Hi Melissa,
Here are some interesting thoughts about our present day calendar system:
Question: "What is the meaning of BC and AD (B.C. and A.D.)?"
Answer: It is commonly thought that BC stands for "before Christ" and AD stands for "after death." This is only half correct. How could the year 1 B.C. have been "before Christ" and 1 A.D. been "after death"? BC does stand for "before Christ." AD actually stands for the Latin phrase "anno domini" which means "in the year of our Lord." The B.C. / A.D. dating system is not taught in the Bible. It actually was not fully implemented and accepted until several centuries after Jesus' death.
It is interesting to note that the purpose of the BC / AD dating system was to make the birth of Jesus Christ the dividing point of world history. However, when the B.C. / A.D. system was being calculated, they actually made a mistake in pinpointing the year of Jesus' birth. Scholars later discovered that Jesus was actually born in around 4-6 BC, not 1 AD. That is not the crucial issue. The birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ are the "turning points" in world history. It is fitting, therefore, that Jesus Christ is the separation of "old" and "new." BC was "before Christ" and since His birth, we have been living "in the year of our Lord." Philippians 2:10-11, "That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
According to the UB Christ was born:
Quote:
122:8.1 All that night Mary was restless so that neither of them slept much. By the break of day the pangs of childbirth were well in evidence, and at noon, August 21, 7 B.C., with the help and kind ministrations of women fellow travelers, Mary was delivered of a male child. Jesus of Nazareth was born into the world, was wrapped in the clothes which Mary had brought along for such a possible contingency, and laid in a near-by manger.
The Julian calendar was accurate, but not accurate enough because every year over 11 minutes were lost. Note what happened in the sixteenth century:
Caesar's calendar, which consisted of eleven months of 30 or 31 days and a 28-day February (extended to 29 days every fourth year), was actually quite accurate: it erred from the real solar calendar by only 11½ minutes a year. After centuries, though, even a small inaccuracy like this adds up. By the sixteenth century, it had put the Julian calendar behind the solar one by 10 days.
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered the advancement of the calendar by 10 days and introduced a new corrective device to curb further error: century years such as 1700 or 1800 would no longer be counted as leap years, unless they were (like 1600 or 2000) divisible by 400.
If we had a calendar based on the birth year of Jesus we would have to add seven years to our calendar. This would now be 2,015. The year that we are now in is arbitrary because we could use any set of systems to determine what year that we are now in. You notice that scholars made a mistake when trying to determine Jesus's birth. But this is the system we have and it could have been based on another set of criteria. I hope that helped.
Paul
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