BCE / CE vs BC / AD

Bob Cargill's latest In My View over on Bible and Interpretation argues in favour of BCE / CE vs. BC / AD, Why Christians Should Adopt the BCE/CE Dating System . In my previous post, I looked at N. T. Wrong's take on the issue, but now I would like to make a few additional comments of my own.

For some, the usage will not in any case be a matter of choice. Within Biblical Studies, the usage is now so widespread that some authors will have had it imposed on them by publishers who make this an element in their house style. Indeed, the usage is much more widespread in our area than it is in any other discipline, and by a country mile. Bob speaks of "the increasingly accepted international scientific standard of BCE (“Before Common Era”) and CE (“Common Era”)": but I am not sure that it is so widespread. I rarely hear it outside of our field.

Bob's focus is on the BC / AD labels as they are used by Christians (note the title), but the difficulty is that everyone uses these labels. As Chris Heard points out in comments, Richard Dawkins uses it without apology.

Moreover, I don't think the term "dating system" is quite right. The dating system is the same, on BCE / CE and BC / AD; it is the labelling within the system that differs.

I would like to comment also on the following:

While the Gregorian calendar accurately represents years of 365.25 days, Dionysius’ calculations skipped the year zero, jumping immediately from the year 1 BC to the year 1 AD. The result is a calendar that claims to be based upon the birth of Jesus, but which skips the first year of his life.

There is also no "year zero" on the Gregorian calendar, so bringing it up in this context is a bit of a red herring. Dionysius did not "skip[] the year zero"; he did not factor in a year zero. It is true that there are astronomical calendars that subsequently have factored in a year zero, but this is not relevant to the Gregorian calendar, or to Dionysius Exiguus, which work with a transition from 1 BCE to 1 CE. There is no question of the first year of Jesus' life being "skipped".

Bob goes on to note that Jesus' birth can be located around 4BCE because it happens near to the death of Herod in Matthew 2:

If we add to these 4 years the fact that Herod the Great did not die immediately after the birth of Jesus, but, according to Matthew, ordered the death of all children two years of age and younger in an attempt to kill Jesus, we can add an additional two years to the birth of Jesus, making his birth approximately 6 BCE. If we also add the missing year zero, it is most likely that, according to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus was born around 7 BCE!

I doubt that we can be too precise about Matthew's dating. I am a bit of a sceptic when it comes to the historicity of Matthew 1-2. At best, I think he had a vague idea of the rough time when Jesus was born. The murder of children of two years old and younger may also say nothing about the time elapsing; it may have to do rather with Herod's attempts, as Matthew conceptualized it, to be thorough. The extra year for year zero is not necessary and should be dropped too.

Bob goes on:

Thus, the BC/AD system is fundamentally flawed in that it misrepresents the birth of Jesus by approximately 7 years. This means that Jesus’ ministry did not begin around the year 30, but instead around the year 23. Likewise, Pentecost and the origin of the Christian Church should not be dated to “33 AD,” but to about 26 CE.

The "year 30" is presumably based on Luke's notice that Jesus was "about thirty years old" at the beginning of his ministry (Luke 3:23), working forward from 7 BCE to 23 CE. But there are other indicators of date here in Luke, most specifically the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberias (Luke 3:1), which places the beginning of Jesus' ministry in 29CE. Bob's "year 23" can't be right. Moreover, 23 CE is too early for the note that Pontius Pilate was governor of Judaea (Luke 3:1), which makes 26 CE the earliest possible date for this (26-36 CE).

I have one more concern. Bob notes rightly that Matthew dates Jesus' birth near to the death of Herod the Great (Matt. 2.15, 19-21) and that Luke apparently dates it at the time of the census that took place "when Quirinius was governor of Syria" (Luke 2.2). Since the latter probably occurred in 6 CE, Bob suggests that there is a 10 year (or so) discrepancy between the dates of Jesus' birth in Matthew and Luke. However, this cannot be the case. Luke 1.5 follows Matthew in dating the action during Herod's reign. Unless he thought that Elizabeth had a ten-year pregnancy, Luke is not dating Jesus' birth in 6 CE. What on earth he is doing with the mention of Quirinius in Luke 2.2. is a mystery, but my guess is that his dating is a bit off. He has things roughly in the right decade or so, but he is not precise enough here for us to work out exactly when he thought Jesus was born. (He is a bit more confident when he gets to the beginning of John's ministry, on the other hand, in 3.1).

See also comments on Daniel McClellan, Clayboy and The Sacred Page.

Resurrecting NT Wrong on BCE and CE vs. BC and AD

Bob Cargill's latest In My View over on Bible and Interpretation is an excellent piece on the BC / AD vs. BCE / CE usage, strongly arguing that the former should be abandoned and the latter adopted by all:

Why Christians Should Adopt the BCE/CE Dating System

On occasions like this, I like to turn to NT Wrong. He wrote the following post on 4 January, in what is effectively an interesting counter to elements in Bob's article. I am not saying that I agree with everything NT says, but it's worth hearing again:

Use A.D. and B.C.! (Out with C.E. and B.C.E.!!)

The abbreviations C.E. (Common Era) and B.C.E. (Before Common Era) are commonly used in modern biblical scholarship to refer to the eras which were formerly known as A.D. (Anno Domini - The Year of The Lord) and B.C. (Before Christ). The usual rationale for the change is sensitivity to other religious and non-religious users of the Gregorian calendar. That is, given the number of worldwide users of the Gregorian calendar who don’t believe Jesus of Galilee is ‘The Lord’, a more neutral term is thought to be provided by ‘Common Era’.

However, what is ‘common’ about the Gregorian calendar? To the contrary, however the dating system is named, it refers to a specific tradition of the Christian West. The calendar has a very specific origin in the Christian tradition, and is calculated with respect to the estimated year of birth of the person central to the Christian tradition, Jesus Christ. (In actual fact, Dionysius Exiguus miscalculated the year of Jesus’ birth when he developed the calendar’s antecedent in AD 525, but that’s another story…)

By using ‘C.E.’ and B.C.E.’, we universalize a peculiar tradition. We make it out to be ‘common’ or ‘natural’, not requiring any special marking or qualification. As a consequence of the fact of Western power, the Gregorian calendar has been adopted as the most-used calendar in the world, and so does have some degree of ‘commonality’ in day-to-day use. But the change from A.D. to C.E. (and from B.C. to B.C.E.) obscures the particular Christian basis of this ‘common’ calendar, misrepresenting it as ‘normal’ - as somehow transcending historical particularities. By contrast, the other calendars are made out to be the only ‘localized’ and ‘particular’ calendars. While the Christian calendar is ‘naturalized’ by its designation as ‘common’, other calendars (Jewish, Persian, Islamic, Chinese, Hindu, Ethiopian, Thai, etc) are ‘artificial’ and ‘contingent’.

Stop this neo-colonialism! Use A.D. and B.C. again!! The specific marking of these older terms, which refers to the Christian concept of ‘Christ’, may well be offensive to some people. But this offence is substantial and systemic, not removeable by changing the name of the year which is dated from the birth of Christ. The hegemony of the Western calendar is a fact, and just one of the many effects of Western power in the world today — a minor but not insignificant fact, given the universal importance of local calendars in shaping culture. To obscure the Western calendar’s particularity by making it into a false universal is a double injustice – both the initial violence of changing local calendars, and then its covering up with the misleading term “common”. This is ideology at work.

Scholarship should be on the side of pointing out where injustices arise, not in covering them up.

3 pm, 7 April, AD30

In Paleojudaica Jim Davila mentioned an article appearing in Saturday's Times:

Moving on from reproach to rapprochement
By Geza Vermes

It is an important article on an important topic, so please forgive me for the most minor historical question which intrigues me:

The original catastrophe struck at 3pm on Friday, April 7, AD 30, when the charismatic Galilean religious preacher, Jesus of Nazareth, expired on a Roman cross, wrongly sentenced to death as an insurgent by the governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, with the connivance of the local Jewish leaders.

The note that intrigues me is the date. (Interesting, by the way, that The Times still use AD in an article about rapprochement; to my knowledge the scholarly BCE/CE has made no dent at all on media consciousness.) If I have understood correctly, and this is not something I have spent any time studying, the 30 date comes out of the Johannine dating of the Passion, aligning the Passover with the Sabbath, rather than the Synoptic dating, which aligns Passover with the day before the Sabbath that year. From scouting around on the net, I see that Vermes explicates this in his book The Passion, so I will have to take a look.

Vermes on the Historical Jesus

Jim Davila and Helenann Hartley link to this interesting piece in The Times from Christmas Eve:

When you strip away all the pious fiction, what is left of the real Jesus?
Geza Vermes

As Jim Davila says, "It's a good summary of one mainstream view of the historical Jesus". Indeed in many respects, it is a much more conservative picture of Jesus than that of, say, the Jesus Seminar. The summary reminds me of E. P. Sanders's Jesus as much as Vermes's own, though Vermes is more inclined towards the historicity of much of the Synoptic material than I would see Sanders as being, e.g. I doubt that Sanders would list the healing of a "servant of a Roman centurion from Jerusalem" among his secure facts. I was also interested to see the characterisation of the those who object to Jesus in the Synoptic sabbath healings as "some petty-minded bigots". There are some great quotations here for those who need to set examination questions. Here's one I may use one day: "He was crucified before Passover probably in AD30 because in the eyes of officialdom, Roman and Jewish, He had done the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time." Bang a "Discuss" on the end of that and what could be better?

It's a regular complaint, I know, but I find the title of the article unfortunate, because it gives the impression that historical Jesus study is all about stripping away fiction and getting down to a kind of untouched core of "real Jesus" material. The difficulty in this context is that it puts the backs up of many of the Christian readers who might otherwise have been sympathetic to an article on what can be said about the historical Jesus with certainty. I suppose I am sensitive to such things because I often talk to evangelical students who instinctively balk at historical Jesus study because it appears to them to be a quest to strip away fact from fiction, and so to discredit Christianity, rather than as an enquiry into what the historian is able to say with confidence in a public arena. In other words, the rhetoric implied by the title is unnecessarily provocative given the useful content.

There are one or two interesting (presumably Times) editorial elements that will strike some readers. I doubt that Vermes desccribed himself as "the world's leading Gospel scholar" or that he used capital H throughout for "He" and "Him" of Jesus. I'd guess that he didn't use BC and AD either, but I may be wrong about that. Either way, what the latter demonstrates is something I have pointed out before, just how little the Bible scholars' use of BCE and CE is making an impact on the wider world of discourse, even here in the very area where such usage was born.

Early Christianity Glossary

N. S. Gill's Ancient / Classical History announces:

Early Christianity Glossary

It's clearly still in development, but could be another useful glossary in the long term (cf. Deinde's stronger one, and my recent blog comments on other on-line glossaries). I'd have liked to have seen some comment on the use of "A.D." and "B.C." here, at least some acknowledgement that they are not now used by many scholars. But this makes me wonder something out loud. Is there anyone apart from Biblical scholars / theologians using BCE / CE? It's been out there a long time now. Is it ever going to catch on more broadly?

Update (23.18): N. S. Gill emails to note that she has now added sentences on "B.C.E." and "C.E."