(Homilary, Portrait of the Venerable Bede, Walters Manuscript W.148,
fol. 3vHomilary, Portrait of the Venerable Bede, Walters Manuscript W.148, fol.
3v, [Public Domain] via Flickr)
Ancient and medieval
Christian clergy had a dire problem that they needed to solve—the churches of
different regions could not decide on how to calculate the date of their holy
day of Easter. It was only around 525 A.D./CE, when a monk named Dionysius
Exiguus (470-544 A.D./CE) proposed a dating system that could be standardized
throughout the various regional churches. He argued that dates after the birth
of Jesus should be labeled as Anno Domini,
or “In the year of our/the Lord.” Using scripture and other sources he had
available to him, Dionysius basically made an educated guess as to where 1 A.D.
should be placed on the timeline. Dionysius never claimed that his designation
of 1 A.D. was precisely the year that Jesus was born (and the date of Jesus’ birth
remains highly debated), but Dionysius kept with his system and started what
would become a Western tradition.
Even though Dionysius began
the use of A.D. for the years after Jesus’ birth, he did not develop the use of
B.C. for the years prior to Jesus—in fact, Dionysius rather wanted to exclude
Roman figures like Julius Caesar and Nero from his timeline. It would take
another monk with an obsession for finding a standardized date for Easter to
bring the use of B.C. into the Western world.
This monk’s name was Bede. He
was born near the monastery of Wearmouth in 673 A.D./CE, and spent almost his
entire life as a monk. Like Dionysius, he was desperate to unite the different
divisions of Christianity under a single system of dating. Bede, sometimes called
“the Father of English History,” used Dionysius’ A.D. to designate dates after
the birth of Jesus, and began referring to dates that occurred before the birth
of Jesus as “B.C.” (Before Christ). Bede’s highly acclaimed achievement, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 A.D./CE), was
very influential in spreading the use of B.C. and A.D. in history, both secular
and non-secular. By the reign of Charlemagne, the dating style of Dionysius and
Bede had become fairly common in Europe, but it would take until the 15th and
16th centuries for the use of A.D. and B.C. to be truly adopted into calendars.
Dionysius and Bede’s system of dating remains in use to this day, either as the
original B.C. and A.D., or as the more universally used BCE (Before Common Era)
and CE (Common Era).
Written by C. Keith Hansley
- From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (and relevant letters), translated by Leo Sherley-Pride, R. E. Latham and D. H. Farmer. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.
- http://www.ancient.eu/article/1041/
- http://www.historytoday.com/michael-ostling/bcad-dating-year-whose-lord
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