Please explain my confused me like I’m 5 (0r 4 or 6).
Arbitrary decision is arbitrary.
Years are ordinal numbers, the kind of number that tells you which place you finished in a race, and as such cannot have zeroes or negatives. You’re living in the 2,024th year since the instant that began the Common Era. “0th” and “-1st” are not valid expressions for years for the same reason that you can’t place 0th in the Olympics
Programmer clutching their keyboards screaming “Arrays start at 0!”
Ordinals are largely used for counting and when you’re counting you kind of do start a zero, most people just don’t say it. When you count 1… 2… 3… it would work just as well to start 0… 1… 2… 3… So programmers can rest easy.
I’m no expert but I assume that the year Christ died would be “year zero” (assuming you’re talking about anno Domini (AD) and before Christ (BC)) since we started counting after that.
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Nope. 1 BC/BCE -> 1 AD/CE. That’s just how it was designed.
The concept of zero had not even been discovered at the time the calendar was designed.
Almost. The first recorded use of ‘Zero’ was in Mesopotamia in 3BC/BCE. https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-the-zero
this is absolutely wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero
The year of Jesus’ supposed birth was counted as year 1 AD/CE. The year before that is considered year 1 BC/BCE. It’s worth noting that the concept of zero didn’t yet exist back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0#History
Probably worth noting that the Gregorian Calendar was an invention of the 16th Century. It was invented to deal with the problems of the Julian Calendar and the creators would have had a firm understanding of the concept of zero. The AD/BC split was all about the assumed year of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth (according to Christian mythology). The year of his birth was set as the first year Anno Domini or “The year of the Lord”. Or the first year where Jesus was kicking about. The year prior to that would therefore be the first year before “Before Christ” was alive, and therefore the year 1 BC.
Especially weird considering that Christmas has been set to December for a long time, so 98% of year 1 AD was actually before the ostensible birth of Christ (I know that scholars now think he was born in April or something, but they probably didn’t always)
When someone decides to change the way that they keep track of time, the new calendar typically starts at 1, as in “the first year of this new era”. It’s not that there was no existing year before that, just that it doesn’t make sense to start as zero.
It’s not like the Gregorian calendar that we use now existed in -1 and then rolled over to 0 and then 1. They just started the new one at 1, and for a period of time, there was surely some overlap in people using both calendars, until one was phased out entirely.
Korea kinda takes this to the extreme with birthdays.
The year 1AD wasn’t called 1AD in 1AD. The system was invented hundreds of years later.
The switch to the current system of using the theoretical birth of Jesus as the start of our calendar occurred in the 6th century, 500 years after the fact. They picked a year based on what evidence they had for when the birth of Jesus occurred with a margin of error of about ~30 years.
When this occurred and we started observing years in Anno Domini instead, whatever local calendar was being used was immediately replaced by the year 525, and retroactively everything before that was assigned it’s proper year. This ends with AD 1 and directly starts with BC 1 going the other direction. No year 0 was observed in this switch.Also note that before this switch, years were often designated in relation to the founding of a city or by the start of a ruler’s reign. There were always ordinal numbers, so the first year of a reign would be year 1, and there was never a zero, because it was year X of a previous reign.
It depends which calendar you use! Every calendar picks a basically arbitrary system to uniquely identify each year, and in some of them “year 0” doesn’t refer to any year.
The Gregorian, for example, goes directly from 1 BC to 1 AD, since 1 BC is “the first year before Christ” and 1 AD is “the first in the years of our lord.” This doesn’t make much mathematical sense, but it’s not like there was a year that didn’t happen–they just called one year 1 BC, and the next year 1 AD.
ISO 8601 is based on the Gregorian calendar, but it includes a year 0. 1 BC is the same year as +0000; thus 2 BC is -0001, and all earlier years are likewise offset by 1 between the two calendars.
If ISO says there was a year 0, there was. There’s only one thing better than perfect : standardized !
I need my standardized fixed calendar now dammit
Zero doesn’t even exist so how would year zero.
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CE/BCE isn’t strictly astronomical year terminology, it can be applied to the Gregorian calendar and AD/BC can be used for astronomical years. If you see BCE outside of an astronomy context, it probably does not include a year zero
i hope all these conflicting answers in the comments have made you less confused, OP.
😁
Can i state the obvious reflect on if this question even makes sense?
We are currently the 2024 year since we began counting and probably didn’t do so from day 1. Instead we took a significant cultural event and marked it the beginning. Adapting any initial time keeping to it.
We centered the beginning of this count on the life of someone who we cant proof ever existed. Great start.
we have likely been tracking sun cycles from much before but we cant exactly call our time keeping records reliable scientific measurements. Different civilizations and cultures had different ideas, may dispute data and eventually all had to make way for the teaching of the church.
There is no year 0, the calendar is a construct of time But doesn’t keep nor measure it.
One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.
The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.
One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.
No there isn’t. There’s tons of people who’ve claimed they’ve found records but ultimately none of them can be produced or are based on other accounts like Josephus who doesn’t ever directly reference Jesus. Further none of his original writing survived. Only reproductions, and the earliest one is from 11th century. Or Tacitus who was born after Jesus was dead. So no direct knowledge or evidence of Jesus as a individual, just a second hand accounting at best. Oh and also, no originals exist. Just copies dated back to the 11th century…
All “evidence” only starts 1000 years after Jesus actually lived… supposedly written by people who were born after Jesus died… and would have written that stuff 50-100 years after his death.
There is no actual archaeological evidence that “Jesus” existed. And a mere 3 references that exist outside of the bible that I’m aware of. All of which are not original manuscripts.
Edit: All of this to say, there is no consensus… and to claim there is consensus on the matter is a christian/catholic claim. Not an actual historical consensus.
They left out 0 from the list. It basically jumps from -1 to 1.
They switched when years are counted. BC years are counted at the beginning of the year. AD years are counted at the end of the year.
The halfway mark in the first inch of a ruler is 0.5". The first inch ends at 1.00. 1.25" falls in the second inch of the ruler.
We recently completed the 3rd month in the 2024th year AD. April 1st would have been 2023.25.
1-Jan-1 BC was almost a year before 31-Dec-1 BC. 31-Dec-1 AD was a year after 31-Dec-1 BC.
Yes. They skipped right over. It confused many people at the time: a whole year of their lives, gone. Many centuries later when zero was invented, an explanation was finally offered as to why that happened.
😂
Serious answer about what the year would have been in 1 AD, according to 63-year-old Emporer Augustus: 754 Ab Urbe Condita
That means “from the founding of the city” - they based their calendar on the mythical founding of Rome, as calculated by Verro, who himself was not long dead at that point. Before that, they just counted the years of each person’s reign Japanese-style. Probably other people in the ancient world had older calendars.
