By Ben Guterson

Astrid Vasquez’s career as a professor of religion at the University of San Carlos of Guatemala has been estimable, though if she is known at all outside her native country it is likely as the accidental catalyst of the proposition that the Anno Domini dating system is padded with three non-existent centuries. According to this implausible theory, championed by an intractable semi-cult based in Andalusia, we currently if unknowingly occupy the 1680s rather than 1988, Charlemagne never lived, and artifacts putatively from the early Middle Ages have been incorrectly dated or are forgeries. Vasquez, a lifelong Catholic and a nominal supporter of the less reactionary elements of the National Liberation Movement, dismisses the so-called False Time Conspiracy as a delusion. She regrets both that her speculations in an obscure theological journal nearly 20 years ago lit such an outlandish flame and that she has had to devote a growing fraction of her time in attempting to douse it.

            Vasquez was born in Guatemala City in 1931. When she was 9, her mother committed suicide; her father, a surgeon, succumbed to alcoholism five years later. An uncle managed to place Vasquez at the Instituto Normal Central para Señoritas Belén, where she trained to become a teacher before continuing her studies at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. She married in 1953. In what was a significant and rare distinction for a Guatemalan woman of her era, she became an assistant professor of religion in 1960.

            In a 1969 article entitled “An Approach to the Millennium” in Scripta Theologica, a Spanish journal of theology published by the University of Navarra, Vasquez included three pages of rumination on several apparent historical anomalies. Of particular note was the curious seeming pause on construction in Constantinople from the mid-sixth century through the start of the tenth century, and the absence of any meaningful advance in scholarship on the doctrine of Purgatory across nearly 500 years, beginning in 600 AD. Vasquez also cited, in passing, additional oddities: the persistence of Romanesque architecture in western Europe well into the tenth century; a proliferation of documents either falsified or confusedly dated by agents of the Church throughout the Middle Ages; and errors in radiometric dating at two dozen archeological sites across central Europe. As something of a thought experiment, Vasquez mused that these incongruities are reconciled if we imagine the Julian Calendar altered by the insertion of 300 years sometime in the seventh century AD.

            An offshoot of the Spanish Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, committed to delegitimizing the Church in Iberia, seized on Vasquez’s scholarship. The group asserted a plot by Pope Sylvester II to recalibrate time itself, this as a legitimizing maneuver for installing Otto III at the head of the Holy Roman Empire. Despite a mountain of countervailing evidence, the group refuses to abandon a belief in what has come to be called the False Time Conspiracy and now counts over 100 members in an informal organization devoted to popularizing the conceit. Vasquez has, with reluctance, authored rebuttals of the group’s positions; over the past decade, she has increasingly devoted herself to defending an understanding of time she concedes may be in some sense a convention but is undoubtedly absent tampering.

            “My work is focused primarily on the non-canonical gospels,” Vasquez explained in Kjell Garborg’s 1976 documentary, Dharma Shock, “and I have given a great deal of thought to the dichotomy of chronos, or quantitative time, and kairos—what we might called qualitative time. What I hadn’t considered, and what the False Time true believers assert, is something perhaps midway between the two, a sort of fabricated time. I’m actually persuaded their ends are political rather than metaphysical.”

            Vasquez joined the Lisbon Circle in 1975. Her investigations of the nature of time led her to the work of Henri Bergson, and she is now editing a critical evaluation of a pair of his works: The Two Sources of Morality and Religion and Time and Free Will. She has two daughters and attends Mass at least five times a week. She enjoys the music of John Coltrane and Amalia Rodriguez.

            “Christ, Duration, and Apocrypha,” Vasquez wrote in “A Scholar’s Freedom,” her contribution to Renata Fuentes’ collection of essays by Latin American women in 1981. “The three words that summarize my life.”

Sembla Intelligencer, November 12, 1988

Ben Guterson

Ben Guterson’s writing includes the Edgar Award-nominated middle-grade novel Winterhouse (Holt/Macmillan) and the New York Times bestseller The World-Famous Nine (Little, Brown/Hachette). His stories have appeared in several literary journals, including Burningword, BlazeVOX, Superpresent, Funicular, and SORTES.