On this classic episode of Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know, Ben Bowlin and Matt Frederick talk about the “phantom time” theory that has quite a lot of people around the world believing that the Middle Ages – around 300 years of history – never actually happened, and were made up by the Catholic church. While it might seem easy to laugh this one off, it’s worth exploring as part of a larger conversation about revisionist history. Matt and Ben dive into the history of history, the invention of the Gregorian calendar, when countries started to try recording “history by consensus” instead of just creating their own account of major events, what proponents of the phantom time theory think about radiometric carbon dating and dendrochronology, and much more.
For many of us, history is somewhat irrefutable: It’s verifiable facts, supported by evidence, recording the events of human beings throughout time, right? Turns out, not so much. Ben points out that the history of the Korean War will read differently in a textbook in North Korea, South Korea, and the United States. Countries like their histories to reflect their values and prop up their citizens’ sense of national identity, and “no one wants to look like an evil bad guy,” Matt says. And in centuries past, it was fully accepted that a new leader – political or religious – could and would tweak the historic record as much as they wished to get the story they wanted to tell.
To Anatoly Fomenko, this meant that it was possible for the Church to not only change portions of history, but completely make them up. In the 1980s, he released his “new chronology” theory, positing that much of the history that’s attributed to Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and Ancient Egypt actually happened in the middle ages. Another version of this theory is that the Holy Roman Empire miscalculated when it switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, which added 297 years to the timeline that never actually happened. Though these theories have never attracted major support from historians, or been able to rebuff questions about the astronomical record and so on that refute their ideas, the new chronology theory still has a lot of popular support – and it’s far from the only alternative history to find a surprising amount of adherents. Find out more on this episode of Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know.
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