when did someone change the time from BC to AD and how did they track time before Christ was born?

Question

I'm sure they didn't call it BC before they changed it. I'm curious to know about what year they did change the time. Also, if the time changed when Christ was born, how come the new year doesn't start on December 26th?

Answer 1

It is now B.C.E and C.E.

Before the Common Era and during the Common Era.

Answer 2

525 was when the number was calculated by Dionysius Exiguus, who was trying to figure out the date for the first Easter (which is a long story about calendars in itself), but most countries in western Europe didn't start using the new way of writing the year until ~8th century or so.

As for why Christmas doesn't on January 1st:

January was already the first month of the year (though it wasn't called January back then) because, in Roman times, "January 1st" was the date that the consults were elected. Although March was considered the first month back then, the elections were done in the winter so that, by the time all the celebrations and administrative duties were taken care of, the consults could focus on moving the military in the spring, summer, and early autumn.

When the calendar was reformed under Caesar, it was decided that this date should be considered the first day of the year. The calendar was kept in place for several centuries, until the adoption of our current calendar (Gregorian) in the 16th century, which is much more accurate.

Despite when the calendar came out, very few nations adopted it right away. England, I believe, objected for a couple hundred years, simply because they didn't want to adopt the Catholic revision.

As to whether or not some guy named Jesus was born in December is an argument in itself.

Answer 3

There were MANY different calendar systems and some (like the chinese and thai one) are still very much in use.

Here is an interesting list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendar_systems

The christ-born equals year 1 thing is actually a mistake some guy made when trying to calculate. And the christmas stuff is a lot of retrofitting history to assimilate some other belief systems. Unless you think Jesus had a christmas tree, or that christianity has a lot to do with bunnies and eggs (easter).

Answer 4

In the time of Jesus, the Roman Empire dated years from the supposed founding of Rome, calling them A.U.C. (anno urbis conditae, "year of the founding of the city") Jesus was born in roughly the year 750 A.U.C. No one knows the exact year. The year 1 A.D. (or 1 C.E., "common era," for non-Christians) was arbitrarily defined much later to be the year 754 A.U.C., with the year before that being identified as 1 B.C. (or 1 B.C.E., "before the common era," for non-Christians).

Jesus was not born in the year 1. The gospels state that he was born in the reign of Herod, who died in 4 B.C, and therefore Jesus was born no later than 4 B.C. and possibly as early as 13 B.C. (One consequence is that the people who were expecting something of religious significance to happen during the millennial year of 2000 missed the party: they should have been on the lookout from about 1987 to 1996.)

The year 1 A.D. was fixed by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus about 500 years after Jesus, during the reign of Diocletian. He calculated the date of Jesus' birth as being December 25, 753 A.U.C., and that became 1 B.C., with the following year being 1 A.D. and starting on January 1 He got it wrong, because he either messed up his math or didn't know that Herod the Great had died in 750 A.U.C.

The dates for the starting of the year are another story. In colonial times the year was sometimes taken to start on March 25, near the vernal equinox. This was a relic of the Roman year starting in March also: that's why September, our 9th month, is named after the Latin word for "seven," October after "eight," November after "nine," and "December" after "ten.

Answer 5

Ok..here's the deal. In the middle ages, an error with dates was made by a monk. There for, AD starts when Jesus was about 3 or 4...it's unclear. AD stands for Anno Domine, which is latin for, "In the year of our Lord". They really didn't track time like we do now...each country did it differently, often tracking the amount of years from events (in the Bible you see before or after the Babylonian exile sometimes, or something like that) Hope this helps!!!!

Answer 6

don't know about other nations but the romans used A.U.C. (which means roughly "since the founding of the city") and was still in use for a few hundred years after the fall of the western empire

Answer 7

The new abbreviations are C.E. and B.C.E.