When did the term ‘Anno Domini’ come into use to indicate dates?
The first historian or chronicler to use A.D. as his primary dating mechanism was the Anglo-Saxon monk Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, published around 730.
I thought that the dating of the birth of Christ (and hence of the use of “in the year of Our Lord”) was due to Dionysus Exiguus (“Dennis the Short”) a fw hundred years earlier.
If you read the linked article, it does credit the invention of the Anno Domini system to Dionysius Exiguus, in the middle of the 6th century. The later chronicler Bede popularized it.
Somehow that link isn’t working for me. But anyway,
and
So who’s right? Dunno, but taken together, it may be that Dionysius first coined the term, but Bede codified it into a counting system later. Even then, it took a while to achieve widespread use, as some parts of Spain did not adopt it until the 14th Century (Duncan, p. 75). Off-the-topic WAG: probably had to do with the Moorish population there.
Wanna know more? B.C. was not used as a counting system for pre-A.D. years until Dionysius Petavius argued for its use in 1627. Well, actually, he advocated the term ante Christum — the alternative ante Domini being confusing — rather than the modern English before Christ. (Steel, p. 114 and Duncan, p. 75) Anyway, this means A.D. actually came before B.C.
I don’t know why there are so many Duncans and Dionysiuses involved in this business. Must be a secret rule or something.