Calendars
Common Era
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Origin 525
Common Era is the religiously neutral name for the era that Christian usage numbers from the presumed birth of Jesus, abbreviated CE and paired with BCE for the years before it. It is a reckoning rather than a calendar: it fixes where the count of years begins and in which direction it runs, and it leaves the months, the week and the leap rule to the Julian and Gregorian calendars that carry it. The numbering was devised by Dionysius Exiguus in 525 to calculate Easter, so the neutral label sits on a Christian calculation rather than replacing it, and the calculation is in any case several years out from the dates the gospels imply. The atlas uses CE and BCE throughout, which is a convention about naming and not a claim about what the years mean.
Facts
Origins
Historical OriginGrew out of the Anno Domini era introduced by the sixth century monk Dionysius Exiguus, with Common Era and Before Common Era becoming preferred as religiously neutral labels for the same year numbering in academic and international use from the later twentieth century. 1 Origin Period Place of OriginRome and the wider Latin Christian world, where Dionysius Exiguus's sixth century dating scheme first took hold before spreading through medieval Christendom and later into secular and international use. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerDionysius Exiguus, a monk working in Rome, who introduced the count of years from the Incarnation in an Easter table drawn up in 525 to replace the era of Diocletian 1 Origin of the NameCommon Era and Before Common Era are the neutral forms of Anno Domini and Before Christ, keeping the same numbering while dropping the confession the Latin makes 1 Attributions
EpochYear 1 is the year Dionysius assigned to the Incarnation, and the reckoning runs forward from it with no starting point of its own before that 1 Year LengthNot an independent day length: a count of years running from a fixed epoch, leaving the actual year length (365-366 days) to the Julian or Gregorian calendar that carries it 1 Calendar TypeA count rather than a calendar of months: it fixes where the years are numbered from and in which direction they run, and leaves the months and the leap rule to the Julian and Gregorian calendars 1 Associated Religion Structure
StructureThere is no year zero: 1 BCE is followed directly by 1 CE, so any span crossing the epoch is one year shorter than subtracting the two numbers suggests 1 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 The reckoning in ordinary use across scholarship, civil life and international standards Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseAdoption of CE and BCE in place of AD and BC is sometimes presented as religiously neutral and sometimes criticized, since the underlying year count still runs from the same reference point fixed by Dionysius's Christian era. 1 Learn More
A Numbering Invented to Fix the Date of Easter
The year numbering now used almost everywhere was produced as a by product of a calendar problem. Easter falls on a Sunday determined by the moon, and computing it years in advance required tables. In 525 the monk Dionysius Exiguus, working in Rome, extended an existing set of Easter tables and chose to number the years from the incarnation rather than from the reign of the emperor Diocletian, whose era the older tables used and who was remembered as a persecutor.
The Oxford Companion to the Year sets out how the scheme spread, slowly, through the work of Bede and others, and how long it took to displace the many local systems of reckoning by regnal year, by indiction and by city foundation. Two consequences follow that are frequently missed. The system has no year zero, so the year before 1 is 1 before the era, which is why century boundaries fall where they do. And the calculation itself is generally reckoned to be several years out from the dates the gospel accounts imply, so the era named for the birth of Jesus most likely does not begin at it. Neither point was a mistake anyone could have avoided with the information available in 525, and neither has ever been corrected, because renumbering every date in every document ever written is not a serious proposal. The era is therefore a Christian calculation, made for a liturgical purpose, that the whole world now uses for reasons that have nothing to do with either.
What the Neutral Name Does and Does Not Change
Common Era and Before the Common Era are relabellings. They keep every number exactly where it was and change only the words attached to it, so a date written 1453 CE is the same date as 1453 in the older notation. The usage has a long history, appearing in Jewish scholarly writing in English well before it became general, for the obvious reason that a scholar who does not hold Jesus to be the Lord has a difficulty with an abbreviation that says so. It is now standard in academic publishing across many fields and in a growing number of general reference works, and it is resisted by others on the grounds that it obscures the calendar's origin without escaping it. Both observations are correct as far as they go.
The atlas uses CE and BCE throughout, and states plainly what that choice means: it is a convention about how to name years in a reference work that covers many religions and none, not a claim about what the years signify. The underlying reckoning remains the one Dionysius produced, the Christian liturgical calendar that generated it is catalogued here in its own right, and nothing about the numbering is neutral except the label. The atlas also carries the calendars that do not use it at all, Hebrew, Hijri, Vikram, Shaka, Buddhist and others, and where a date matters to a tradition in its own reckoning that reckoning is given alongside.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
The numbering was devised by Dionysius Exiguus in 525 to calculate the date of Easter.
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