The Calendar in A.D. (Anno Domini)
Created | Updated Feb 8, 2002
We know what year this is. Some may even have seen the letters A.D but do you know what they mean? They come from the Latin
for The year of our Lord. Those who understand that will realise that the letters properly go before a date not after it. This system is not really a calendar but rather a benchmark by which to set years in chronological order.
The Calendars
The Old Roman Calendar. This is the calendar under Julius Caesar was born.This calendar had many features that were strange to us today.Click here for example.2. the Julian Calendar...This calendar was first introduced by order of Julius Caesar in the year DCCIX on the old Roman Calendar. After his death July was named in his honor. Augustus Caesar not wishing to be any less honored named the next month after himself August.
3....The Gregorian Calendar
By the year 1582 the seasons were 10 days out of sync making the spring equinox March 11 which did not sit well with those planning Easter festivities so Gregory XIII had someone devise a new leap year rule and chopped 10 days off the month of October for that year only. Other nations were slow to follow, so both Isaac Newton and George Washington were born under the old system and lost ten days when their respective countries converted to the Gregorian calendar.
The Beginning of A.D.
Early Christians dated things by the calendar of their regionalgovernments. but by the sixth century a more universal system was desired.
In that day a monk named Dionysius Exiguus Exigguus which is little in Latin was probably a term of self-abasement not a comment on his height who had been born a Scthian but made a name for himself as an Abbot in Rome was called upon to come up with a new system of numbering years. We have been using it ever since. In his day the years were counted from the founding of Rome. While this may have been a pivotal event in the Roman mind, the once mighty Roman Empire was no longer in the heights of it's former glory; and Dionysius could see it fading more. He wanted to start dating from something with permanent significance.
Being a devout man, the most significant thing he could think of was when God took on flesh, being born as a baby in Bethlehem, so that God and man could be reconciled. It has also been said he wanted to draw attention away from a controvery over Easter by stressing the birth rather than the death of Christ. In that day all educated people spoke Latin even if it was not their native tongue. Dionysius Labeled the year of the Lord's birth as Anno Domini 1(abbreviated AD 1) as Anno Domini is Latin for "The Year of The Lord".
THE YEAR IN QUESTION
Dionysius placed the date at 754 on the Roman Calendar. This made the sequence 752AUCAb Urbe Condite(the founding of the city)
, then 753AUC, then A.D. 1,then A.D. 2 etc. Notice the absence of BC which is a suffix added by Bede a few centuries later In Latin this is Ante Christum. Perhaps Bede did not use AC because it was too much like AD or perhaps it it resonated of Antichrist. As Bede was Anglo-Saxon he may have thought it would save problems to use the Anglo Saxon abbreviation rather than the Latin. Dionysius did not have modern computers or Astronomical data to set his date. It is believed now that he was a few years off. It is curious to note that despite the assertion that celebrating the resurrection on the wrong day would be blasphemous,no charge of Blasphemy was leveled at the Abbott for getting his birth on the wrong year!
How many years he was in error is still a matter of debate.
His System was first adopted in parts of Italy but Charlemagne was the first ruler to give it wide usage. It then spread to other parts of the world. Bede seems to be the first historian to use it as his primary dating system. During the French Revolution and in Fascist Italy attempts were made to start from some other year but these never took hold the way AD has. When men were commisioned by Pope Gregory to bring the equinox back into line, they must surely have known that A.D.1 was not the real year of Christ's birth but apparently considered it outside their mandate to change and so left the benchmark year where Dionysius had placed it.
CURRENTLY
The Old Farmers Almanac lists ten other systems among them the Islamic Hegera but none of these has achieved the universal acceptance of Anno Domini. The Y2K problem was just one example of how worldwide this calendar system is. Looking up the Chinese calendar, I noted that even the Peoples Republic Of China uses this benchmark in civil transactions. China is not alone. Nations all across the world now use it as the year in civil transactions even if it runs counter to their culture.
ANOTHER NAME
Some have renamed it C.E. for current era and years prior to 1 as B.C.E. they do this to avoid the religious implications of calling it A.D. One group however is resolving to keep A.D. complete with those religious implications.
Representatives of The Southern Baptist Convention meeting in June of A.D.2000 passed a resolution calling on all baptists to encourage use of A.D. rather than C.E. because they believe that the Incarnation of Jesus still deserves a central place in history.
REFERENCES
(Roman Calendar)www.clubs.psu/aegsa/rome/romec.html
(Jewish Calendar) aish.com/literacy/concepts/jewish_time.asp
Islamic Hegira
sbcannualmeeting.org/sbc00(Southern Baptist Res.9)
A
considerably more detailed look at Calendars
