Calling "Time" on BC and AD
For more than a thousand years, BC and AD have bisected our understanding of time. Should we keep them?
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This is a riff on Simon Lambe’s article in History Today, Volume 74, #8, August 2024
This essay discusses how the Gregorian calender, commonly used in the 21st Century, arrived at its AD/BC division, and the common reason for the usage. Other calenders have other issues; I don’t take them up here.
The orthodox dating convention of Before Christ (BC) and Anno Domini (AD), Latin for “In the year of our Lord” are constructs historians and historical scientists use for framing time and how we record the events, and have been for over 1,000 years. Geographers, theologians, astronomers, historians, astrologers, politicians, and occasionally sociologists have contributed to these noisy discussions over the centuries, and now ethnologists appear to be entering the fray.
The Big Questions…
Why are BC English and AD Latin?
And that year zero: where is it? Is there one? Do we need one?
Was the turn of the millennium really 1 January 2000 or 1 January 2001?
Basic Math History
There is/was no zero in Roman numerals. Until the 13th Century, Europe lacked the concept of zero, period. In 1202, Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, wrote Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation). Considered one of the most important mathematical works of the Middle Ages, it introduced the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to Europe and made the zero more than just a placeholder. This dating is important to know for much of the following discussion.
The Emergence of AD
Dionysius Exiguus, a Scythian monk from Tomis (modern Constanta, Romania), conceived AD for Anno Domini around AD 525, basing his (rough) division on the then-common belief that Christ’s birth occurred 753 years after Rome's founding. However, Dionysius’ system it did not gain widespread use until 300 years later.
Bede, the Anglo-Saxon historian, used Dionysius’ dating system in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in AD 731. For Bede, the use of the AD system was important because he could fit the conversion of the English people into a narrative of God’s plan. Charlemagne encouraged the use of Anno Domini throughout the Carolingian Empire, reinforcing the centrality of Christ in his empire, and reflected Christ’s name every day. The spread of AD across his Empire is at the heart of its enduring dominance, becoming popular across Catholic Europe from the 11th to the 14th Centuries. In around 1700, following Russia, Eastern Orthodox nations also implemented AD. Much later, it found favor in the Republic of China (now Taiwan). Although the ROC uses its own Minguo Era system (where Year 1 is 1912 in the Gregorian calendar) internally, it uses the Gregorian calendar in an international context.
The Problem of BC
The period “before Christ” only interested medieval lawyers or clergymen when AD was being developed and adopted. General disinterest and an inability to settle on a simple, universal phrase for it were the biggest issues. Bede had experimented with “the year before the incarnation of the Lord.” German monk Werner Rolevinck used “In the year before the birth of Christ” in his world history of 1474. Denis Petau, a French Jesuit theologian, introduced ante Christum, “Before Christ” in 1627. While AD in its Latin form became widespread relatively early, and in Latin legal and ecclesiastical documents, “Before Christ” emerged in a post-Reformation, vernacular-speaking world, so it was more natural to adopt an English expression.
What’s in a name?
Revisions and alternatives to BC/AD dating have emerged over the centuries, including vulgaris aerae (vulgar era) (c.1615), Christian era (1652), and common era (1708). While these often make no specific reference to the birth of Christ, they are based on the same point of division as BC/AD. David Gregory, in his The Elements of Astronomy, Physical and Geometrical (1715), introduced the terms Before Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE), reflecting a post-Enlightenment departure from the reliance on religious terminology. Most have failed to gain widespread traction.
Why is all this important?
While critics claim that the BC/AD division is a Western Christian construct (which they are) and thus are exclusionary, in losing BC and AD, we only stand to gain a relatively nondescript replacement in BCE/CE. What is a “Common Era?” What can we expect from the period “Before Common Era?” These phrases have simply piggybacked the existing conceptual dating framework and revised the wording with similar but meaningless terms. The point is to offer more culturally neutral dating terminology in an increasingly secular landscape. The advantages of opting for terminology without reference to a Christian deity are that they comply with a more temporal outlook, with all the potential benefits that can stem from that choice: to permit an interfaith use of the same calendar.
But, if we do that, we overlook the fact that letters, missives, and chronicles in Western Europe consistently opened with and recorded the year using Anno Domini. It was the method of recording the vital dating information required in the last 2,000 years. Where possible, historians ought to use language that reflects the terminology used by those who wrote the documents we use today to understand the past. To just rebrand the fundamentals of historical discourse without stopping to consider a meaningful alternative, just renames the problem.
Year Zero: Where/What/Why Is It, Or Isn’t It?
There is no year zero in the Gregorian calendar. In the Gregorian calendar, the year 1 BC is followed by year AD 1. The Gregorian calendar is based on the Roman system of counting, which did not include zero. Since the number of recorded events between 4 BC and AD 1 are few, if there are any at all, this has never been a historical problem.
But it is an issue (kind of) when numbering centuries and millennia.
It’s not clear when anyone started saying/writing things like “18th Century” or “1700s,” but that phraseology in itself confuses many…because they refer to the same thing, strictly speaking. This is because the AD epoch technically began with Year 1 (whether or not anything happened then), which is referred to as being in the First Century AD. The year 101, thus, began the Second Century AD. The year 100 was still in the First Century because there is/was no year zero. This is only important to historians and geographers, but it explains the consequences of a lack of a Year 0.
However….
On 1 January 2000, popular culture celebrated the turn of the millennium and the beginning of the 21st Century. Well, pop culture was (technically) wrong! It wasn’t (technically) the 21st Century until a year later.
Not the first time the crowd was (technically) wrong.
Crop Duster: A Novel of WWII
My first novel, Crop Duster, started as an experiment, like nearly everything I write. It’s a dual narrative about two men, an American and a German, whose lives are more alike than different, but who must try to kill each other in the skies over Europe.
Bomber pilot Miller and fighter pilot Thielmann meet each other exactly twice over Germany. Only one encounter ended well. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Changing the Great Game
Choice or Destiny
And Finally...
On 11 January:
1861: The state of Alabama becomes the fourth state to secede from the Union. The Alabama Secession Convention in Montgomery adopted an Ordinance of Secession that declared Alabama a "Sovereign and Independent State." She rejoined the Union in July 1868.
1935: Amelia Earhart takes off to become the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the U.S. mainland. Though some called it a publicity stunt, the 2,408-mile flight had already claimed several lives.
And today is NATIONAL MILK DAY, commemorating the first milk delivered in glass bottles by Alexander Campbell in New York City on this day in 1878. I’m old enough to remember milk deliveries in glass bottles, along with bread and the odd doughnut. That ended, though, in the ‘70s, as I recall, but the bottles were already long gone.