What does the year 1 mark?

Question

Why are we living in the year 2000 and not the year 2 billion or something? What did the year one mark? And why do the years go by BC and AD? When did the years start going by before christ and in the years of? And are we still living in AD? Or did they start over after Jesus supposedly died?

From a non religious perspective? Why do we go by this when not everyone is a Christian?

Answer 1

We "all" go by this because otherwise there would be complete confusion. Many countries and faiths keep two calendars, the Gregorian and their own, using the Gregorian as a common reference.

Year numbering was a mish-mash of regnal eras as this or that king ascended this or that throne. It was the Sixth Century before a clever monk named Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Small) got the idea of indexing history from the birth of Christ (since Christ was the most important person in history). He used the best historical records he could find and calculated that Christ had been born 782 years after the legendary founding of Rome. So with the pope's approval, he designated the following year 1 Anno Domini ("Year of the Lord"). He turned out to be off by a few years but no one had a better candidate for a starting point, so the designation stuck. (And it will continue until such time as someone decides something even more important has happened. Not any time soon.)

The other calendars, Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, etc., all have different year numbers because they refer to different establishing events.

Answer 2

Absolutely nothing.

The guy who came up with it got the birth year of Jesus Christ wrong (and he also didn't know about zero) and it was known even back then that Jesus could not have been born after what we now call 4 BCE (if he was even born at all).

Oh and BTW, we now use CE (Common Era) instead of AD and BCE (Before Common Era) instead of BC though I think we should really just set a new year zero (say 1957 CE since the launch of the first satellite was a lot more important than the alleged birth of some obscure Palestinian, or at least those a few thousand years from now will probably think so).

The reason that it is the international standard is largely because it was Christian countries that were dominant and so it was the Christian time keeping system that ended up in use, flawed though it is (attempts have been made to deal with the problem of the days of the week changing each year though sadly they haven't really led anywhere).

Answer 3

BC is Before Christ; AD Anno Domini which means year of our Lord. This started some time after the life and death of Christ when the church fathers decided that the calender should start again when Jesus was born. They worked out when JC was born and got it a bit wrong, but considering they had no computers or even calculators they didn't do too badly. Not every one uses these dates, the Jews, Muslims, Chinese and other cultures have their own systems.

Answer 4

The year 1 marks the beginning of the Christian calendar (they hadn't developed the concept of zero yet). The whole system of B.C. and A.D. (Before Christ, and Anno Domini, Latin for "The Year of Our Lord) was created by a monk named Dennis Exegesis (either Dennis the Little, or Dennis the Short, depending on the translation -- either way he was short of stature at a time when people were far smaller than they are today, so he was a runt even among runts!) in Medieval times. He wanted to date things from the birth of Jesus. Trouble was, nobody knew when that was. So Dennis studied the Bible and plotted the date. Given what little he had to go on it's amazing that he got as close as he did. He managed to get within 4 years of the true date, and he'd have been within 3 if it weren't for the fact that western man hadn't yet developed the concept of zero, so instead of starting at that point (as we would today) Dennis began with 1, because that was all he knew! Dennis' system wasn't used by anyone but him in the beginning, but eventually it caught on with the church authorities, and through their influence, got into the civil system as well. Today, it's the traditional calendar for the entire western world.

Answer 5

The year one marks the differential between before Christ and after dead. After the passing of Jesus, man kind started a new calender and mark of time.