For a new awareness of history, merely witnessing the living remnants of the past is not enough. There is another dimension needed, which we call the latitudes of time, a perspective on simultaneity and an understanding of what has occurred in the world at the same time. This is a much more complex exploration, attainable only through winding and surprising paths.
Since ancient times, people have marked events in their lives by the years of a king’s reign or by other locally significant occurrences. The year 1900 A.D. was calculated by the Chinese as the 26th year of the Guangxu Emperor, while in Japan it was referred to as the 33rd year of the Meiji Emperor. In India, ancient Indians marked the calendar by dynasties, but Buddhists calculated from the year the Buddha died and attained Nirvana in 544 B.C. Indians also used the era of Kali, a small cycle within the larger mahayuga cycle of 4,320,000 years and the yuga cycle of 432,000 years. Other calendar systems in India were based on a specific battle or a reform event. All these systems became complicated due to the variations between the lunar and solar years. Every major ancient civilization (Rome, Greece, Egypt, Babylon, and Syria) had its own calendar system. The Roman method, which used the founding year of the city as a reference point, was also adopted elsewhere. The Islamic calendar, calculated from the era of the Hegira starting July 16, 622, was only implemented 17 years after the event and continues to use the lunar year.
In Christian Europe, the new calculation—B.C. or A.D.—expressed the early Christians’ belief in a unique event, the birth of Christ, which gave meaning and direction to all of history. However, this system developed gradually. Judaism holds the creation event as the singular occurrence, and the year 1900 A.D. corresponds to the year Anno Mundi 5661 in Judaism. Many centuries passed after the birth of Christ before the current system of dating was established. The inventor of the A.D. calendar system (A.D. = Anno Domini) was Dionysius Exiguus (500-560), a monk, mathematician, and astronomer. He sought to accurately calculate the date of Easter, which is generally agreed to occur on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox on March 21. This means that in the Western Christian world, Easter can fall on any date from March 21 to April 25. Easter always governs the Christian year as it is the reference point for calculating other movable feasts. However, the method for predicting Easter dates for future decades has been troublesome and a perennial topic of debate. Despite many attempts at compromise, the date of Easter still divides Eastern churches from Western ones. Nonetheless, the Christian calendar method by Dionysius Exiguus, based on the year of Jesus’ birth, has been accepted by most of the non-Christian world, except for Islam. The error in Dionysius Exiguus’s calculations is merely a detail. He calculated that Jesus was born in the year 763 from the founding of Rome. However, modern biblical scholars, based on the Gospels, agree that Jesus’ birth must have occurred before the death of Herod, which means it could not be after 4 B.C.
In 525 A.D., Dionysius Exiguus proposed that the Pope use the term “Anno Domini” (A.D., meaning “Year of Our Lord”) as a reference point for time. Gradually, through the use of Dionysius’s Easter Tables in Christian Europe, the term Anno Domini, calculated from Jesus’ birth, replaced all other systems. However, it was not until the 17th century that scholars began using the term “B.C.” to mark the years before the birth of Christ.
But when was the beginning of each year calculated? There were previously many ways to calculate it, including Christmas Day, the Feast of the Annunciation (March 26), Easter, and January 1. This New Year date still causes much confusion.
The new custom of starting the year on January 1 represents a return to pagan calculations, as it is the start of the year according to the Roman calendar, and therefore the Church has always opposed this method. Nevertheless, this calculation gradually became widespread, and by the end of the 16th century, it had become common practice in Europe. Pope Gregory XIII, during his calendar reform in 1592, also yielded to this pagan approach and established January 1 as the New Year. This New Style created some complications for modern historians. Countries under the Roman Catholic Church quickly adopted Pope Gregory’s rational reformed calendar, but Protestant and Eastern Orthodox churches did not follow the papal calendar. For nearly two centuries, the English preferred to endure inconveniences rather than live by the papal calendar, as the seasons had long ceased to correspond with lunar cycles.
Finally, in 1751, Philip Dormer Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), a liberal thinker, proposed that Parliament accept the New Calendar (no longer referred to as the “Gregorian” calendar).
