I understand what each one means. As well as BCE and CE. But I’m wondering why did we feel the need the number the years according to Jesus’ supposed birthday. And if it was so flawed (nobody even knows if Jesus was real, let alone when his birthday was) why did we keep it going? Could you imagine what year we could be in right now if we counted them normally?
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Because the separation of Church and State was an invention in response to the protestant war in Europe that slaughtered so much of Germany and plenty of other places in the early modern era that the leaders of the continent had to get together and agree to stop *brazenly* killing eachother over being Catholic, Protestant, or the wrong kind of Protestant. Though shooting the Ottomans for being Muslim heathens was still allowed, let’s not pretend these people were *enlightened* or anything.
Let’s back up a bit with a fun fact: The modern calendar, specifically the number of days in the year, how we divide the months, and the concept of Leap Days, dates back very specifically to about ~40-ish BC, and was one of Julius freaking Caesar’s pet projects after he won the civil war he caused by marching on Rome.
This is relevant because Caesar was *able to do this* not actually because he was a Dictator and a King in all but name at the time, but because it was legitimately his job as the Pontifex Maximus- Rome’s highest elected religious official (yes there were some technically higher ones who hel a ceremonial role, and yes, priests were elected in Rome, because politics and religion were seen as *very deeply tied together*), so Rome already viewed the observation of the Calendar as a religious thing long before then, which was only doubled-down-on after Caesar’s death and subsequent deification- “This god in the pantheon is incidentally the guy who rewrote the Calendar” makes a pretty clear connection even if there hadn’t been one in the past, doesn’t it?
Anywho, fast-forward a few centuries, after Rome has been Christianized and the Church establishes itself with a hierarchy and a bureaucracy in Rome. I don’t think they were still using the Roman Republic tradition of tracking the years not by number, but by the names of that year’s two Consuls, considering the Consulship hadn’t mattered for *generations* by that point, if it was even still an office (I like Roman Republic history, I never studied much on the Empire, alright?) so I don’t know how people tracked the years before the introduction of the AD system, but just from that brief description, you can see why someone, at some point, switched the Romans over to a numerical system, but to do that, you need to choose a Year 1.
If this was first done before Rome was Christianized, Year 1 wouldn’t be something ancient or far off, it was probably Rome’s mythological founding sometime around ~300BC, because you need to choose a start date for the calendar to start counting from, so it’s just a question of what the society values as an important date at the time they rewrite the Calendar. And when the AD system was conceived, it was by priests in a Post-Christian Rome, so their best estimate of Jesus’s birth was the date they chose.
So, to answer specific quibbles in your post: Today, It seems silly to doubt that Jesus existed as some Jewish prophet in the Levant around ~30ish AD. If he was Divine is obviously an entirely different question, but the books of the New Testament do have little touches and details that make them seem like they originated as genuine recollections and accounts of some guy who picked up a religious following. Dude was real, and probably really got crucified, we don’t really have any good reason not to believe that.
Why we keep it going, especially now in a less-religious society, I mean, you mention knowing about CE and BCE, which is the ultimate example: *Momentum*. This system of dates has been around for *over a thousand years*, and we’ve kept that shit pretty consistent through that time. If you told me “Stop using AD, It’s for religious hacks, use this new system I made up instead”, I’d tell you to piss off, it’s not important enough to raise a big fuss about changing. And that’s from someone who *isn’t* religious. I’ll leave their responses to your imagination.
“If we counted them normally” is a choice of words that doesn’t even make sense. Normally *from what*? Every numerical calendar needs a year 1, a start date, a point where it begins, so what are you trying to say we should’ve been counting from the whole time? Yeah, the effectively-mythological presumed birthdate of a religious prophet is an arbitrary start point, but so is everything else we could pick, so who cares?
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