I received an email today from GOPUSA News about a proposed change in wording in the Kentucky Educational system. In the proposal, students would be taught the terms “Before Common Era” (B.C.E.) and “Common Erra” (C.E.) as synonyms to “B.C.” (Before Christ) and “A.D.” (Anno Domini - in Latin means “In the year of the Lord”). You can read the article, written by Bobby Eberle, titled “So… Is It 2006 A.D. or 2006 C.E.?” You may recall I blogged about Eberle in this previous post.
I can see this argument from all stand points. In all the conversations I’ve ever had with people, I have yet to find someone who disagrees with Jesus’ existence. Some see him as the Son of God. Some view him as only a prophet. And there are many others who think of him as just an ordinary man of the time. There are of course those, I’ve yet to encounter, who don’t believe he existed at all - that he is just a character out of one big fairy tale. Since I have yet to meet anyone holding that viewpoint, I’ll put that theory on the back burner.
Like it or not, Jesus was a figure in time whose existence changed the course of history. It seems fitting that the current labels for historical dating are kept as B.C. and A.D. However, I can see where this would annoy atheists and others who may not view Jesus as anyone special. To play the devil’s advocate, one could say, “Why don’t we just create new date labels for anyone who changed the course of history?” My answer to that would be, that would be stupid, because there are far too many people in history who have altered its path and I’m sure many more who have altered it in ways we have yet to comprehend.
When I think back at the course of documented human history, I can think of no one more influential in the game of time than Jesus - regardless of how you view him. Thousands upon thousands of hours have been devoted to documentaries; countless surveys, studies, research and polls have been conducted; who knows how many books have been written all in an attempt to demystify the man known as Jesus. The Christian faith he gave word and human form to has been a driving force in all things. Millions were slaughtered The Crusades in the name of God and Jesus in the 7th century. Christianity was used as the justification for genocide and persecution from the days of the Roman Empire (allegedly up until passage of the “Edict of Milan”) and in some countries around the world to this very day. Empires rose and fell in the name of Christianity.
This is why I say that Jesus changed the course of history, regardless of how you view him. I’m not so sure that having more clever monikers for A.D. and B.C. will change much of anything, other than we’ll have potentially fewer people out there who know what A.D. and B.C. actually stand for. Is that a crucial thing?
Why don’t you chime in? I’m curious to see how others view this issue. While not exactly influencing people to convert to Christianity, I’d like to see if anyone thinks the change would be a way to further separate church and state. Or is this just a waste of time?
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3 comments ↓
I can think of two reasons to use C.E rather than A.D.
1) Like it or not, it has gained rather wide adoption in academic circles, so it’s useful to at least be aware of the term. Kentucky has an interest in not making its future students look like countrified rubes when they get to college.
2) A.D. isn’t particularly accurate. It’s widely believed that Jesus was actually born around 4 or 5 B.C.E. In this case, it’s useful to use the C.E. notation because it’s silly to claim that someone was born 4 years before he was born.
I’m about as strong a proponent of the separation of church and state as you’re likely to find, but even I think that C.E. is a bunch of semantic nonsense. We shouldn’t bother changing from A.D. because there’s no compelling reason to.
I might change my tune if the government started emphasizing the “our Lord” part of the English translation, but as it stands, I don’t see the cultural acceptance of A.D. as a term as being a governmental act.
One reason I can think of changing it is that for the longest time when I was a kid, I thoght that “A.D.” meant “After Death” and the time that Jesus was alive was this whole non-recorded time vortex. However, I’m also a big fan of keeping things simple. Why change a non-broken system anyways? I would think that removing “In God We Trust” from the monies and “Under God” from the Pledge would be better first steps to seperate church and state. Actually, I never liked pledging to a flag at all, let’s ditch the whole damn thing.
This is basically the same thing that has happened with UTC vs. GMT. They effectively refer to the same time standard, but one is “international” and the other is an accurate reflection of the historical origin of the standard (the time at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where 0 longitude is).
Similarly, the calendar used by most of the western world is the Gregorian calendar. Some faiths may well consider the “year of our lord” terminology to be overtly blasphemous, have their own calendars that can be readily translated back and forth. The B.C.E. and C.E. terminology is just an unnecessary euphemism. It’s the same as using the term “B.S.” instead of using the full, explicit phrase; everybody knows what you’re saying, you’re just pretending not to say it.
If academics would like to concoct a dating system that is more accurately-tied to a significant event (the definition of “significant” would likely vary depending upon the academic in question), they should do so.
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