Origins of Common Era
– The idea of numbering years from the birth of Jesus was conceived by Dionysius Exiguus around the year 525.
– Bede introduced the practice of dating years before the birth of Jesus and not using a year zero.
– In 1422, Portugal became the last Western European country to switch to the new system.
– The term Vulgar Era was used to distinguish dates on the Gregorian calendar from dates of the regnal year.
History of Common Era notation
– The term Common Era can be traced back to a book by Johannes Kepler in 1615.
– The term Common Era became more widely used in the mid-19th century.
– Jews have used the abbreviation VE (Vulgar Era) to denote years in the Western calendar since 1825.
– Some academics in theology, education, archaeology, and history have adopted CE and BCE notation.
Contemporary usage of Common Era notation
– Several style guides now prefer or mandate the use of CE and BCE notation.
– In the United Kingdom, some local education authorities have adopted BCE/CE dates in schools.
– In the United States, the use of BCE/CE notation in textbooks has been growing since 2005.
Rationales for using Common Era notation
– The use of CE in Jewish scholarship aimed to avoid the implicit reference to Jesus in AD.
– BCE/CE notation showed sensitivity to non-Christian users of the Gregorian calendar.
– BCE and CE allowed scholars of different faiths to refer to events without compromising their beliefs.
Opposition and debates surrounding Common Era notation
– Some Christians were offended by the removal of the reference to Jesus in the Common Era notation.
– The Southern Baptist Convention supported retaining the BC/AD abbreviations.
– Raimon Panikkar argued that BCE/CE was less inclusive as it imposed the Christian calendar on other nations. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCE
Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the original Anno Domini (AD) and Before Christ (BC) notations used for the same calendar era. The two notation systems are numerically equivalent: "2024 CE" and "AD 2024" each describe the current year; "400 BCE" and "400 BC" are the same year.
The expression can be traced back to 1615, when it first appears in a book by Johannes Kepler as the Latin: annus aerae nostrae vulgaris (year of our common era), and to 1635 in English as "Vulgar Era". The term "Common Era" can be found in English as early as 1708, and became more widely used in the mid-19th century by Jewish religious scholars. Since the later 20th century, BCE and CE have become popular in academic and scientific publications because BCE and CE are religiously neutral terms. They have been promoted as more sensitive to non-Christians by not referring to Jesus, the central figure of Christianity, especially via the religious terms "Christ" and Dominus ("Lord") utilized by the other abbreviations.
