I can't seem to get this puzzle out of my mind today.
Our modern calendar was created by the Church, and I grew up understanding these dating terms:
B.C. = Before Christ
A.D. = Anno Domini
Why is our era named in the Latin for roughly 'Year of our Lord', when the era before Jesus arrived on earth uses the simple english phrase 'Before Christ'? Why isn't that a Latin designation like Ante Christum used? Maybe if it's Ante Domini it doesn't work because it gives us the same two letters.
B.C.E (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) were made up by atheists in the universities who would prefer to deny that the Church had a hand in the modern calendar. They'd like everyone to forget all about good old BC and AD. Let's pretend those monks who created the calendar never existed (even though they miscalculated the year of Christ's birth by just a bit).
Still, the whole thing has been rolling around in my head all day. I'd like to know who first used the B.C. designation and why. Was it the same time they started with A.D.? What was B.C. before the English language defined it?
Maybe somebody will stumble across this and tell me the history in a comment.
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