St.Paul's 2000th Birthday

I only realised this yesterday, but, apparently the Pope has declared that the next 12 months are to be a year long celebration of the 2000th anniversary of the birth of St. Paul. Although it's fairly unclear when exactly Paul was born, those who think we have sufficient data to make such a call tend to go for sometime between 5 and 10 BCE. I'm slightly sceptical that we have enough evidence to really be sure even of that kind of range. I suspect that the Pope simply thinks it's an event that should be celebrated, and so just chose an appropriate year.

The image above is an extended stamp type thing from Malta (which was actually what drew my attention to it - it's obvisouly a bigger deal over there than it is here) and there's a little more on this here