The
preface to what follows: You owe it to yourself to read, see, and
understand everything you can in regards to the decision about what you
believe. Making a decision, and refusing to see any information, or
not educating yourself about the decision you are making is FOOLISH.
The cornerstone at the Iowa State Capitol reads, "IOWA. A.D. 1873."
Credit: Iowa Legislature
The idea of counting years has been around for as long as we have
written records, but the idea of syncing up where everyone starts
counting is relatively new. Today the international standard is to
designate years based on a traditional reckoning of the year Jesus was
born — the “A.D.” and "B.C." system.
"A.D." stands for anno domini, Latin for “in the year of the
lord,” and refers specifically to the birth of Jesus Christ. "B.C."
stands for "before Christ." In English, it is common for "A.D." to
precede the year, so that the translation of "A.D. 2014" would read "in
the year of our lord 2014." In recent years, an alternative form of
B.C./A.D. has gained traction. Many publications use "C.E.," or "common
era," and "B.C.E.," or "before common era." Before we talk about how and
why the system was invented, let's get some historical context.
When is Easter?
In the early Middle Ages, the most important calculation, and thus one
of the main motivations for the European study of mathematics, was the
problem of when to celebrate Easter. The First Council of Nicaea, in A.D. 325, had decided that Easter would fall on the Sunday following the full moon that follows the spring equinox.
Computus (Latin for computation) was the procedure for calculating this
most important date, and the computations were set forth in documents
known as Easter tables. It was onone such table that, in A.D. 525, a
monk named Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor introduced the A.D.
system, counting the years since the birth of Christ. They say below they theorize how this monk did this. But in the same breath they state that he had "Easter Tables" where time had been being tracked from the Diocletian system. So, there was at the time a tracking mechanism whereby they could count time that had passed and calculate time to come. No theorizing needs to be done. They knew about Christ at 500 years +/- of his death, and had been tracking it. And they set up a system that marked the time of when he lived and when he died.
--> So that means the monks, and the people of the time were keeping track of the time passing since the death of Christ and before his death.
Anno Diocletiani to Anno Domini
Dionysius devised his system to replace the Diocletian system, named
after the 51st emperor of Rome, who ruled from A.D. 284 to A.D. 305. The
first year in Dionysius' Easter table, “Anno Domini 532,” followed the
year “Anno Diocletiani 247.” Dionysius made the change specifically to
do away with the memory of this emperor who had been a ruthless
persecutor of Christians.
Dionysius never said how he determined the date of Jesus' birth, but
some authors theorize that he used current beliefs about cosmology,
planetary conjunctions and the precession of equinoxes to calculate the
date. Dionysius attempted to set A.D. 1 as the year of Jesus Christ’s
birth, but was off in his estimation by a few years, which is why the
best modern estimates place Christ’s birth at 4 B.C. [Related: Easter Science: 6 Facts About Jesus]
Adding in the years before Christ
The addition of the B.C. component happened two centuries after
Dionysius, when the Venerable Bede of Northumbria published his
"Ecclesiastical History of the English People" in 731. Up until this
point, Dionysius’ system had been widely used. Bede’s work not only
brought the A.D. system to the attention of other scholars, but also
expanded the system to include years before A.D. 1. Prior years were
numbered to count backward to indicate the number of years an event had
occurred “before Christ” or “B.C.”
No Year Zero?
According to Charles Seife in his book "Zero: The Biography of a
Dangerous Idea": “To Bede, also ignorant of the number zero, the year
that came before 1 A.D. [sic] was 1 B.C. There was no year zero. After
all, to Bede, zero didn’t exist.”
However, zero did exist; our modern conception of zero
was first published in A.D. 628 by the Indian scholar Brahmagupta. The
idea would not spread to medieval Christian Europe, however, until the
11th to 13th centuries.
Spread of the system
The B.C./A.D. system gained in popularity in the ninth century after
Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne adopted the system for dating acts of
government throughout Europe.
By the 15th century, all of Western Europe had adopted the B.C./A.D.
system. The system's inclusion was implicit in the 16th-century
introduction of the Gregorian calendar, and it later would become an
international standard in 1988 when the International Organization for
Standardization released ISO 8601, which describes an internationally accepted way to represent dates and times.
Common and vulgar eras
The alternative form of “Before the Common Era” and “Common Era” dates
back to 1715, where it is used in an astronomy book interchangeably with
“Vulgar Era.” At the time, vulgar meant “ordinary,” rather than
“crude.” The term “Vulgar Era” is even older, first appearing in a 1615
book by Johannes Kepler.
Rationales for the transition from A.D. to C.E. include (1) showing
sensitivity to those who use the same year number as that which
originated with Christians, but who are not themselves Christian, and
(2) the label “Anno Domini” being arguably inaccurate, since scholars
generally believe that Christ was born some years before A.D. 1 and that
the historical evidence is too sketchy to allow for definitive dating.
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