BC/AD vs. BCE/CE

Great Debates
1

Nowadays it is increasingly popular to substitute the terms “Before Common Era” and “Common Era” instead of BC and AD due to the latter explicitly naming what the dating system is derived from-that is the birth of Christ as calculated by some ancient chronologists.

My question though is, if we’re going to be using a dating system derived from (the probably wrong) birth of Christ, it seems simply dishonest that the dating system should be called BCE and CE rather than what the dating system is really derived from.

2

I always use the CE/BCE, mainly because its nice to separate history from fantasy, but I agree that it should start from a different year. Exactly why should the dark ages be part of any “common” era?

3

It probably would have been OK if it had been BJ and AJ, although junior high school kids would have giggled. Jesus is a name. But “Christ” is a title, meaning Messiah, and for most of the people in the world, Jesus is not the Messiah.

Even worse, AD is short for Anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord,” and most of the world is definitely not going to go along with that.

IMO it’s bizarre to call it dishonest to use the same dates with unoffensive acronymns (assuming, of course, you’re not one of those Christians who is offended any time Christianity isn’t treated as the One True Religion, and consider “Happy Holidays” a war on Christmas). I would say it’s magnanimous of the rest of the world to use the same dates at all.

It’s also more accurate. It makes no sense to say Jesus was born in 4 BC, but it’s perfectly sensible to say he was born in 4 BCE.

4

Since it’s pretty universally conceded that BC/AD is probably misdated with respect to the actual year of birth of Jesus of Nazareth (including in the OP), it seems more “honest” to use BCE/CE. “BC” doesn’t actually accurately represent the exact number of years before the birth of Jesus (without even getting into whether or not it’s “honest” for someone who doesn’t accept Jesus as Christ or as Lord to refer to such-and-such years “Before Christ” or “Anno Domini”). On the other hand, the calendar which declares this to be the year 2013 pretty much has become the “Common Era” of the planet. (This is not to say that it’s universally used, but it’s the calendrical equivalent of a lingua franca.) You could even expand “CE” to mean “Christian Era” if you prefer–the era or calendar originally invented by Christians (and now also the “Common Era”).

5

I don’t see how calling CE as “christian era” is an expansion. JC’s time on Earth is limited to a supposed 33 years, then ascension. So social acceptance of lifestyles and beliefs as it were 1,980 years ago is still common? No.

Even if true, the amount of different sects and variations of Jesus’ teachings is certainly seen in so many different ways than early christians saw it. I doubt a politician or preacher with a four-car garage filled with Mercedes claiming to be personally blessed by JC is anything close to his teachings. If anything, it’s a HUGE reduction of the word “Christian”. Almost makes it seem like, “Eh, if you’ve heard of a bible, you’re christian.”

Even calling the era “common” is very misleading. We have a lot of other eras named for industry, iron, bad times, good times, etc. In 2013 years and counting, it’s no longer that common an era. Two cars in one household is unheard of in most places 60 years ago. A college education for a girl 80 years ago? Very uncommon.

I think we should call year 1 CE/AD something else. Not sure what, but what are we even calling the last 100 years? The Technological Era? The Modern Era? How about Civilized Era? Eh, maybe not that civilized.

6

By “expansion” I just meant that you can say “C.E.” is an abbreviation for “C…ommon E…ra” or “C…hristian E…ra”, whichever suits you.

It’s the “Christian Era” in that it’s the era invented by, you know, Christians. (Specifically by a monk named Diogenes the Short.)

None of that has much of anything to do with, well, anything. The calendar in which this is the Year 2013 was originally made up by Christians, so referring to it as the “Christian Era” is reasonably descriptive, in the same way that the calendar in which this is the Year 5774 is the Jewish Calendar.

The current calendar–the “Gregorian Calendar” to be precise–is a totally different thing from the Stone Age/Bronze Age/Iron Age/Space Age/Plastic Age/Internet Age/Twerking Age periods people come up with. The “2013th year of the Common Era” is just a convenient way to refer to the current year, since referring to this as the Fifth Year of the Presidency of Barack Obama isn’t a fashionable way to number years anymore, and wouldn’t fly outside the USA in any event. And Year of the Universe 13,798,000,000 is too many digits and isn’t really all that precise, and I might call it the 43rd Year of Me, but you might call it the 17th Year or the 83rd Year of You, and we’ll never get anything done that way.

Since the Christians did a better job of evangelizing and/or beating up on everyone else, the world has adopted their calendar as the “Common” reference point. To a guy from Riyadh this is the 1434th year since the Hegira, and to a guy from Bangkok it’s the Year 2556 of the Buddhist Era, but if they need to talk to each other, they can both say it’s the year 2013 (and specifically that it’s September 5 of the year 2013), and that way they can both agree on when their shipment of oil or cassava or whatever the hell it is is overdue.

7

Okay then, let’s replace “Before Christ” with “Before the Year that Some People Once Mistakenly Thought Was the Birth Year of Jesus, Whom Christians Consider Christ and Lord.” Seems kinda long, though, even if we abbreviate it.

8

hmm, most would say 5th of september 2013, though. September 5 is not Common notation.

9

I don’t see any problem with sticking to AD and BC. For various historical reasons the European dating system become the standard for the world eclipsing all of the others (chinese, Hebrew, Islamic etc.) and continued for the secular reason of traditional simplicity and consistency rather than for religious reasons.

We continue to use Wednesday for the 4th day of the week without worrying that we are promoting Wotan, and the third month March without worrying about promoting Mars. Why should be worry about calling the date system AD.

Changing it to CE and BCE seems overly PC and unnecessary.

10

Two comments.

(1) There are a huge number of papers, e.g. on anthropology, which use BP - Before Present. I can imagine a future recovering civilization basing its calendar on these, where P is “a fuzzy period of several decades when lots of Papers were Published.”

(2) In the unlikely event that a major calendar change is made, will anyone join me in pushing for a Year Zero? Maybe I’m just too used to communicating with computers rather than humans but it’s always seemed wrong that the span from 25 BC to 25 AD is 49 years, not 50.

11

How about a new calendar? ‘The Year of Our Bomb’ 69 AT?

Where AT = After Trinity (the first successful nuclear bomb, July 16, 1945)

Or ‘The Year of Space’ 45 AT

Where AT = After Tranquility (where Apollo 11 landed)

12

I remember growing up many works in Spanish used “Era Cristiana” rather than “Después de Cristo”, so later on seeing AEC/EC was entirely unremarkable to me.

A majority of humankind does not consider that particular character to be “Their Lord” nor seems likely to change their mind about that in the foreseeable future, so Anno Domini would at best get a :rolleyes: from them. Yet at the same time, for practical reasons of efficient commercial and academic communication many of them have adopted the Gregorian calendar’s AD dates as a *common *reference, often while still retaining AM, AH, Regnal Year, etc. for intracultural use.

As earlier mentioned, to add insult to injury the actual years of Jesus’ life and ministry are not exactly known but we believe it most likely they’re off by 4 to 6 years from Exiguus’ Year One datum.

So why not refer to the calendric era numbered according to the miscalibrated AD dates as the “Common” era, if you feel your audience may not be composed exclusively of Christians? Never caused me a minute’s pause when I first encountered it, found it a perfectly good alternative. Want to use BC/AD (or in Spanish AC/DC :p) among your cultural compatriots? Fine with me, too. Does not offend me either.

I got enough trouble with event scheduling for next week to be hung up on what letters I append to the year Caesar got shivved.

13

The convention is that we’re using the Gregorian calendar, and that it uses AD/BC.

It’s history, not religion, and it seems to me like the silliest sort of beating around the bush to pointedly not use the historical convention just because it happens to have roots and terminology based in the Christian church 2000+ years ago.

(ninjaed by Buck Godot)

14

Cite?

I find it pretty common. US Military style is “5 September 2013”. Another common but criticized style is “September 5th”. In casual speech, I probably use the latter, despite being aware of the (valid but pedantic) criticism.

15

That would get my vote. I’d even have been willing to say that 0 CE = 1 BC, but that horse left the barn already. Plus, think of the billions of dollars of damage it’d cause due to incorrect date conversions! :wink:

16

Spanish works similar (except by adding “de”[“of”] between the parts of the date) to US military style, which seems a NATO-standardized usage. Except for the first of the month in casual usage, we do not use ordinals for the day numbers.

17

Most of this discussion hinges on the precise definition of the word, “common.”

One definition, and the one most here are using, is, “a frequent occurrence, happening with regularity.”

Another definition, and, I believe, the one envisioned by the coiners of the phrase “Common Era,” is “a connection between two or more disparate systems.”

Many cities and communities have a “Commons,” or an area or park, usually near the center of the village, where people from different areas of town can get together for a variety of purposes. Many industrial systems have automated alarms, and several functionally-related conditions will set a “Common” alarm, which may or may not happen with any frequency (it may, actually, be quite rare.) Electrical systems occasionally have a “Common Bus,” where several different logical circuits share the same electrical path.

In the case of the “Common Era,” I, and many other people, perceive it as an adaptation to the multitude of local, incompatible date-reckoning systems which had been in place at the time.

It had been a long-established practice to date noteworthy events from the beginning of the reign of the local monarch, warlord, or ruler. This, unfortunately, meant that people from different regions would have widely varying dates for the same events. It was the intention to reconcile these incompatible systems that led to the introduction of a “Common” dating convention, whereby all “civilized” peoples (i.e., those who we communicate with on a regular basis) would be able to agree on a calendar.

Since the Roman Catholic Church had spread throughout Europe at the time, and virtually every community had a representative who spoke and understood Latin, it was obvious (to those who instituted the calendar) to use the purported date of the birth of Christ as the starting point of the new calendar.

As Buck Godot pointed out, we currently use the Roman pantheon to name some of our months, the Norse pantheon for the names of our days, and nobody feels we are promoting belief in these religions thereby—why cause a major international disruption in the naming convention for our years, to preserve the tender sensibilities of a few who find “Common Era” distasteful?

18
19

While I understand the argument behind BCE/CE, and I have no particular attachment to BC/AD, it just strikes me as pedantic. Everyone knows that the calculations for BC/AD are wrong, similarly everyone knows that BCE/CE is based on BC/AD, just called something else. Yes, it derives from a particular event in a particular religion, but it is what it is.

I’m not pagan, yet I still use the common names for the days of the week. I don’t celebrate Christmas, and everyone knows that Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th–the whole Happy Holidays thing aside as I don’t see how it’s related to what the day itself is called–but it’s still called Christmas. So I don’t see how using BC/AD is anything that needs a different name if it’s exactly the same thing.

If we want to adopt a different name for more secular or academic purposes, why not just use that for situations where it’s appropriate or other calendars as those are appropriate. Frankly, if we’re going to put in an effort to secularize, why not also create a secular era instead?

20

BP has to do with carbon dating.
BP means before 1950, because atom bomb tests messed up using C-14 after that date.