this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory
https://www.discovermagazine.com/what-is-the-truth-behind-the-controversial-phantom-time-hypothesis-45433
I have my own that is similar to this one, due to calendar switcheroo stuff. the idea is that biblical scholars at some point in history made up the stuff about Noah and others in Genesis living to 900 years and whatnot, or it was really just a simple mistranslation of 'years' with 'months' or 'seasons' and living that long sounded way cooler and made their religion superior because of it so they went with it.
i'm sure i'm not the only one who has thought of this but if one were to do the math and divide the supposed years lived by 12, it would put Noah at 77.5 years old instead 900, which is still a really long time for that era. each descendant lives less long but still reasonable ages after dividing by 12, all the way to Abraham when the division stops sounding logical, with him supposedly living to 175 which would put him at 14 and likely isn't true (but still possible).
at this point the time error/lie switches to seasons, so ages get divided by 4 instead, putting Abraham almost at age 44, much more likely. the last one with an abnormally high age (that i am aware of) is Moses, at 120. By that point, it's actually his real age and no more division is necessary, plus, records from other places would start to show noticable conflicts in ages.
in my mind, if Otto and Sylvester actually did the 297 year thing, what's to stop them from doing this too?
This guy made a case that we are really in the year 1728 because Holy Roman emperor wanted their reign to begin in the year 1000 because its pretty. So they made up 290+ years of history and yanked the calendar ahead to cover it up.
Ohhh okay yeah I'm vaguely familiar with that one. Good one there.
That would be good because it would potentially explain some other conspiracy theories too, like the world didn't end at y2k because we haven't reached it yet. You could milk that for a while
Y2K was a date tracking problem for computers not a world ending event on this day type thing. It would bring back the Mayan calendar conspiracy with the world ending on 2012 just not happening yet though.