Understanding calendar notation

This right here is a fresco by Raphael of Plato hanging out with his best student, Aristotle. And you may or may not know that these two fellows, along with Plato's teacher, Socrates, are considered the fathers of Western philosophy. But that's not what this video is about. This is actually just a small little video about different dates, or maybe a better way to think about it, different ways to specify dates or dating mechanisms. And so, if you were to look up Plato's birth, you might get either 428 or 427, but we'll go with 428. If you were to look up Plato's birth, you might see it written as 428 BC, or you might see it written as 428 BCE. And the natural question is, what's the difference here? They both have a BC, but this one has an E. It's the same year right now. And the answer is that these are referring to the exact same year in history, but the acronyms here do stand for different things. BC literally stands for Before Christ. So if the date is written 428 BC, the implication is that this is 428 years before the birth of Christ. We'll see in a second that that's not exactly right, but that's what the implication is. If someone writes BCE, they're saying something very different. The B still stands for before. But the CE, the C in CE does not stand for Christ anymore. It now stands for common. And so the CE part is Common Era. Even though it's not referring to Christ anymore-- and the intention here is so that it's less religious than the term "Before Christ"-- it's still putting an importance on Christ's birth, because it's saying that the common era is the time period after the birth of Christ, which we'll see in a second isn't exactly right. But there's essentially the same exact dating scheme. One not directly referring to Christ, one that is directly referring to Christ. Similarly, this right here is a painting of Christopher Columbus. And if you were to look up in history books, when was his first voyage and when did he first show up in the New World, finding an island in the Bahamas? You would see it written as either 1492 or AD 1492 or 1492 CE. And once again, these are all referring to the same year, just using different acronyms. One of them's a little bit more religious, or more directly refers to Christ. And one is a little less religious. So AD, some people think it refers to after death. It does not refer to after death, because if you think about it, if you have years before the birth of Christ, and if you started numbering after his death, how would you number the years during his life? So AD does not stand for after death. It stands for Anno Domini, which literally means, anno means year, and domini means lord, or the lord's. So it's the year of the Lord or the year of our Lord. So it's years since. And 1 Anno Domini would be the year of Jesus Christ's birth. So not after death. It stands for Anno Domini, but literally year of our Lord. So years since Jesus was born, with year one implicitly starting with his birth. And we'll see in a second that's not exactly right. CE stands for Common Era. Once again, 1 CE is the same thing as AD 1. Sometimes we now write, instead of writing AD 1492, we'll write 1492 AD, all referring to the exact same thing. Now, all of these things we refer to, when we say 428 BC it implies 428 years before the birth of Christ. 1492 AD, that's in the year of our Lord 1492, it implies 1492 years since the birth of Christ. But the reality is that we're not really quite sure when Christ was born. And so these aren't exactly. Columbus didn't sail across the Atlantic exactly 1492 years after the birth of Christ. Most historians put the birth of Christ at 7 to 2 BC or BCE, depending on how you want to view it. Remember BC is Before Christ, which is a little ironic, because we're talking about the actual birth of Christ. BCE is Before the Common Era. And they put his death at 30 to 36 AD, which is 30 to 36 in the year of our Lord, or-- that's what this stands for, Anno Domini-- or in the Common Era, CE. Now some people, they obviously don't like BC. They don't like the BC, AD naming mechanism, because it's explicitly referring to Christ in every year. It makes Christ the central figure in all of history. So they'll say that this is clearly too Christian. And they would prefer the situation, they would prefer the less Christian naming scheme where you use BCE and CE. But a lot of people would still say, hey, look you change. Well, you know, first of all, some Christians wouldn't like this that you removed the direct references to the birth of Christ, or being in the years since Christ's birth. But even here, and they'll say, you've removed it. But even here, some people would complain that although you've made the direct reference that this is saying Before the Common Era, and the Common Era, even though you've removed the direct reference, it still makes Christ's birth the central thing in all of history. But this is the convention whether people like it or not. In order to have the same reference point and it's too logistically difficult to switch it this time, everyone has essentially settled on this. It's really just a matter of letters of which naming scheme you pick. But the whole point of this video is that you don't get confused between BC and BCE. You don't think that AD stands for after death, it stands for Anno Domini, in the year the Lord, or the year of our Lord. And CE stands for Common Era. But this and this are referring to essentially the same count after Christ, after the birth of Christ, or this theoretical birth of Christ, which we don't really know when it actually happened. It probably did not happen at the beginning of 1 AD or 1 CE. And these two things also refer to the same direction in the timeline. One last thing I want to point out is that there is no year 0. So if you take either of these naming schemes, you have, so let's go very close to the year 1. So there's just some point, this theoretical birth of Christ, which was probably not the actual birth of Christ, but at that theoretical point-- so New Year's, so you have December 31 of the previous year, all of a sudden, now, you are on January 1 of 1 AD or CE, depending on how you want to refer to it. And the year before that was 1 BC or BCE, depending on how you want to refer to it. So there is no year 0 in this scheme. And then the last thing I want to emphasize-- and it might be obvious to you-- is the larger a number you have here, the further back you're going in time. Because this is saying how many years before this theoretical birth of Christ, and obviously larger numbers here, you have here, this is the further you're going off into the future. And if you wanted to figure out how many years passed between Plato's birth and Columbus sailing across the Atlantic to find the New World, you would say, well, look, it took 428 years to go from Plato's birth to this theoretical birth of Christ. And then you have another 1492 years to wait until Columbus gets his ship together. So the total number of years would be-- I'll do it right over here-- 428 years to get to Christ from Plato's birth, and then you have another 1492 years to wait for Columbus. So let's see, 8 plus 2, that is 10. As you can see, I just wanted to add a little arithmetic in this video. So 1 plus 2 plus 9 is 12. And then we have 9, 1 plus 4 plus 4. So 1,920 years between Plato's birth and Columbus sailing across the Atlantic.