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?
In: 0
Because that’s how influential a religion can be.
> nobody even knows if Jesus was real
There is historical proof of a guy, but obviously him being the messiah is another story. But yes, I believe the dates are I think 3 or so years off from his birth.
It doesn’t really make a difference what we call the year, so long as we all call it the same year (it does/did make for much prettier new years glasses though; could you imagine making a glasses design using 4,500,000,000?), though we still aren’t at that point (heck, we only just recently [made a jump towards most everyone doing their own ages the same](https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-age-counting-law-a38a4a6b47c6864bd13433fdac071cec)).
> Could you imagine what year we could be in right now if we counted them normally?
What do you mean by “normally”? We need an arbitrary starting point. CE/BCE was chosen to align with BC/AD due to convenience as it was already widely used, and there’s no advantage to any other system.
Christianity.
There are a lot of calendars around the world that do not adhere to the BCS/CE convention, including the Jewish calendar.
> why did we feel the need the number the years according to Jesus’ supposed birthday
Because the birth of Jesus is important to Christians? It’s the same reason Muslims count the years from Mohammed’s migration to Medina, or Jews count the years from the beginning of the Book of Genesis.
> nobody even knows if Jesus was real
You’d be very hard pressed to find a modern historian who does not believe that Jesus was a real historical person.
> let alone when his birthday was
When the estimate was first made way back in the 6th century it was accurate given the available sources. With the benefit of a more complete historical record we now know that the estimate was a few years off, but by then the calendar was in such common usage that it couldn’t practically be changed.
Humans generally live less than a hundred years. History goes back to when? We didn’t really get into writing until perhaps 5,000 years or so ago (likely a bit more). So there are no references to a “normal count” for years (how would humans ever agree given no writing and certainly no global communication)
Hence year counts are necessarily arbitrary. Some culture/religion/government/ruler picks a time and says “start from here”. Even today, there are other calendars in use (Jewish, Chinese, Muslim) Just happens that in this time and period of history, the Julian calendar seems like the most global one. That isn’t any guarantee that it will always remain that way in the future.
Certainly no one alive at 1 AD thought of their year as 1 AD. This was only really established arbitrarily by the Catholic/Christian church some few centuries later. And clearly it would be ridiculous for someone alive at the time to say “this is the year 1 BC”. (think about it)
Well, we could replace it with dendrochronological (tree ring) dates, which can go back over 10,000 years. Given that the US is still not using the metric system, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a change.
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!!!!
Because it doesn’t matter so we keep doing it the way it was done before. And it was done like that before because they liked the symbolic of Jesus being the beginning of time.
And because the starting point doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t matter that they probably got Jesus’ birth year wrong.
AD/BC were the standard for a long time in the west and in turn for academia/science. CE/BCE were an attempt to make the terms non-religious. However at the same time having to go through and convert dates that were in print would be an insane and unnecessary undertaking.
Just think of the work it would take to convert a week to 10 days vs 7.
I remember an interview with niel deGrasse Tyson where he explained that the modern calandar, the gragorian calandar which was created by these fanatic monks hundreds of years back was the best calandar man ever contrived. That the Julien calandar, the man calandar, the Chinese calandar, none of them were as accurate.
The naming convention of Before Christ, and Ano Domini were their convention and out of tribute respect, he uses their BC and AD markings and not the established Before and After the common erra markings made by the politically correct within academia.
The year 0 is of course the supposed birth year of Jesus, the manner, three wise guys, you know, the whole nativity scene. Before that, we have BC, after that we have AD, or the year of our lord, which you may hear in plays and movies when old timey court scenes play out, “in the year of our lord, seventeen hundred and fourth-eight,….”
Other cultures like the Japanese have many different eras, mainly for various leaders, empowers, etc. For these you’d see records saying, “5th year of the meji era” from there we’d have to figure out what year on the gregorian calandar was being referred to.
The Roman did the same thing, reading the Bible you’d see references to “in the xth year of August’s reign” or similar conventions bu period historians.
But yeah, we have the Jesuit monks to thank for the BC and AD distinctions
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