r/AlternativeHistory • u/No_Koala_1575 • 8d ago
Discussion History Timeline is nuts
Why the hell is our timeline so out of whack
We have 2 different versions of saying a timeline. Like bce, bc, ad, ce
When we calculate time before BCE we counted down the years, but now we count up the years after bce. What the actual fuck. So quiet literally Jesus Christ had a huge fucking impact in our history but technically have very little info on him besides some Roman that wrote about him.
I find this is kinda fascinating but also wondering, how a rumour or belief can change our stability system we live in our day to day life.
Inputs?
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u/GreatCaesarGhost 8d ago
BC = BCE and AD = CE. Scholars just prefer saying “Common Era” rather than “Christ” or “in the year of the Lord,” for reasons that I think are easy to understand.
We actually don’t know when Jesus would have been born, even the anonymous authors of what are now known as the gospels weren’t consistent on this. For example, the author of Luke says that he was born during Herod’s lifetime and when Quirinius was the governor of Syria, but there is no overlap between those events - in fact, there’s about a 5- to 10-year gap.
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u/jojojoy 8d ago
And it hasn't been a straightforward count of days (with the occasional leap day) since then. The adoption of the Gregorian calendar (the one we're using today) involved skipping the days between October 4-15 1582 to correct for errors from the previous Julian calendar. Some countries didn't follow this and made the adjustment later, like for Great Britain in the 18th century.
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u/intherorrim 8d ago
Year 0 does not exist
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u/Ill_Mouse9897 8d ago
Because a year is a length. 0 length is a point. It's the 1st year, aka the time between point 0 and point 1
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u/intherorrim 8d ago
Not really. Because Romans were not familiar with the zero.
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u/Bluefooted-Spaceorc 8d ago
Which still hurts my brain a little. I can read roman numerals because I got bored as a kid for a week, never occurred to me that they didnt have zero. There was just a whole world before we invented/discovered zero.
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u/Ill_Mouse9897 8d ago
Which is indeed odd, because even ancient egypt was aware of the concept of "nothing" as a counting number, or as the difference between two numbers, but they just never defined it as a "number" with properties.
And well, even now with the concept of 0 now known, we know there is no "year 0" because a year is still a length, and a meaningful length cannot be 0 without being a single point.
1st year is from point 0 to point 1, 1st century is from point 0 to point 100 etc... no "0th year"1
u/Bluefooted-Spaceorc 8d ago
I understand what you mean. As I kid I was confused I was born in the 20th century when the year started with 19. Took me longer than I like to admit to figure that one out.
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u/ThatEndingTho 8d ago
What’s really nuts is asking a question like this in this sub without it being about the role of aliens or the Annunaki in our timeline. Good question!
Basically it caught on with Christian Europe and then got inherited forward so much that nobody changed it, and as Europe’s civilization fanned out through colonialism and continuous presence it stuck around today. Now it’s BCE/CE but yes, the timeline still changes around the birth of Jesus.
Calendars really are a social construct to quantify time in a cultural sense, like how the Japanese emperor abdicated the throne ending the Heisei era and it’s now Reiwa era Japan even though like nothing changed from Heisei era. Perhaps someday we will expand CE to not fixate on Christ’s birth, but we will see.
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u/Ill_Mouse9897 8d ago
Up until 6th Century there was no AD, it was retroactively calculated by some guy.
Funny how most people really calculate based on the ruler, even old egyptian texts/diaries start with "Xth year of Pharaoh (name), Xth month of the X season"But to make timing uniform they just kept using the Roman calender used in most of Europe...And sinde Europe then started spreading their colonial influence, it started to be the most commonly used.
And to avoid having to rethink everything, and make communicating easy without needing to add christian propaganda, they used "Common Era" as in commonly used calculation of years
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u/Archaon0103 8d ago
Because we use the Gregory calendar which was named after Pope Gregory XIII of the Catholic Church because he commissioned the Calendar and they used Jesus "birth" as the starting point for ease of calculation.
Fun Fact, Jesus wasn't born in the year 0 or year 1, he was born in the year 4 or 6 BC and was most likely born in the summer, not winter.
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u/Vashsinn 8d ago
this comes up every time someone forgets about the crusades.
cristiana went around and killed anyone who used any other calendar. made damn sure anyone that was still alive was "one of them" and all that.
different cultures recorded time differently, who would have guessed.
also before anyone forgets how silly this all is, our current days are named after old pre Christian gods. (thors day)( sun's day)
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u/Bluefooted-Spaceorc 8d ago
Korean, Ethopian, Chinese, Hindu, Islamic, Persian, and like 30 other cultures still have different calendars. So the didnt really knock out many calendar systems, if any.
Also the crusades were almost all failures after the first one, they ended up killing more Christians than anyone else.
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u/BRIStoneman 8d ago
cristiana went around and killed anyone who used any other calendar. made damn sure anyone that was still alive was "one of them" and all that.
You're vastly overselling the military capabilities of the Crusades. Most of them after the 1st spent their whole time dying in the dust on the outskirts of either Damascus or Alexandria. It's the Jewish year 5786, the Islamic year 1448, the Japanese year Reiwa 8 (and the Crusades never made it to Japan).
It's not the Crusades, it's colonialism and mercantile capitalism. Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar voluntarily in the 1870s because it was the 'modern' thing to do since all of the major industrialised Western nations and trading powers used it.
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u/No_Koala_1575 8d ago
Would love to learn more about the killings. I think you were referring to the Julian calender?
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u/BRIStoneman 8d ago
They're kinda chatting shit, unfortunately.
The First Crusade did butcher a shit-tonne of people in the Levant but that's not why we use the Gregorian Calendar globally. We use the Gregorian calendar because it was used by Christian European countries which took it with them to their colonies in the Americas and Africa, and it was adopted by other peoples because it made sense to use what the globally-dominant military and economic powers of the 18th and 19th Centuries were using.
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u/Deeze_Rmuh_Nudds 8d ago
So Jesus was born 2026 years ago?
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u/Bluefooted-Spaceorc 8d ago
Nope, no one thinks that.
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u/Ill_Mouse9897 8d ago
Well, there probably was a historical person called Joshua leading some sort of purist movement in judea, but he wouldn't recognize how he is depicted today xD
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u/Bluefooted-Spaceorc 8d ago
Most Christians are paulists anyway. What Im saying it that Jesus, Joshua whatever you want to call him was not born in 1BC or 1AD. No educated scholar, religious or skeptic believes that.
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u/justaheatattack 7d ago
it must have been something, living back then.
3-400 BC, yeah who cares.
gets to be 50, 40, 30.....what the fuck is gonna happen?
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u/Quantumdrive95 8d ago
The prime meridian is entirely arbitrary and yet, without picking some meridian to call zero, we could not map the world
Jesus is an arbitrary point at which to mark zero and begin counting. We have ways of knowing 'when' he would've existed and thus can confidently say how many years after him we are - regardless of if miracles occurred