Making History

After Dionysius Exiguus used the phrase anno Domini to describe the year (525) in which he was writing a table of dates for Easter, the convention took awhile to catch on.

There were many ways to identify the present year. Rome could use the years "since the founding of the city" (AUC, standing for ab urbe condita), or by whomever was proconsul that year. Lots of local kingdoms counted years by the reign of the king, so that each new king dated records and event starting with year "1"; even more confusing since a king could start his reign on any date of the year.

The Anglo-Saxon historian known as the Venerable Bede knew the work of Dionysius and used AD for dating in his history that went up to the year 731 (Bede died a few years later).

For years prior to AD, he use the elaborate phrase ante incarnationis dominicae tempus ("before the time of the Lord's incarnation") followed by a number. The Latin phrases used by scholars to refer to dates prior to Christ eventually came to be known in the English-speaking world simply as "BC": Before Christ.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, they did not explain if by incarnation they meant conception or birth. In the 9th century, theologians chose conception as the starting point of the era, the date of the Annunciation, 25 March, celebrated sometimes as Lady Day.

Alcuin started using Anno Domini during the Carolingian Renascence, which helped spread the convention throughout much of Western Europe and beyond. Popes, who also used regnal years the way kings would, started using the neutral AD starting in the 11th century. When Portugal switched officially to AD for dating documents as of 1422, all Christian countries were now on board.

Note that there in no Year Zero. The first year of the present era is AD1; the year preceding is 1BC. Yes, AD is traditionally printed before the number because you are saying "The year of Our Lord 2025." Otherwise you are saying it is "Year 1 Before Christ."

Because there are other cultures with their own calendars, a modern convention has arisen of using CE and BCE (Common Era, Before Common Era) in western culture to remove the religious facet. These other calendars, still adhered to, will be a topic for tomorrow.

Anno Domini

When Pope John I in 525 asked Dionysius Exiguus to write a chronology to tabulate future dates of Easter, Dionysius looked at how years were numbered and wanted something he considered more appropriate. Of course there was the Roman Empire numbering of AUC, which stood for abs urbe condita, "from the founding of the city." Dionysius wanted something a little more appropriate for a Christian world.

At the time, years in Rome were designated by the terms of the Roman consuls. Other methods of keeping track of years included Olympiads or the regnal years of Caesars. In various countries, years were called by the regnal years of the king. When a new king was crowned, his records began with Year 1 of his reign. 

Christians were using the "Diocletian era," which was calculated since the last big persecution of Christians under Emperor Diocletian. Dionysius did not want to use a calendar based on someone who was hostile to Christians. There had been a previously calculated set of dates by Victorius of Aquitaine c.457 that Dionysius ignored as being "off" and developed his own system, laying down dates for the years 532-626.

Dionysius wrote that the "present year" was the "consulship of Probus Junior," which he also claimed was 525 years since the birth of Christ. (We assume he looked at various historical records and counted them up to determine that year.) 

His solution to keep track of years was the phrase anno Domini, "year of [our] Lord." This divided time into two sections: everything that happened prior to the Incarnation, and then everything that happened starting at the Incarnation.

Problems arose, of course. One question was what defined the "Incarnation": was it birth, or conception? The Diocletian Year began on 1 September, but consulships began on 1 January, so were we adding up years correctly? Lists of consuls were not always complete, nor were the dates of emperors.

We are not sure how Dionysius determined the year of the Incarnation. It may have been based on the Gospel of Luke, where he says Jesus was about 30 shortly after the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar.

The use of AD was not adopted universally. Tomorrow we'll look at other conventions and the slow rise of AD's popularity. We should also mention "Phantom Time."

Dionysius Exiguus

We learned a lot about St. Pachomius and his development of the Eastern Coptic Christian monasteries from a biography written over a hundred years after his death by an Eastern Roman monk named Dionysius Exiguus, which means "Dionysius the Humble."

Born c.470 in Scythia Minor—a Roman province north of Constantinople, between the Danube and the Black Sea—he was a "true Roman" by inclination (according to Cassiodorus).  He was a mathematician and astronomer, a theologian, and was well-versed in canon law. He was fluent in both Greek and Latin. This skill allowed him to translate hundreds of important Greek works into Latin, including the "Life of St. Pachomius." He also translated a history of the discovery of the head of John the Baptist. Some translations attributed to him seem to be the earlier work of Marius Mercator (mentioned previously in a post about forgeries).

He came to Rome when Pope Gelasius I summoned him to organize the papal archives. (Gelasius died 496CE, so Dionysius must have been in Rome by that year.) He translated into Latin 401 ecclesiastical canons, including the apostolic canons and the decrees of the councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon, and Sardis, all of which were recorded in Greek, having taken place in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Pope John I in 525 asked him to create a chronology, which he did, using the Julian calendar and tabulating the dates of Easter, that "floating Holy Day" that caused much consternation in the early Church. In the process, Dionysius created a—let's call it a "convention"—that has lasted until today: the use of Anno Domini to describe years since the birth of Christ.

Tomorrow we take a deep dive into those two simple words, what came before, and how they were determined.