Why was time counted backwards thousands of years ago?

Question

A long time ago, like in Moses day, time was counted backwards, like 1500 b.c.e-1400 b.c.e. then to 1300-1200 on down to the first century and such. Does anyone know why time started out backwards like this? I was told that when Adam was sentence to die for his sin in the garden of Eden, he started counting down to the day of his death and it went on from there. Do any qualified people have a legitimate answer? If you don't know please do not give me just any kind of answer.

Answer 1

Time was counted that way to try to calculate the time that the promised Messiah/Christ was to be born, according to prophecy.

Answer 2

Look! A long time agao, the papacy hired out this monk...Dionysis...to figure once and for all the date of Jesus's death. Some christians celebrated him on in April, some in January...it was a religious nightmare.....

So, this guy decides that Jesus was was born and died 758 years after the founding of Ancient Rome...hence, the change in the calendar to msignify the time before Christ (B.C. or B.C.E.) and the time after the christ (A.D. or C.E.).....

So all dating in the before the common era (B.C.) is a count down to the coming of the christ....it is unliely that the modern dating sustem was in use during ancient times since we know that the Gregorian calendar we now use has only been in use for about thlast 2 millenia.

Answer 3

Please tell me you're under the age of 10.

People didn't count backwards, because they didn't know exactly when Jesus was going to be born. Nowadays we regard Julius Caesar to have reached Britain in 57BC, but strangely he didn't think it was 57BC, he thought it was the 13th year of the reign of Caesar. During the 6th Century AD the Roman Catholic church decided to revamp the calendar basing it around the date they thought Jesus had been born. This only applied to the world possessed by the Church, for example the year is 6000and something in China, who don't give a monkeys about some guy called Jesus, and in Islamic countries they measure time from the birth of Mohhammed, somewhat 600 years after Jesus.
Whoever told you about Adam is so full of Sh*t I can't believe it, or did God only create a small part of the world, not China, the Middle East etc?
Why do I get the feeling your from some fringe Christian Evangelical family, to be taught such Boll*cks. Possibly homeschooled?

Answer 4

The recording of the years as BCE means before common era it is actually the same thing as BC or "Before Christ". The counterpart is CE, or common era, which is the same as AD, or anno domini, meaing "in the year of our Lord." This style of counting was adopted in the west when the Catholic Church became the the transcendent power in the Roman Empire. People who were living in the year 1000 BCE or BC would not have recognized that. So at no time in history did people actually count the years backwards.

Answer 5

lol! I really enjoy your question.
In those times people were using different calenders and different ways of counting time from what it is the way we count it now. Iit was not counted backwards. We count it backwards. We decided to count the time from thetime of the birth of Jesus Christ. Everything what is before that time we count backwards.
Other countries and other religions have different ways of counting time and the yusually take an importat event for it. For example Jews count it from the the moment the world was created, so for them it is your 5thousand and something, Muslims have their way of counting..I do not remeber exactly what, but it is connected to Mohamad...and so on.
Hope this helps.

Answer 6

Legitimate by what law, or whose law.... even authentic answer needs an authority to authenticate it !
Therefore, only a logical reasoning can take us somewhere close to a tenable answer.
Counting backwards was in retrospect not prospectively ! What ever time was counted by what ever methods, recorded or otherwise was 're-adjusted' backwards, relating to BC- AD era... that is all...

Answer 7

Of course it wasn't counted backwards! How could they have possibly known the future? Incidentally, it was only in the eighteenth century that people scarted counting backwards in B.C. terms.

Answer 8

they were all crazy or are we the crazy ones