ABSTRACT
Actual calculations of time in early Christianity were quite varied, which followed from the Greco-Roman habits of diversity and looseness. Byzantine Christianity continued this approach for a long time. Western Christians struggled in similar ways, hampered after Rome's fall by a lower level of intellectual activity overall. Some based the first year of their calendar on the Diocletian era or on Egyptian dates. Western calendar history reflected the random and disparate traditions of the classical Mediterranean. Almost everyone who thought about the matter assumed that the world was not very old; even in the 18th century some Christians, such as Bishop Ussher, were pushing the notion that Creation had occurred in the year 4004 b.c. One of the first real Christian histories, by a Roman named Sextus Julius Africanus, laid out an extremely tidy pattern using the Book of Revelation but also Etruscan ideas that to him implied the end of the world in six thousand years.
