The idea of counting years has been around for as long as we have written records, but the idea of

syncing up where everyone starts counting is relatively new. Today the international standard is to
designate years based on a traditional reckoning of the year Jesus was born the A.D. and "B.C."
system.

"A.D." stands for anno domini, Latin for in the year of the lord, and refers specifically to the birth
of Jesus Christ. "B.C." stands for "before Christ." In English, it is common for "A.D." to precede the
year, so that the translation of "A.D. 2014" would read "in the year of our lord 2014." In recent years,
an alternative form of B.C./A.D. has gained traction. Many publications use "C.E.," or "common era,"
and "B.C.E.," or "before common era." Before we talk about how and why the system was invented,
let's get some historical context.

When is Easter?
In the early Middle Ages, the most important calculation, and thus one of the main motivations for the
European study of mathematics, was the problem of when to celebrate Easter. The First Council of
Nicaea, in A.D. 325, had decided that Easter would fall on the Sunday following the full moon that
follows the spring equinox. Computus (Latin for computation) was the procedure for calculating
this most important date, and the computations were set forth in documents known as Easter tables.
It was on one such table that, in A.D. 525, a monk named Dionysius Exiguus of Scythia Minor
introduced the A.D. system, counting the years since the birth of Christ.
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Anno Diocletiani to Anno Domini

Dionysius devised his system to replace the Diocletian system, named after the 51st emperor of
Rome, who ruled from A.D. 284 to A.D. 305. The first year in Dionysius' Easter table, Anno Domini
532, followed the year Anno Diocletiani 247. Dionysius made the change specifically to do away
with the memory of this emperor who had been a ruthless persecutor of Christians.

Dionysius never said how he determined the date of Jesus' birth, but some authors theorize that he
used current beliefs about cosmology, planetary conjunctions and the precession of equinoxes to
calculate the date. Dionysius attempted to set A.D. 1 as the year of Jesus Christs birth, but was off
in his estimation by a few years, which is why the best modern estimates place Christs birth at 4
B.C. [Related: Easter Science: 6 Facts About Jesus]

Adding in the years before Christ

The addition of the B.C. component happened two centuries after Dionysius, when the Venerable
Bede of Northumbria published his "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" in 731. Up until this
point, Dionysius system had been widely used. Bedes work not only brought the A.D. system to the
attention of other scholars, but also expanded the system to include years before A.D. 1. Prior years
were numbered to count backward to indicate the number of years an event had occurred before
Christ or B.C.

No Year Zero?
According to Charles Seife in his book "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea": To Bede, also
ignorant of the number zero, the year that came before 1 A.D. [sic] was 1 B.C. There was no year
zero. After all, to Bede, zero didnt exist.

However, zero did exist; our modern conception of zero was first published in A.D. 628 by the
Indian scholar Brahmagupta. The idea would not spread to medieval Christian Europe, however,
until the 11th to 13th centuries.

Spread of the system

The B.C./A.D. system gained in popularity in the ninth century after Holy Roman Emperor
Charlemagne adopted the system for dating acts of government throughout Europe.

By the 15th century, all of Western Europe had adopted the B.C./A.D. system. The system's
inclusion was implicit in the 16th-century introduction of the Gregorian calendar, and it later would
become an international standard in 1988 when the International Organization for Standardization
released ISO 8601, which describes an internationally accepted way to represent dates and times.

Common and vulgar eras

The alternative form of Before the Common Era and Common Era dates back to 1715, where it is
used in an astronomy book interchangeably with Vulgar Era. At the time, vulgar meant ordinary,
rather than crude. The term Vulgar Era is even older, first appearing in a 1615 book by Johannes
Kepler.

Rationales for the transition from A.D. to C.E. include (1) showing sensitivity to those who use the
same year number as that which originated with Christians, but who are not themselves Christian,
and (2) the label Anno Domini being arguably inaccurate, since scholars generally believe that
Christ was born some years before A.D. 1 and that the historical evidence is too sketchy to allow for
definitive dating.