Thoughts Medley 29 Mar 24 When Did the World Start using dates starting with the birth of Jesus?

by Tony Medley

Obviously, Julius Caesar and Brutus did not know that their murderous act occurred in 44 B.C. But did Constantine know that he became Emperor in 306 A.D.? Dating years then was notoriously ambiguous. 

According to Merrill Fabry,

Systems of dating before B.C./A.D. was fully adopted were often based on significant events, political leaders and a well-kept chronology of the order in which they ruled. For example, the Romans generally described years based on who was consul, or by counting from the founding of the city of Rome. Some might also count based on what year of an emperor’s reign it was. Egyptians also used a variation on this system, counting years based on years of a king’s rule (so, an event might be dated to the 5th year of someone’s rule) and then keeping a list of those kings.

According to Lynn Hunt, author of Measuring Time, Making History and professor of history at UCLA, it was a monk named Dionysius Exiguus who in 525 A.D. (Anno Domino, the year of our Lord) wanted to figure out when to celebrate Easter in future years, stating that he figured that was how long it had been since the birth of Jesus, and that this should replace a system based on the rule of Roman Emperor Diocletian.

But the world did not immediately fall in step. Hunt says that in Europe church documents and such started using the system hundreds of years later in the 8^th and 9^th Centuries.

Fabry writes, “Bede, an Anglo-Saxon historian and monk, (is) an early instance of writing about ‘before’ Christ. He used the same dating system as Exiguus throughout his history of England in 731, which he started with Caesar’s raids (55-54 B.C.) and so mentions years ‘before the incarnation of our Lord’.”

Hunt claims that the idea that years should be dated as before and after Christ only firmly took root in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries.

So if anyone asked Constantine when he became Emperor, you can bet your bippy he didn’t say, “306.” On the other hand, William the Conqueror undoubtedly did know that the year of his great victory was 1066.

The idea that the people who run college athletics know what they are doing is clearly a thinly disguised myth. Who, for instance, scheduled the Sweet Sixteen games so the two semifinal venues played their games at the same time? Today is Good Friday when everything’s closed. Nobody has anything to do. There are four important college basketball games that could have been scheduled one after the other, four in a row. But, nooooo! Not these geniuses. They scheduled them at exactly the same times so that viewers must choose which to watch instead of having a day full of college basketball to watch them all.