I got into an argument that Jews and Jewish scholars, however much they may have resented the preference in Western society for BC/AD, it was now more an issue mostly for secular academics who did not want as strong a religious foundation for our dating system. The issue is now that it is religious, not that its use is perceived as antisemitic. I based this on both online and live discussions, with both everyday and academic Jews, who tended to shrug off BC/AD. They do not regard it as antisemitic. They likely would if someone were to make a big deal about it, such as if Donald Trump were to declare that all government documents, no matter the context, were required to be in the old form. That would arouse suspicions. I am guessing about that, but I think it likely.
My disputant stated that BC/AD was considered antisemitic among Jewish academics. The argument went to related places but we did not go much longer on that in specific. I felt he was not understanding a distinction I was making, but no matter. That bears on this discussion only slightly. He is an academic and knows more Jewish academics than I do, and it would come up in his specialty. I know psychology researchers, med school researchers, and online I have heard academics in genetics, history, literature and other liberal arts. His numbers would be greater.
Yet it occurs to me that even outside of the cross-understanding, I may have been wrong in my original premise. What do you know from your own experience. Granted that it may have been Jewish scholars who originally pushed for the change and both secular and practicing Christians who led the acceptance, what is the situation in 2025? Is there any energy in popular intellectual or academic discussion on the topic now?
I kept thinking of the ban on Brown Bag Lunches because they were supposedly offensive to black people because of the exclusive clubs where you had to be lighter than a brown bag to get in decades ago. No black people actually made that association, it was white people showing off. I may be imposing that fraud on this unfairly.
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Whatever moniker you hang on it, the same guy's 6th birthday is still the reference point.
True, but I think people regarded it as less in-your-face. It does seem to be a hard distinction to explain to a Martian.
I was unaware of the Jewish connection; I've only heard it used by left-leaning academics of no special religious observance. However, it turns out that there's a much longer and more interesting history to the matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era
Thank you. I should have suspected there was more to the story.
I was on the Faculty Senate many years ago and there was another Faculty Senator, a Jewish Historian, who gave some indignant speeches about A.D. dating. He was strongly identified as a religious Jew and filled to the brim with ethnic grievance. He was on the dissertation committee of one of my first PhD students and I still shudder to think of the eggshells over which he made young professor Smith (and my PhD student) tiptoe. But BCE-CE is not just a Jewish foible. It is a fastidious lexical affectation among the same prigs who are given to other fastidious lexical affectations.
I am skeptical of the conflations being made in that Wiki, especially since the Jews and others have been using a year designation not based on Christ's birth (Anno Mundi) since roughly the same time period. I don't dispute the occurrence of various phrases but I think a lot is being made of what are probably essentially rhetorical flourishes that could be dropped or added at will. Nobody at a practical level uses AD or CE on dates now, and I doubt they did back then, either.
What I know from my own experience is that I was there when you had the argument with the other guy (who, for the sake of clarity to other readers, was not me). I think there was a certain amount of the common problem of talking past each other. (I described the exchange to my wife, who was amused and analyzed it as what happens "when two men mansplain at each other.")
"My disputant stated that BC/AD was considered antisemitic among Jewish academics. The argument went to related places but we did not go much longer on that in specific. I felt he was not understanding a distinction I was making, but no matter. That bears on this discussion only slightly. He is an academic and knows more Jewish academics than I do, and it would come up in his specialty."
I think he did understand the distinction. You can always just ask him, but I think I heard him saying that Jewish academics didn't like AD/BC dating because it offended their Jewishness rather than their academicness (which is now a word; I don't care what the spellchecker says).
When I first came to an adult realization of what CE/BCE was all about, I thought then, as I think now, that it was a particularly futile effort to do a bit of de-Christianizing, since it is still obviously trying to date from the Guess What. Personally, I continue using AD/BC but don't make a fuss about CE/BCE. I was interested to note from the Wikipedia page that the two notations are now apparently in equilibrium.
The issue reminds me of this historical factoid:
In 393 A.D., the Emperor (Nth-generation Christian) decided to officially close down the Delphic Oracle, which closed shop with these words:
"Tell the king; the fair wrought house has fallen.
No shelter has Apollo, nor sacred laurel leaves.
The fountains are now silent; the voice is stilled.
It is finished."
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