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neither month nor year lengths were modified by Constantine. In effect, Constantine took the pagan
Roman calendar with its eight-day week that revolved around the market days and lopped a day off
to create our present weekly cycle. Thus began what is known as the "Christian period" of the Jul-
ian calendar.

Also, the seven-day week that Constantine created out of the old Roman calendar was
based, by him, on the GREEK CALENDAR -- even further complicating things!

"It was not until the third century," explains Joseph Lewis, "that the practice of measuring
time in cycles of seven days, each of them dedicated to the seven planets, was to any degree uni-
versally used. The division of time into seven days to the week as the basis of our PRESENT cal-
endar belongs to the Greeks. (If the Greeks had known that there were ten planets instead of only
the seven with which they were acquainted, it is quite probable that they would have provided for
a ten-day week instead of the seven-day week, for in China the ten-day week prevailed until al-
most the present era.) The very names of the days, called after the planets, were made up by the
Greeks" (The Ten Commandments).

Continuing, Lewis states that,

the first and seventh days of the week, and particularly the number seven, were regarded
by the Greeks as sacred to the god Apollo, probably because of their supposed relation to
the seven planets. References of the seventh day implying some special, though vague,
significance of a sacred character are frequently mentioned in Homeric poems and other
early Greek records. One writer quotes the Greek historian Strabo who wrote before the
Christian era: "The Greeks and barbarians have this in common, that they accompany
their sacred rites by a festal remission of labor" (ibid.).

Before the Greeks came up with their seven-day week based on the then known planets,
they actually had, like the Babylonians and Egyptians of the same period, a thirty-day month di-
vided into three "decades" of ten days!

Even people back in the fifth century were confused and confounded by the changes made
by Constantine to the calendar! In a letter from Bishop Paschasinus of Lilybaeum (Marsala), Sic-
ily, to Pope Leo the Great (461 A.D.) we find discussed a DISCREPANCY between the Roman
and Alexandrian calculations of Pascha or Easter. Paschasinus writes --

After much scrutiny and debate, we found that what the Patriarch of the Church of Alex
andria had written to Your Beatitude was correct. Since the Roman computation for the
year in question [444 A.D.], the sixty-third year of its cycle...was March 26, we were in-
clined to doubt that this date for Pascha was correct, but in fact that it was on April 23.
CONFUSED AND UNCERTAIN, we consulted the Jewish calculation, now ignored by
the Romans -- which is why they sometimes fall into error...

For the time being, let us not be afraid of the lateness of the date of Pascha, lest by trying
to avoid it, we fall into error, as happened during the reign of your predecessor, Zosimas
[418 A.D.]...At that time, by hastening the celebration of Pascha from its date of April 22

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