Origin of the terms “BCE/CE” for dates?

A friend who blames Jews for all of the ills that he perceives in American society asked me if it was a Jew who started using “BCE” (“Before the Common Era” rather than BC or “Before Christ”) for dates of events that occurred more than 2004 years ago.  Being a techie rather than a historian he had only recently come across this coinage and was convinced that it was part of a contemporary Jewish plot to deestablish Christianity as America’s default religion.


My response was that I believed BCE/CE instead of BC/AD was a bit of 19th century academic pedantry from Europe or England.  I remember seeing the term on yellowed labels next to objects in museums that had been gathering dust for 50+ years.  Given that Jews had only recently escaped from their ghettos in the 19th century and that most classics or Bible scholars would have come from wealthier families, I thought it highly unlikely that a Jew coined the term.  Most likely I thought it was Christian scholars who wished to employ a bit of jargon to make their professional work appear more scientific.  The only etymological reference that I could find was this Word IQ article, that talks about the appearance of the term “Common Era” in a 1908 encyclopedia published by the Roman Catholic Church.


Anyone have a better source for settling this question?  The Oxford English Dictionary and first Supplement don’t contain “BCE” or “Common Era”.

16 thoughts on “Origin of the terms “BCE/CE” for dates?

  1. “common era” is in the OED:

    1. A system of chronological notation, characterized by the numbering
    of years from some particular point of time; e.g. the Christian, Common,
    or Vulgar era (see CHRISTIAN 7); era of the Hegira (Hijrah), the Muslim
    era, reckoned from the year of Muhammad’s flight from Mecca; era of
    Nabonassar, a Babylonian era, employed in astronomy, commencing 747 B.C.,
    etc., etc. These phrases are also frequently employed in sense 2.

    as is BCE.

  2. The “Word IQ” article is the same as the Wikipedia article Gen Kanai cites. For some reason, Wikipedia results are rarely as highly-ranked on google as results from sites that mirror Wikipedia’s content.

  3. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (initially published 1966 and most recently updated 1991) has no entry for BCE, CE or Common Era.

  4. I thought CE meant “Christian Era” What is “Common” about it other than Christianity?

  5. I’m more interested in your friend, Phil, and in hearing details on what he thinks Jews are doing to subvert the culture.

  6. I’m more interested on why Phil might be comfortable with this friendship. Additionally, this friend doesn’t sound like a very good scientist or engineer.

  7. Allan: there are plenty of Web sites devoted to Jew-hatred and the negative effects of having Jews living in the U.S. My friend’s feelings are certainly not original. Aside from the BCE/CE issue he has observed with displeasure that there are Jews working at the ACLU, whose efforts to secularize our society he does not support. He also has noted that there are Jews who figure prominently in efforts to limit gun ownership. It depends on what is in the news that is pissing him off…

    Terry: Of course he’s a good scientist and engineer! One of the best. If I were to start dropping friends merely because they hated Jews I would have only half as many friends, at least according to the Anti-Defamation League study that I cited in http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/

  8. Anyone who professes to follow the Scientific Method (I’m assuming that’s what the label scientist or engineer implies) should be skeptical of claims that Jews are to blame for all of American societies ills. Please.

    Are there Muslims at the ACLU? Protestants? Catholics? There are people at the ACLU, so therefore people are to blame! Damn people!

    Secularization of American society a problem? I thought that was the point: http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Amend.html (See Article I.)

  9. Actually, I had thought that your being Jewish would be an obstacle to your friend….

    I still remember flipping through a copy of Henry Ford’s The International Jew in my grandparents’ home when I was a kid. Scary!

  10. I read in Jared Diamond’s book that there is a lot of misuse of BCE because apparently BCE and bce (lowercase) are not the same thing.

  11. Well it does seem that some of the earlier references that use BCE and CE are from Jewish history books, which sounds reasonable. The origin of the term, however, may be quite different than its popularization. In academic circles, I believe it was used partially to sound less ethnocentric, but also to bring the dating system in line with standard usage of historical chronology which often uses “eras” of all kinds to refer to broad swaths of history.

    Here are the oldest quotations from the OED that I could find that use BCE or CE (or CAE, a variant of the latter):

    ——————————–
    1838 E. H. LINDO Jewish Calendar (title-p.), Tables for continuing the calendar to A.M. 6000-2240 *C.

  12. phil, u r so stupid if ur friends with a jew hater maybe u just say it to get a rise?

  13. It’s hardly the case that Jews were so kept down by “the man” that none of them could afford higher education until recently. There was a prominent Jewish role in banking in NYC going way back. After Jefferson’s death, Uriah Levy bought Monticello and except for his curatorship it would be an archeology site. And Levy was a fifth-generation American.
    Your friend is a redneck, of course.

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