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Joined: Fri Jan 04, 2013 2:55 am +0000
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Please, how do you interpret the parenthetical information (in bold face), after the dash, within the context of the paragraph? I know what a leap year is, but cannot make sense of what they mean by using it as an explanation of "current usage".

(651.1) 57:0.1 IN PRESENTING excerpts from the archives of Jerusem for the records of Urantia respecting its antecedents and early history, we are directed to reckon time in terms of current usage — the present leap-year calendar of 365¼ days to the year. As a rule, no attempt will be made to give exact years, though they are of record. We will use the nearest whole numbers as the better method of presenting these historic facts.
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I think it means that our measurement of a year is based on our definition of "day" - 24 hrs. of 60 minutes of 60 seconds - which results in a fractional "year" - a rather crude measure of any orbit. A year is truly a complete orbit or a base measure of 1 which should then be fractionalized into months, weeks, days, years, minutes, seconds. Our form of measure is backwards and awkward....but the authors utilize the "standard" year as measured by us in expressing historical time-facts on Urantia.

8)
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Yes, but I still don't understand the reference to a leap year, sorry. When I translate this passage into Spanish, there is something that does not "fit" well. It seems that they are going to use our current uses, including leap years.
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Angel,

When I read the phrase, my impression is that they are trying to make it very clear that when they present dates, they are explicitly defining 1 earth year as 365.25 earth days. I think they point this out as the "current usage" since throughout history there were many different methods of addressing this issue of time tracking and definition vs earth's orbit. Wikipedia says the Romans, Chinese, even Ethopians all had various ways to tackle this problem.

In light of the variety of ways humans have handled (or ignored) leap-years in history, to me, the revelators are taking pains to eliminate any uncertainty as to how they reckoned historical dates. In other words, they're reiterating that they are computing the dates the way we "moderns" would, and then rounding the years off the nearest century, millennia, or whatever.

quil
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Joined: Sun Aug 23, 2015 9:23 am +0000
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Greetings Angel,

Angel Francisco wrote:
I still don't understand the reference to a leap year


I'm assuming that you understand that every four years the calendar adds an additional day in February (February 29th) to make up for the fact that our orbit is 1/4 day longer than our man-made calendar year. The leap refers to adding the 4 fragments of a year that had been unaccounted for. 2016 is a leap year. The month of February has 29 days instead of 28. Now, for the next four years we will carry 1/4 day every year until we make the leap and add them all together to make an extra day in 2020.

Forgive me if you already understand the meaning of leap year. It just didn't seem from your statement that the translation was coming through completely.

In Friendship,
Rexford
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Yes, they mention something similar in
http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/ca ... stian.html

[...] In the Julian calendar, the tropical year is approximated as 365¼ days = 365.25 days. This gives an error of 1 day in approximately 128 years.
The approximation 365¼ is achieved by having 1 leap year every 4 years. [...]

Thank you FanofVan, Quil, Rexford for helping me understand this passage.
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