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THE COUNTING OF YEARS
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- Man always wanted to count days, and "months" to keep track of things.
- The idea of counting "years" was around for as long as man has had 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. 2021" would read "in the year of our lord 2021."
- In recent years, an alternative form of B.C./A.D. now is "C.E.," or "common era," and "B.C.E.," or "before common era."
- History of BC/AD: The Hebrew calendar, still in use, is based on a concept known as Anno Mundi ("in the year of the world") which dates events from the beginning of the creation of the earth as calculated through scripture. Ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Egypt based their calendars on the reigns of kings or the cycles of the seasons as set by the gods.
- In Mesopotamia, for example, one might date an event as "five years from the reign of King Shulgi" and, in Egypt, as "three years after the last Opet Festival of Ramesses who was the second of that name" or, otherwise, "In the 10th year of the reign of Ramesses who triumphed at Kadesh".
- This method of dating was continued by the Romans who counted their years according to three different systems in different eras: from the founding of Rome, by which consuls were in power, and by which emperors ruled at a given time.
- Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) reformed the calendar and renamed the months during his reign (49-44 BCE). This calendar remained in use, with periodic revisions, until 1582 CE when Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian Calendar still in use in the present day. Christians used the Anno Mundi calendar and the Roman calendar in the early years of the faith. In c. 525 CE, however, a new concept in dating was introduced by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470-544 CE) which provided the groundwork for the later dating system of BC/AD.
- 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 on one 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.
- 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.
- 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. 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.
- Today: The use of BCE/CE in the present day, then, is not an attempt by the "politically correct" to remove Jesus of Nazareth from the calendar but has precedent in history. The usage began when people were questioning received knowledge and forming their own educated opinions about how the world worked and what constituted reliable sources. Kepler uses "vulgar era" at a time when many institutions and understandings were being questioned and among these would have been how Dionysius arrived at his conclusions regarding the date of the birth of Jesus.
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