The Gregorian calendar is the world’s standard for dating events. Though rooted in Western Christianity, today it transcends religious, cultural and linguistic boundaries.
This calendar uses the abbreviation AD (Anno Domini – “in the year of the Lord”) for years after Jesus’ birth, and BC (Before Christ) for earlier years. However, some now prefer the religiously neutral abbreviations CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era).
While AD/BC and CE/BCE mean the same thing, CE/BCE better reflects the calendar’s global, non-religious status today.
The era of BCE, meaning the Before Common Era is 1 year prior to the CE (Common Era). Hence, technically, the difference between CE and BCE can be noted as
- CE – The era of year 1 and onward
- BCE – The era before year 1
This is the same as the year AD 1 (Anno Domini); the latter means in the year of the lord, often translated as in the year of our lord. (It was thought when the AD dating system was created that its year 1 was the year Jesus of Nazareth was born.)
Anno Domini was the first of these to appear. Before the 6th century AD, many Christians who didn’t use an Anno Mundi (in the year of the world) type system relied on Roman dating, either marking dates from the year legend had it that Romulus and Remus founded Rome (753 BC) or by relying on the date system established under the Roman emperor Diocletian (244-311), based on the accession of Diocletian.
Initially, the adoption of the BCE/CE system by Jewish scholars over a century ago was primarily motivated by the desire to maintain religious neutrality, and this rationale remains the most widely cited justification for its use. However, some objected to the BC/AD system on the grounds of its factual inaccuracy. That’s where the disagreement about BCE vs BC rose to the peak. It is generally accepted that Jesus was actually born at least two years before AD 1, leading some to argue that explicitly associating years with an erroneous birthdate for Jesus is arbitrary and even misleading. The BCE/CE system avoids this inaccuracy by not explicitly referring to Jesus’ birth, thereby removing some of the baggage associated with our dating system while also acknowledging that the starting point for 1 CE is essentially a convention.
However, most Christians weren’t too fond of Diocletian, since he brutally persecuted them in the latter part of his reign in the late third/ early fourth century. This was supposedly, in part, a response to advice Diocletian received at the oracle of Apollo at Didyma. Previous to this, he had purportedly only advocated banning Christians from such things as the military and ruling body in hopes that would appease the gods. Afterwards, he switched to an escalating policy of persecution to try to get Christians to worship the Roman gods. This began simply via seizing Christian property, destroying their homes, burning all Christian texts, etc. When this sort of thing was ineffective, they progressed to arresting and torturing Christians, starting with the leaders. When that didn’t work, Christians began to be killed in various brutal ways including occasionally being torn apart by animals for the amusement of the masses (Damnatio ad bestias).
This method of convincing people to worship the Roman gods ended up being a massive failure and the persecution appears to have only continued after AD 305 in the Eastern half of the empire under Galerius and Maximinus. Finally, in April of AD 311, by imperial decree, the Great persecution was put to an end even in the East. A few years later, Constantine the Great (reigning from AD 306 to 337) publicly declared himself a Christian and Christianity began to transition into the dominate religion in the Roman Empire.
In any event, Easter was/is the most important holy day of the Christian tradition, and it was decided at the First Council of Nicaea (AD 325) that it should occur each year on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. In order to forecast when exactly the holiday fell each year, Easter tables were created.
In AD 525, the monk Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor was working on his table to determine when Easter fell when he decided to eliminate reference to Diocletian by listing his table’s first year as Anno Domini 532, explicitly stating this was referring to the year directly following the last year of the old Diocletian-based table, Anno Diocletiani 247. How Dionysius came up with 525 years since Jesus was born at the time he was calculating his table (532 years from when the table’s dates began) isn’t clear, but he wasn’t far off the range most biblical scholars today think, with the more modern estimates tending to ring in somewhere between 6 to 4 BC for the actual birth of Christ.
The Anno Domini system, sometimes called the Dionysian Era or Christian Era, began to catch on among the clergy in Italy relatively soon after and, though not terribly popular, did spread somewhat among the clergy in other parts of Europe. Most notably, in the 8th century, the English monk Bede (now known as the Venerable Bede) used the dating system in his wildly popular Ecclesiastical History of the English People (AD 731). This is often credited with not only popularising the calendar reference, but also introducing the concept of BC, notably setting 1 BC to be the year prior to AD 1, ignoring any potential zero year. It should also be noted that Bede didn’t actually use any such abbreviation, but rather in just one instance mentioned a year based on ante incarnationis dominicae tempus (before the time of the lord’s incarnation). While there would be rare sporadic mentions of years before the time of the lord’s incarnation from here on out, it wouldn’t be until Werner Rolevinck’s 1474 work Fasciculus Temporum that it would be used repeatedly in a work. The English, Before Christ didn’t appear until the latter half of the 17th century and it wouldn’t be until the 19th century that it would be abbreviated.
Shortly after the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Anno Domini was used officially under the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (AD 742-814) and in the 11th century, it was adopted for official use by the Roman Catholic Church.
As we talk about BCE vs BC, the terms CE and BCE are much more recent inventions. This started in the 17th century, with the advent of the term Vulgar Era; this wasn’t because people considered it to be an age when everyone was coarse or rude, but because vulgar more or less meant ordinary or common, thus reflecting that the era was of or belonging to the common people (from the Latin vulgaris).
The first documented instance of the Vulgaris Aerae (Vulgar Era, meaning Common Era) being used interchangeably with Anno Domini was featured in Latin works by Johannes Kepler in 1615, 1616, and 1617. The English version of phrase later appeared in 1635 in an English translation of Keple’s 1615 work. (In the mid-seventeenth century the English vulgar took on a new definition of coarse, but it wouldn’t be until this coarse/unrefined definition would become more common in the 20th century that referring to the Vulgar Era would cease.)
The Latin phrase Aerae Christianae (Christian Era) and the associated English Christian Era was also used by some in the 17th century, such as when Robert Sliter employed it in his A Celestiall Glass or Ephemeris for the Year of the Christian Era 1 (1652).
Shortly thereafter, another CE came about with Common Era used interchangeably with Vulgar Era, first appearing in the 1708 edition of The History of the Works of the Learned and again in David Gregory’s The Elements of Astronomy (1715).
As for the actual abbreviation, CE (Common Era) has been claimed to have been used as early as 1831, though I couldn’t find specifically in what work it is supposed to have appeared in. Whatever the case, both it and BCE (Before the Common Era) definitely appeared in Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall’s Post-Biblical History of the Jews in 1856. Understanding the usage and difference between BCE and CE was particularly popular in the Jewish community where they were keen to avoid using any nomenclature explicitly referring to Christ as the lord. Today, BCE vs BC and CE vs AD has become fairly common among other groups for similar reasons.
This article was originally published on Today I Found Out. Follow them on their Youtube channel.
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