So what year is this really?

Another shocking revelation that shakes Christianity to blah blah blah, from none other than the Holy Father: 

In "Jesus of Nazareth -- The Infancy Narratives," the pope says the Christian calendar is actually based on a blunder by a 6th century monk, who Benedict says was several years off in his calculation of Jesus' birth date.

Well! If the Church can be mistaken about what year a child was born to an obscure family in an age before birth certificates, or even family Bibles (at least the kind with blank space at the front -- papyrus was expensive), clearly it has no grounds to say what's right or wrong either.

But then, neither does CNN, which in this article gets Jesus' age at the Presentation off by 12 years.

Amy Welborn says in one of her books that in Jesus' time, most people had only the vaguest idea how old they were. When (as I understand it), John the Baptist saw his cousin walking toward him and suddenly realized the meaning of the prophesy he'd been given about the "one who came after him", he was the only one present who had any way of knowing that it was also true in that Jesus was a few months younger than him. And he'd have heard it from his parents, not seen it written down anywhere.

Anyway, the last thing Our Lord would want us to do is waste our energy re-numbering the A.D.