Your time is priceless, spend it wisely...
Your time is priceless, spend it wisely...
May 14, 2025 - (reading time:7 minutes)
“What year were you born?”
“Um... in the year 235 before the birth of a prophet who won’t even know he’s a prophet for many years, and who will never know that his birth date is being used to count years. However, 2,000 years from now, his birth will become the center of the Western world’s calendar—even for those who don’t believe in the religion that he (or rather, his followers after his death) started.”
Absurd, right?
Yet for centuries, people lived without any Christian reference point. People in Antiquity didn’t walk around saying: “It’s 57 BC, Julius Caesar is about to cross the Rubicon!” They lived in their present, with their own markers.
Let’s picture a Roman classroom:
“Pop quiz, kids: In what year was Julius Caesar crowned? When were the pyramids of Egypt built?”
Well, Julius Caesar was never “crowned” in an imperial sense: he was named dictator for life in 44 BC, but at the time, people simply said it was the year of the consulship of Caesar and Mark Antony.
As for the pyramids, it’s estimated that the Great Pyramid of Khufu dates back to around 2560 BC. Egyptians at the time would have called it the 23rd year of the reign of Khufu, king of the 4th dynasty.
No absolute dates. Time was marked by years of a ruler’s reign, by Olympiads, or by local events. A completely different way of living... and counting.
A monk named Dionysius Exiguus, originally from Scythia (a region corresponding to part of modern-day Romania), launched this global time reboot!
In the year 525 AD, Pope John I asked this monk to calculate the date of Easter.
To do so, the monk had the idea of changing the counting system and using the “Christian era.” Why? He was tired of counting years based on the reign of Roman Emperor Diocletian (Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus)... especially since Diocletian was infamous for persecuting Christians.
He then decided to redefine year zero: it would be the birth of Christ.
According to his calculations, Dionysius believed Christ was born 535 years ago. But for convenience, he decided Christ was born 532 years ago. After all, no one was yet using AD years, so he could afford to “make Christ 3 years younger” (what’s one more miracle?). Why did it suit him? Because 532 is the neat product of 4 leap years, 7 days of the week, and 19 lunar cycles of Meton. He thus forced a “numerical coincidence” to align with his theological needs and make it easier to fix the date of Easter.
He set the birth of Christ at December 25, 754 AUC (Ab urbe condita, since the founding of the city—meaning Rome). This year would now be year 1 of the Christian era. It would be known as 1 AD Anno Domini (the Year of the Lord). Amen!
Dionysius’ decision gradually took hold, notably due to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.
It became more widely adopted under Charlemagne starting from his reign (768–814), particularly after his imperial coronation in 800, and progressively became an administrative standard during the Middle Ages, then global through European expansion starting with the great explorations of the 15th century.
Bad luck—Dionysius made two calculation errors.
First, he called that year year 1, skipping a year 0. To be fair, the number zero had not yet entered European mathematics. People were using Roman numerals: no room for the void.
Result: by jumping directly from year -1 to year 1, we lose a year in the count. The 1st century has only 99 years instead of 100… The others have 100. Oops.
Second, Dionysius was wrong about Jesus’ birth date. We know that King Herod, whose paranoia drove Mary and Joseph (Jesus’ parents) to flee, died in 750 AUC, which means 4 BC. In other words, if Jesus was born during Herod’s reign, he must have been born before year 1.
Modern historians agree on a likely birth around 4 or 5 BC.
So not only did this holy man rise from the dead (according to Christians), but he was technically born before himself! Quite the prophet.
Here are some well-known dates and how they were referenced at the time:
2560 BC → Approximate date of construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
At the time? It was during the 4th pharaonic dynasty, under Khufu’s reign.
776 BC → First Olympic Games in Greece.
People would later say: 1st Olympiad, 1st year.
509 BC → Founding of the Roman Republic.
Romans began dating from this event: Ab urbe condita, or “since the founding of the city (Rome).”
44 BC → Assassination of Julius Caesar.
Official documents cited the year of the consulship of specific politicians.
4 BC → Probable birth of Jesus, according to modern historians.
1 AD → First year of the Christian era.
But at the time, no one said, “It’s year 1!” They said it was 754 years since the founding of Rome.
64 AD → Great Fire of Rome under Nero.
People would say, “In the 10th year of Emperor Nero’s reign.”
313 AD → Edict of Milan, legalizing Christianity in the Empire.
“In the 3rd year of Constantine I’s reign” or “under the consulship of Constantine and Licinius.”
476 AD → Fall of the Western Roman Empire (deposition of Romulus Augustulus).
People would have said “At the end of Emperor Zeno’s reign.”
Let’s not forget that the globally adopted calendar isn’t the only system—even today!
If we’re in the year 2025, in other systems:
Hebrew calendar: The Jews are in the year 5785
Muslim (Hijri) calendar: Muslims are in 1446
Chinese calendar: The Chinese are in 4723, the year of the Wood Snake
Each culture has its starting point, its own “year 1.” And none of them begins in Bethlehem.
Before Dionysius Exiguus, no one needed a universal year zero. People lived in a local present, tied to the king, the event, or the hero of the moment. No fixed reference. No calendar imposed by a foreign religion.
What does this say about us? We believe we live in a rational world, yet we count our years from a religious event that neither we nor our direct ancestors experienced. It pushes us to constantly project ourselves into a normative past instead of anchoring ourselves in the present—at the very least, in our own era.
No, Jesus hasn’t always been the center of time.
And for a long while, he wasn’t even on the map.
Finally, don’t forget that technically, you were born 4 years earlier than what your ID says. Sorry, that won’t help you reach retirement any sooner.
But it might come in handy for you or your children at the next history quiz. You technically have a 4-year margin of error.
