Dates in Common

The terms Common Era and Before Common Era and their abbreviations CE and BCE were adopted relatively recently, first by theologians and then by academics. I’ve questioned their use in the OEDILF context, not as neologisms, but as academic terms that get between us and a popular audience, as evidenced by our own workshoppers sometimes asking what they mean.

Just because these terms are standard in some academic disciplines shouldn’t be a reason for them to be ours. We aren’t writing for academic publication, we’re writing a collection of short comic poems intended to entertain and enlighten any member of the public who stumbles across them. To my mind, that means using the terms that ordinary people will recognise: AD and BC.

I appreciate that Anno Domini and Before Christ, and the suggestion that Jesus was Christ, have a significance for people of Jewish and Islamic faiths that they simply don’t have for people outside those faiths, but am unconvinced that non-Christians would be consoled by a definition of a Common Era that happens to coincide with the years of J.C. The Islamic world uses Islamic dates; Thailand uses Buddhist Era dates. Replacing AD by CE does nothing to change the substance of the calendar as one dating from the birth of Christ, give or take four years. Changing it to CE seems only to compound the potential for offense:

AD: Christian calendar used in Europe.

CE: Common Era, so called because Europe colonized half the world and brought the Christian calendar with it.

When I write AD it says nothing about my personal religious beliefs, especially as I don’t even speak Latin. (I rarely use AD anyway—I just leave it off—but you can’t take a BC as read.) Similarly, when I write Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, I’m not announcing a belief in Norse gods; when I write my birth month, I’m not confirming a belief in the Roman god of beginnings and endings. I use these labels because they’re dominant in my mother tongue.

Geologists and paleontologists use Before Present (BP), which really is substantially different. The numbers they deal with are so large that a thousand years here or there make no difference, and it’s important, I believe, not to date geological eras in reference to the birth of an arbitrary human being, whether it’s Christ or Buddha.

But when we’re talking about historical figures, the relabelling is jarring. Why don’t the before people get to be part of the Common Era? In their case, it’s arbitrary either way: they had no Before Christ or Before Common Era calendars, only the reigns of emperors and pharaohs. They’re actually in the same boat as everyone limericked at the OEDILF: a calendar is being used to describe their lifespans which relates to the birth of Christ. That is the calendar in English-speaking culture, and has been for over a thousand years. Relabelling it the Common Era obscures that history.

All of the words we’re writing about in the OEDILF, especially the biographical names, have a history, and that history is tied to a specific language, a specific culture, a specific set of circumstances—and a specific religious calendar. That specific history is just as important as this specific language, because without the former we wouldn’t be speaking the latter. For me, this has nothing to do with whether or not Jesus was real or whether or not he was God. It has to do with a thousand years of Western culture, and stonesmiths who carved A.D. into countless tombstones all over Europe and its colonies. It connects us with our past, and academics have no privilege to break that connection by fiat. The connection may yet break, but the use of BCE/CE is forcing it.

If some OEDILF authors want to use BCE/CE, that’s their choice, but we don’t have to have a party line on it. We’re limerick writers, not members of the American Anthropological Association.

Reworked from forum and workshopping comments from May 2005–December 2006.