Why do we divide history between BC and AD?

Question

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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Answer 1

What does “count normally” mean? Any way you slice it, you would be using some country’s government-made calendar.

Let’s zoom out. The Roman Kingdom (lunar), the Roman Republic (Julian), then the Roman Papacy (Gregorian) made all of the calendar that the Western Civilization uses and they had political, scientific, and religious reasons to do so each time.

Before the invocation of Christ, the founding of Rome was the date they numbered years by.

As for the convention of naming all of the years after Jesus Christ, that was already a Roman convention. Just as the Victorian Era is named after the ruler Queen Victoria, in ancient times, a year was named after the leader of the time. Think of it this way, the farther back you go in Roman history, the definition of a “year” was more in line with the definition of how long government was in session. Go back far enough and they didn’t count entire weeks as part of the year because who the hell wants to work in the middle of winter? 😛

The more that the calendar became standardized to be measured outside of the year-to-year needs of the government and outside of the belief of any one ruler being more important than one Lord and Savior, and you get a systematic calendar that counts all days and is named only after Jesus.

So…. If we weren’t counting back from Christ’s invocation, we’d be counting back from the founding of Rome, and if not that, then we’d be using the Copic Calender of Hellenistic Egypt which, although older than the others actually reformed it’s start of its calendar to “The Era of the Martyrs” the last major persecution of Christians in the Empire by Roman Emperor Diocletian. The when the current calendar was adopted by the Pope in the 1500s, he didn’t want to ironically name the years after the last great Christian persecutor, so they used The Year of Our Lord.

So that’s right… The calendars themselves are one giant JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure reference. EVERYTHING is a JoJo’s reference!!!!