Why is B.C. an English abbreviation while A.D. is a Latin abbreviation?

Question

One would think both abbreviations would be in the same language, yet they are not. Is it possible they were derived at different times?

Keep in mind that B.C. stands for "Before Christ" and A.D. stands for "Anno Domini"

Answer 1

When the term Anno Domini was created, they were only concerned with numbering the year they lived in, year after year.

It wasn't until later that the need for a term for the years before Jesus was needed. By the time an interest in history required a new term, English was the language in which it was done.

Answer 2

Early in the sixth century, the Catholic Church was trying to set an official date for Easter. Pope John I called on a very well versed and educated monk named Dionysius Exigus.

Dionysius spent many weeks calculating back to the time of Jesus’ birth. This wasn’t an easy task. The two New Testament books that tell of Jesus’ birth, Matthew and Luke do not reveal the exact date. They do however give some clues. In Matthew 2:1 it states that Jesus was born "in the days of Herod the king." That didn’t narrow it down enough for Dionysius so using other passages, probably Luke 3:1 and 1:24-31 which talk about the time table for John the Baptist career as a prophet and the time when Jesus began his ministry, Dionysius calculated what he thought was the time of Jesus’ birth. He then numbered each year forward from that point and labeled those years "A.D." A.D. is the abbreviation for Anno Domini - Latin for the year of our Lord.

Why then does B.C. stand for the English words "before Christ" and not some Latin words? Dionysius wasn’t interested in inventing a time reference for history and as such was not the least interested in what had occurred before Christ’s birth. At least not for this enterprise. His whole intention was only to devise a method of reliably calculating Easter every year.

Answer 3

First, to the other posters, AD stands for Anno Domini (sp?) which means in the year of our lord, meaning after Christ was born, not after he died.

And it's very plausible that they were created at diff times. Also, perhaps the Latin was just picked up by the Anglican church since they used to read the Bibles only in Latin/Greek.

Answer 4

Good Question!!
It isn't really possible that they were derived at different times because neither could have been formulated prior to the birth and death of Jesus, so both must have been conceived after his death. But there certainly isn't a logical reason why they are in two different languages.
It also raises another problem. If one is before Christ, and the other is after the death of Christ, what do they call the 33 years when Christ was alive? That sort of leaves a hole in the calendar, doesn't it?

Answer 5

How does YOOL sound but like the fool they make of you?

Your Lord is a creation of those who spoke Latin and worshipped Jupiter because they wished to conceal Zeus as the Father-God, hence anno domini.

The great difference between domini Jesus or Zeus the son has to be coded and what better way than to confuse with different languages.

It's like the Gospels saying that Jesus King of The Jews was inscribed on the crosses in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and King James coming along and making the anglicised Jesus or Geezoss out of JeZeus.

How about that for your confused little mind?

Answer 6

nicely, this is style of basically like the "Calvinist" as adversarial to "Hyper-Calvinist" deal. human beings have made a semantic version that helps them talk a flowery concept in a single image. particular, technically, [C]atholicism is broader than the Latin ceremony, notwithstanding you ought to confess that the Latin ceremony is the only plenty familiar to recent Western societies. Why is that? ought to or no longer this is unquestionably the crushing dominance of the Italian living house workplace with understand to the lesser traditions? could you decrease slightly slack for those human beings taking the 50,000 foot view of the subject? If right here day, the adjectival use of "Roman" to delineate [C]atholicism's center nucleus of doctrine have been particularly stopped, it ought to take no time at fascinated some variety new adjective to change it, because of the fact the linguistic choose for this form of gadget is actual and inescapable. i assume something like "Papal Catholicism" maybe an adequate substitute. In any social amassing, historic previous has created the identity you seek to rehabilitate with the help of skill of remarketing below a extra independent company perceive, and standard language will fill any vacuum left on the lower back of with the help of skill of guy-made word video games used to suppress the undesirable establishments of the Roman label.

Answer 7

The English language is just plain weird. It is filled with anomalies and inconsistencies. It borrows heavily from other languages, yet does not follow grammar rules from those languages. Speaking English (and writing it) grammatically correctly is something that takes a lot of practice - and even those who have used it all their lives still make common errors.

Answer 8

Before Christ and After Death... they are all in English.