When numbering years, the system using BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, which is Latin for “in the year of our Lord.”) is commonly used, especially in the Christianity-dominant part of the world. More recently, there has been a move to change BC to BCE (Before Common Era) and AD to CE (Common Era), a shift that I applaud. The actual numbering would not change since the switch from BCE to CE occurs at the same time as the switch from BC to AD, but the label would be more religiously and culturally neutral.
Miriamne Ara Krummel describes how the BC and AD system came about. She says that part of the motivation was to marginalize the competing Jewish calendaring system.
Part of the phenomenon was caused by global capitalism, but I soon learned that another aspect involved the globalization of “anno Domini.” The A.D. system, often called “C.E.” or “Common Era” time today, was introduced in Europe during the Middle Ages. It joined the world’s other temporal systems like the Coptic, Seleucid, Egyptian, Jewish and the Zodiac calendars, along with calculations based on the years of rulers’ reigns and the founding of Rome.
Latin Christendom slowly but confidently came to dominate Europe, and its year dating system then came to dominate the world, so that most countries now take A.D. for granted, at least when it comes to globalized business and government.
…But in many ways, the real author of the world’s modern sense of time, the one who decided to choose the date when Year One would begin, is the Venerable Bede, an English monk who lived circa 673-735.
Bede found himself with several calculations he did not approve of, and decided Christ must have actually been born on Dec. 25, 1 B.C.. By his reasoning, in other words, the A.D. system began a year after Jesus’ purported birth. Bede also determined that March 25, 34 A.D. marked Christ’s death.
…Bede, a monk in an important monastery in Northumbria, popularized the A.D. dating system by using it in his work “Ecclesiastical History of the People of England,” which made him the first historian to tell time by “anno Domini.”
…Today, many people use the expressions “common era” and “before the common era,” or C.E. and B.C.E., instead of A.D. and B.C. But despite what we call it now, the roots of this system are not “common” but Christian. As the medieval studies scholar Kathleen Davis writes, using C.E. “does little to diminish the effect of a globalized Christian calendar.”
Initially, I too had applauded C.E. as a less Christian replacement for A.D. But today, I’d argue it is just the equivalent of a yellow sticky note placed over it.
I am surprised that right-wing conservatives have not seized upon the move to switch to the CE and BCE labeling system, even though the numbering is still based on the older one, to whip up another faux-outrage that the Christian calendar is being canceled.
Of course it is. Just as Christmas is a yellow sticky note placed over the Roman observation of the winter solstice. There are yellow sticky notes everywhere!
Still, CE and BCE are preferable to me.
Actually, there have been clashes over the purported switch, with UK PM Boris Johnson telling the BBC that they had better not make the change and must stick with BC/AD.
Rob Grigjanis wrote,
“Still, CE and BCE are preferable to me.”
I concur; for the same reasons.
Hardly any need; context will suffice in almost any situation.
(If I told you I was born in 1960, you’d not bother asking whether it was in antiquity or recently, would you?)
It’s not all that recent. Johannes Kepler used it as far back as the 17th Century!
But, I have to say, as someone who uses the system daily (when you teach Greek, Roman and Medieval history it becomes important to get right which year 200 you mean) it doesn’t really matter all that much to me what you call the earlier and what the later periods. I grew up with BC and AD, and instinctively prefer them because of this, though I knew about BCE and CE from Primary School.
Likewise, I am fine with calling my midwinter holiday “Christmas” and my spring one “Easter”, even though the two deities referred to in those names don’t exist and I have no fondness for either. I am also fine with calling the planets by the names of Roman gods, and saying “oh god” when I am exasperated. It’s all just fossilised language features by now.
What does surprise me is that nobody has ever proposed putting a logical corollary of the Julian Calendar into effect -- starting the count in what we now refer to as 45BC, the first year the Julian Calendar was used. Or, possibly, with 8AD, that being the year in which our familiar regular leap year was finally agreed upon (the years between 45BC and 8AD used the older and much less regular Roman tradition of having the Pontifex Maximus decide if there should be an intercalary period added). It seems only sensible to start one’s dating system with the first year one’s calendar was used.
Mind you, ancient historians tend to be much more flexible when it comes to what we accept as a legitimate dating system. Before there was any kind of agreed system one has to deal in all kinds of local calendars -- the city of Athens had three, running concurrently! Indeed, a lot of dates in Greek history can’t be assigned to a specific year of our Julian Calendar, because years in different city-states began at different times, so we often have to refer to something happening in, for example 511/510BC.
I always thought it was odd that one was English and one was Latin. Why not just BC and AC, if you’re going to have Christ-centered dating?
If it makes them happy, Christians can just pretend the “c” in BCE and CE stands for “Christian” anyway.
On a similar note, I’ve always been amused that, when the US bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, the international date line moved from the Alaska-Canada border to the Bering Strait; and October 6 in the Julian calendar was followed by a second instance of the same day with a different name, October 18 in the Gregorian calendar. Isn’t civil time wonderful?
Certainly there are conservatives who complain about the shift to CE and BCE. I used to correspond with one who lamented it bitterly. I argued that it was wrong to impose explicitly Christian dating language upon non-Christian historians. His response, as I recall, was that long use had removed the religious connotations from the terms — after all, he said, you don’t see Christians out there trying to change the days of the week from Thor’s Day and Wotan’s Day.
I don’t think I had a good comeback at the time, but later I thought that Christians’ acceptance of those pagan names had a lot to do with the fact that they don’t see the Norse gods as a threat. If the days of the week were named Mohammedsday and Alisday, you can bet the farm that they would be out there lobbying to get them changed.
Krummel says: “…must have actually been born on must have actually been born on Dec. 25, 1 B.C. By his [Bede’s] reasoning, in other words, the A.D. system began a year after Jesus’ purported birth.”
However, because the BC/AD system has NO year zero, in actuality there is only one week from Dec. 25, 1 B.C., to the first day of the AD system, on January 1, 1 A. D.
Of course, in common usage and practice, most mentions of the year do not involve CE or AD at all, but are just a number. And most people don’t think about the meaning of it most of the time. To anyone who pretends that the USA is Christian because it was founded in 1776 A. D., I would respond that, because July 4 was a Thursday that year, that must mean that the USA is dedicated to the god Thor. If they want silly logic, we can reply with parallel silly logic. But as BruceGee1962 said in @#8, these religious references are all meaningless unless someone sees them as being connected with a clear and present danger.
Maybe we should lobby to bring the USA back to the way it was when it was founded, and the English colonies all required supporting the Church of England? By making religion mandatory, we can teach everyone to ignore it and have disdain for it, as in England. Nobody here worships Thor, and Christianity stuff will eventually follow it.
Bruce,
“In May 2013, the “Hammer of Thor” was added to the list of United States Department of Veterans Affairs emblems for headstones and markers.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathenry_in_the_United_States#Politics_and_controversies)
The BC/AD issue is yet another example of Christian privilege, albeit a rather small one. I tell my students that BCE and CE are the academic terms, and even those are anchored to Christianity. I would prefer BP and AP (before present and after present) but the present keeps jumping around.
@11: not at all! The Present is defined as 1 January 1950:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present
Ketil @12- I can’t believe I didn’t know that Saturday was the 72nd anniversary of the present!
Today is September 10352, 1993.
I think we’ll need a look at Jesus’ birth certificate.
@1 RobG: “Just as Christmas is a yellow sticky note placed over the Roman observation of the winter solstice.”
Wrong. Saturnalia started at 17 de and ended at latest at 23 dec.
https://historyforatheists.com/2020/12/pagan-christmas/
New Atheists love their myths as much as christian literalists do. So much for they being more rational. Are you one of them?
@6 Ridana: “If it makes them happy, Christians can just pretend the “c” in BCE and CE stands for “Christian” anyway.’
Something I’m indifferent to as well. Because nobody mentioned the main reason for the shift yet: AD suggests that Jesus of Nazareth was born in the year 0 or 1 (eventuall -1). We are pretty sure that he wasn’t; the best candidate is 7 BCE.
@8 bruceG: “I don’t think I had a good comeback at the time”
You still haven’t. You could as well bet on “if my father had been king of Norway”. Is equally convincing: not at all.
@9 Bruce: “in actuality there is only one week from Dec. 25, 1 B.C., to the first day of the AD system, on January 1, 1 A. D.”
Which leads some christians to the conclusion that Jesus was born in 1 BC indeed. They are wrong. One reason is that King Herodes the Great was already dead in that year.
I say we roll the calendar back 1000 years to coincide with the life of Bi Sheng, the inventor of moveable type and precursor to the printing press. It’s 1022PE (print era). Why not? Mass printing led to affordable literacy of the populace and the scientific revolution.
https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/printing-press
mnb0 @16: I wasn’t referring to Saturnalia, but to the date Romans assigned to the solstice;
Do you ever take a break from being a smug prat?
Oops. Linky;
https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Winter+Solstice
#8 Brucegee
I would guess that most people don’t know that the days of the week have religious origin at all.
Any calendar discussion legally requires a mention of “Give us back our eleven days!”
To be technical, the Associated Press stylebook says A.D. goes before the date, not after. B.C. follows the date. Historians use CE and BCE to reduce the “Christian-ness” (Common Era) of the dating system as many historians and other scholars are not Christians and reasonably object to treating it as specifically Christian. I imagine many would be willing to change the whole dating system if not for the horrendously complex problems of redating everything. Same problem with renaming cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles to eliminate the Christian aspects of their names -- it’s just not practical. I doubt most people ever think about or care about the religious roots of such names.
Historical footnote: If you go by the implied dates of the birth narratives of Luke and Matthew, Jesus was born either before 4 BCE or no earlier than 6 CE. And I’ve read that some early Christians purportedly believed Jesus was born around 100 BCE. So I agree with #15 that the only solution is to get Jesus’ birth certificate from the records of the Judean secretary of state. Can someone rent a Tardis from Doctor Who to make the trip?
Not only are the days of the week pagan, but so are the months -- the gods Janus, Februa, Mars, Maia, Juno, plus the deified Julius and Augustus Caesars. And September-December are simply the Latin numbers 7-10 (septem, octo, novem and decem). My memory is going bad, but even after 50-plus years I still remember a very few words from my Latin class.!
Since both the birth narratives for Jesus (in gMatthew and gLuke) are obvious retcons, to move Jesus’ birthplace from Galilee to Bethlehem in order to conform with prophecies that the Messiah would be born there (something with which the more sophisticated Christians would agree), there is no “best candidate”, and the date of Herod’s death is irrelevant.
But we don’t use the Julian calendar (unless we are members of the Russian Orthodox and IIRC some other Orthodox churches) -- we use the Gregorian, which was first used in October 1582 -- so, depending on whether we want a year 0, we should by your principle now be in year 440 or 441! (I’ve just calculated the last time the Julian and Gregorian calendars will agree on the year -- if I’ve calculated correctly* it will be on 31st December 48996 by the Gregorian calendar, which will be 1st January of the same year by the Julian.)
*Calculation:
Currently, the difference between the two is 13 days, with the Gregorian running ahead.
It will become 14 days on 29th February 2100 (Julian) -- the Gregorian won’t have a 29th February that year, so that Julian date will correspond to 14th March 2100 for the Gregorian. The difference will become 15 days on 29th February 2200 Julian, and 16 days on 29th February 2300, but will stay at 16 days through 2400, as the Gregorian calendar does have a 29th February 2400 just as it had a 29th February 2000.
Every 400 years, the difference increases by 3 days, so it will be 364 days (the 16 days of 2400 plus 116 lots of 3 days) throughout the year 48800 (by either calendar). On 29th February 48900 Julian it will increase to 365 days. After this, the year will be the same in both calendars only on 1st January Julian (31st December Gregorian) in leap years, and this will be the case in 48996. But 49000 will be a Julian but not a Gregorian leap year, so on 1st January 49000 Julian, it will be 1st January 49001 Gregorian, and on 29th February 49000 Julian, the difference will increase to 366 days.