AD and BC — How we measure years
Day 83 / 365
It’s the year 2019 right now, but what does that really mean? Clearly, we’ve been around for way more than a couple of thousand years. So what are we counting 2019 years from? What happened on year 0, or the years before that?
To be precise, the year right now would be 2019 A.D. We label are years with either A.D. (which stands for Anno Domini, or the “Year of our Lord”)or B.C. (which stands for “Before Christ”). So 2019 A.D. would roughly mean 2019 years after Jesus Christ was born.
So what about year 0? There is no year 0. The year 1 A.D. is the year when Jesus is born, and the year before that is labeled 1 B.C.
Who came up with this system?
This system was devised by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus in the year 525 A.D. while he was devising a new easter table (used for determining the date for celebrating Easter). It’s not certain how he found out the year that Jesus Christ was born. He actually got it a bit wrong, as most historians now agree that the birth of Jesus Christ would be somewhere around 6 B.C.
Different Calendars around the world use different events as the reference for measuring years. For example, according to the Chinese Calendar, we are in the year 4714.
This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — And Yet it Moves