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What's the Difference Between BCE/CE and BC/AD and Who Came Up with These Systems? - YouTube
Channel: Today I Found Out
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BCE (Before Common Era) and BC (Before Christ)
mean the same thing- previous to year 1 CE
[20]
(Common Era).
[21]
This is the same as the year AD 1 (Anno Domini);
the latter means âin the year of the lord,â
[26]
often translated as âin the year of our
lord.â
[28]
(It was thought when the AD dating system
was created that its year 1 was the year Jesus
[33]
of Nazareth was born.)
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Anno Domini was the first of these to appear.
[37]
Prior to the 6th century AD, many Christians
who didnât use an Anno Mundi (in the year
[42]
of the world) type system relied on Roman
dating, either marking dates from the year
[46]
legend had it that Romulus and Remus founded
Rome (753 BC) or by relying on the date system
[53]
established under the Roman emperor Diocletian
(244-311), based on the accession of Diocletian.
[61]
The_Christian_MartyrsHowever, most Christians
werenât too fond of Diocletian, since he
[65]
brutally persecuted them in the latter part
of his reign in the late third / early fourth
[70]
century.
[71]
This was supposedly in part a response to
advice Diocletian received at the oracle of
[75]
Apollo at Didyma.
[77]
Previous to this, he had purportedly only
advocated banning Christians from such things
[81]
as the military and ruling body in hopes that
would appease the gods.
[85]
Afterward, he switched to an escalating policy
of persecution to try to get Christians to
[90]
worship the Roman gods.
[91]
This began simply via seizing Christianâs
property, destroying their homes, burning
[95]
all Christian texts, etc.
[97]
When this sort of thing was ineffective, they
progressed to arresting and torturing Christians,
[103]
starting with the leaders.
[104]
When that didnât work, Christians began
to be killed in various brutal ways including
[108]
occasionally being torn apart by animals for
the amusement of the masses (Damnatio ad bestias).
[113]
This method of convincing people to worship
the Roman gods ended up being an amazing failure
[118]
and the persecution appears to have only continued
after AD 305 in the Eastern half of the empire
[125]
under Galerius and Maximinus.
[127]
Finally, in April of AD 311, by imperial decree,
the Great persecution was put to an end even
[134]
in the East.
[135]
A few years later, Constantine the Great (reigning
from AD 306 to 337) publicly declared himself
[142]
a Christian and Christianity began to transition
into the dominate religion in the Roman Empire.
[147]
In any event, Easter was/is the most important
holy day of the Christian tradition, and it
[153]
was decided at the First Council of Nicaea
(AD 325) that it should occur each year on
[160]
the Sunday following the first full moon after
the spring equinox.
[164]
In order to forecast when exactly the holiday
fell each year, Easter tables were created.
[169]
In AD 525, the monk Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia
Minor was working on his table to determine
[176]
when Easter fell when he decided to eliminate
reference to Diocletian by listing his tableâs
[182]
first year as Anno Domini 532, explicitly
stating this was referring to the year directly
[189]
following the last year of the old Diocletian-based
table, Anno Diocletiani 247.
[195]
How Dionysius came up with 525 years since
Jesus was born at the time he was calculating
[201]
his table (532 years from when the tableâs
dates began) isnât clear, but he wasnât
[206]
far off the range most biblical scholars today
think, with the more modern estimates tending
[211]
to ring in somewhere between 6 to 4 BC for
the actual birth of Christ.
[216]
The Anno Domini system, sometimes called the
Dionysian Era or Christian Era, began to catch
[221]
on among the clergy in Italy relatively soon
after and, though not terribly popular, did
[226]
spread somewhat among the clergy in other
parts of Europe.
[230]
Most notably, in the 8th century, the English
monk Bede (now known as the Venerable Bede)
[233]
used the dating system in his wildly popular
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
[237]
(AD 731).
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This is often credited with not only popularizing
the calendar reference, but also introducing
[244]
the concept of BC, notably setting 1 BC to
be the year prior to AD 1, ignoring any potential
[252]
zero year.
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(This is no surprise as Bede, like Dionysius,
didnât have a numeral zero to work with,
[259]
see: The Story of Zero.
[260]
However, they both did at various times reference
the Latin nihil, ânothingâ, in certain
[264]
places in calculating their tables where the
number zero should have gone had they had
[269]
such a numeral.)
[270]
It should also be noted that Bede didnât
actually use any such âBCâ abbreviation,
[273]
but rather in just one instance mentioned
a year based on ante incarnationis dominicae
[277]
tempus (âbefore the time of the lordâs
incarnationâ).
[279]
While there would be rare sporadic mentions
of years âbefore the time of the lordâs
[283]
incarnationâ from here on out, it wouldnât
be until Werner Rolevinckâs 1474 work Fasciculus
[288]
Temporum that it would be used repeatedly
in a work.
[292]
The English, âBefore Christâ didnât
appear until the latter half of the 17th century
[296]
and it wouldnât be until the 19th century
that it would be abbreviated.
[299]
Shortly after the Ecclesiastical History of
the English People, Anno Domini was used officially
[304]
under the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor
Charlemagne (AD 742-814) and in the 11th century,
[311]
it was adopted for official use by the Roman
Catholic Church.
[315]
CE and BCE are much more recent inventions.
[319]
This started in the 17th century, with the
advent of the term Vulgar Era; this wasnât
[324]
because people considered it to be an age
when everyone was coarse or rude, but because
[328]
âvulgarâ more or less meant âordinaryâ
or âcommonâ, thus reflecting that the
[333]
era was âof or belonging to the common peopleâ
(from the Latin vulgaris).
[336]
The first documented instance of the Vulgaris
Aerae (Vulgar Era, meaning âCommon Eraâ)
[339]
being used interchangeably with Anno Domini
was featured in Latin works by Johannes Kepler
[344]
in 1615, 1616, and 1617.
[346]
The English version of phrase later appeared
in 1635 in an English translation of Keplerâs
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1615 work.
[354]
(In the mid-seventeenth century the English
âvulgarâ took on a new definition of âcoarse,â
[358]
but it wouldnât be until this âcoarse/unrefinedâ
definition would become more common in the
[363]
20th century that referring to the Vulgar
Era would cease.)
[366]
The Latin phrase Aerae Christianae (Christian
Era) and the associated English âChristian
[371]
Eraâ was also used by some in the 17th century,
such as when Robert Sliter employed it in
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his A Celestiall Glass or Ephemeris for the
Year of the Christian Era 1 (1652).
[383]
Shortly thereafter, another âCEâ came
about with Common Era used interchangeably
[387]
with Vulgar Era, first appearing in the 1708
edition of The History of the Works of the
[392]
Learned and again in David Gregoryâs The
Elements of Astronomy (1715).
[397]
As for the actual abbreviation, CE (Common
Era) has been claimed to have been used as
[401]
early as 1831, though I couldnât find specifically
in what work it is supposed to have appeared
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in.
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Whatever the case, both it and BCE (Before
the Common Era) definitely appeared in Rabbi
[411]
Morris Jacob Raphallâs Post-Biblical History
of the Jews in 1856.
[417]
The use of BCE and CE was particularly popular
in the Jewish community where they were keen
[421]
to avoid using any nomenclature explicitly
referring to Christ as âthe lord.â
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Today, BCE and CE instead of BC and AD has
become fairly common among other groups for
[431]
similar reasons.
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