What year came immediatley before AD1?

Answer 1

it CAN'T be BC1!!

Surely BC1 is the FIRST BC year until you get to Jesus' birth where of course you have AD1

if the year before AD1 was BC1 then BC2 would come before BC1(!!!) and that's not right!!

Plus they never called it Before Christ 'cos not everybody knew that christ was going to be born. Not everyone subscribes to the view that he was born then...

The bible has no mention of when Jesus was born.The decision to celebrate christmas on teh 25th December was made CENTURIES after his death. Infact there's more documentation from that time that the Roman God MITHRAS who died to save his subject's sins, whose subjects could be saved through him,
he was worshipped on a Sunday because he was a Sun God...
AND didn't want to include women as clergy or even as members!

"There is much debate on if Christianity is a re-branded version of many Mithraic beliefs... [or that]
...Christianity borrowed its doctrines from Mithraism...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism

I don't think that everyone who lived in BC called their years Before Christ. I don't think that years existed right at the beginning in the same way that we see/use them now.

We can only assume what year came immediately before AD1 and the likelihood is that it was changed a little while after Jesus' death into BC...whatever-it-was. So it would be quite difficult to get an accurate picture about how that span of time (a year) was actually measured IN the space and time that would have been BC1 or BC1001...

...beause when we say BC we're counting backwards 300 years BC. Surely they'd have been counting forwards if they were living in those times?

Answer 2

1 B C

Answer 3

According to this letter published in a newspaper: ' ......... Quoting Patrick Moore: "There was no Year 0; 1BC was followed immediately by AD1. This sounds illogical, and indeed it is, but it means that the first day of the first Christian Millennium began on the first day of AD1." (This, of course, would mean that the first day of the new Millennium was not January 1, 2000, but January 1, 2001).

Answer 4

It was 1 B.C.. When the Christian calendar was compiled by the monk Dionysius Exiguus (his name means "Denis the Dwarf* in Latin) in the fourth century, he did not include a Year 0. Therefore it is correct to say that 2001 is the first year of the twenty-first century, and that the Millenium ought to have been celebrated on 31st December 2000 - a fact that ought to have been obvious to our ill-educated rulers.
The lack of a Year 0 in our calendar is perhaps is a good reason why the term "Year Zero" evokes such instinctive fear in most people's minds - and why it is so beloved of all manner of fanatical revolutionaries from the Jacobins to Pol Pot.

Answer 5

Since you ask the question in the past tense, the answer is 'it all depends on where in the world you were and what calendar you were using' The Romans counted from 'ab urbe condita' - 'from the founding of the city' in 753BC, so the year 753 would have come before the purely notional 1AD. The Jewish Calendar, on the other hand, begins at the notional date of creation, as per Genesis about 5800 ago. Their year is counted from 2 October and I calculate, having used the site below, that this is currently year 5767, so the year before 1AD would have been 3760/1 (I think - any Jewish friend is welcome to correct these calculations) The Chinese Lunar new Year dates back to 2600BC, so for them it would have been 2600/1 as their new year dates from mid January to mid February, depending on the lunar cycle.

There never was actually a year when everyone said 'hooray it's 1AD' as we didn't get around to defining years by BC and AD until well into the 4th century.

Answer 6

the Year 2 BC ... because there was no year nought. And the year 1 for either era is the same. 1 BC (or BCE) is the same year as 1 CE (or AD)

Answer 7

bc 1

Answer 8

There was never a year defined as 0 a.d, the year prior to a.d 1, was 1b.c

Answer 9

i believe it was 55 BC as the years were counted in reverse before AD

Answer 10

BC 1