particularly convenient because there is only one unit, a simple number, that need be calculated in order to arrive at any day known to history. It also makes calculating day-differences easy, since it can be done with one addition or subtraction.

The most enduring of those day counting systems is called the Julian Day Number system. Anyone wanting to accurately identify a specific day in history need only specify the day on that system, and anyone can easily tell which day it was, no matter what calendar might be used to otherwise identify the day by year, month and day.

The Julian Day Number (JDN) system is the starting point for the tools you’ll find here. But, there are 2 key problems that caused me to design an alternative. The first, is the range of positive day numbers. The first day on that system is well beyond the first year of Adam, so to reach back to those days requires negative Julian Day Numbers. This is so unappealing that the Julian system itself was designed to have an early epoch so for most uses the day numbers would be positive.

The second problem is that the JDN numbering system is defined with a day start at Noon, GMT. This is of course very important for Astronomers comparing notes about when they saw something in the sky, but it is not when the Bible defines day-breaks. So, to use JDN would be to have a day definition out of line with the Bible itself.

The answer was to define a new day number system where day 1 is assigned to the first day of the first month of the first year of Adam’s life. Each day forward is simply assigned a number 1 higher. The system is called the After Adam Number system, or AAN instead of JDN for the other system.

The next problem was to provide a way to look at days on the various calendars of interest while at the same time retaining the AAN number. There are various possible ways to do this but I eventually settled on the idea of an Auditable Date Report. These are small tables that are used throughout the website that call out specific days, one day to the row. What follows is an example, showing off day number 1:

There is a simple set of server-side HTML tags that call out this report. The details of the tags are beyond our scope here, but as a writer of articles about time in the Bible it makes it particularly easy to get accurate, auditable dates. The output, the form of the report, is also particularly easy to use for the purposes of performing an audit on the results.

The HTML tags behind the report have the ability to highlight specific items in the report. This highlight is a small double arrow (⇉) usually displayed in red that points at the specific calendar entry that is interesting to the narrative.

If you see a square box inside the parentheses or nothing at all, instead of 2 left pointing arrows, then your browser is obsolete and cannot display the full Unicode character set. You should upgrade to a modern browser.

In the report above I have pointed out that this report is for the 1st day of the 1st month of Adam’s 1st year, which happens to be the basis for the Bible’s calendar. Find the arrow in order to find that date.

The report does not say why this date is interesting. The narrative of the article where specific Auditable Date Reports are found provide the explanation.

In this case, what is interesting about this day is the "AA" calendar begins, as an epoch definition, with 1/1/1 AA set to the first day of Adam’s life. This is also day 1 in the AAN system. The following is the same day, with the highlight pointing at the AAN entry.

Each day forward has a day number 1 higher.

This little fact has powerful consequence. Want to audit anything on the system? Any date presented in any article? That AAN value provides the key, since it is a unique identifier for any day that is of any interest to any calendar date calculation we may wish to perform.

For those who look at the software code behind this report, let me just note, that all dates are actually stored internal to this system as that number alone. All the other values in the date report are simply calculated at display time so we can all read the dates in a form we are more likely to recognize.

Look again at this same day, but this time look at the JDN: value. This is the "other" day counting system, and the day number that would start at noon on the GMT clock, for that same date. The difference is the number of days difference between the 2 systems.

This JDN: value is very important for taking days as mentioned throughout the Bible Time system and mapping them to days calculated by others using other date calculation tools. If you, say, wanted to see when a comet appeared in Jerusalem, and wanted to be totally clear about it, you’d need to learn the JDN for that date and look it up using one of the online tools in order to look up that day and find the Bible Date.

Staying with this same day a little longer, take a look at the "NS" date for this same day. The abbreviation NS stands for "New Style" and is the world’s conventional notation for indicating a Gregorian Calendar date. The notation springs from the confusion that accompanies changing calendars. The New Style replaced the "Old Style" (OS) Julian that preceded it.

On the NS date for this day, Adam’s first day was 17 November -10975. Note that there is a negative number on the year and no ’BC.’ This is an important convention that indicates there is a year zero included in the date calculation. This is common on dates back-calculated by astronomers who simply impute a year number in order to make year differences easier to handle. The dates in the Roman column do not show negative year numbers, so they were calculated without a year zero which is the convention used by historians for calculating historical dates.

Note the difference.

Throughout most of history year numbers were displayed using Roman Numerals, which have no zero. Thus there was no way to indicate a year zero, and so historians for most of history considered year 1 BC to fall immediately before 1 AD. No zero in the middle.

Only after Roman Numerals stopped being used widely to record ancient dates did the question of year zero come up, and generally astronomers have included year zero in their calculations.

There are 9 pieces of information given for any specific day and there are considerable issues for each, dealing primarily with the definitions of the calendars represented by those dates. The specific specifications for those calendars follow in additional articles in this section.

Before going further lets take the system for a spin. The following is the Auditable Date Report for Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the day that lives in infamy.

The colors and fonts have changed, the NS system is now green, indicating that on this date this calendar system was the one in most use. All of the other calendar systems are in blue, indicating they are past public use.

Note, though, that the OS calendar is still used to calculate holidays in Russia, and the AA system is used prophetically for calculating the days when Jesus does something significant in the world. For a simple example of this, consider 911...

Inspect the table closely and you see the month and day on the AA calendar and on the FE calendar are also 9/11 just like on the NS Gregorian calendar. Why? From the perspective of the text of the Bible, the event took place on the same date as the secular world records the date. The name, 911, is thus in a sense a biblical name for the event. This is in part why the Holy Spirit has chosen that event to be named by the numbers that make up the date of the event. He sees it the same as we do.

One final example. At the end of December 31, 1999, the world celebrated the arrival of a new millennium. The calendar rolled all of its digits. Something that had not happened in 1000 years and which will not happen again for another 1000.

When we take years counted forward from Adam, the millennial break is still to come. The following is the date report for the first day of the year 13,001:

This does not roll all the digits, the "1" at the start remains the same. But millennial breaks are significant throughout history. They usually mark great changes in God’s dealing with mankind.

2 weeks later the world passes the 3500th anniversary of the Exodus from Egypt. 70 full jubilees will have passed. Indeed, that Passover anniversary date will have the whole world watching the closing Ceremonies of the Olympic games from Vancouver, Canada. It promises to be an interesting time.

Follow the Next links at the bottom of this page to continue with the story... Next up we look at the Gregorian Calendar