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# Every Date You Write Is a Theological Argument
My daughter's history homework came back with a red-pen correction last week. She had written 'AD 410' — the year Alaric sacked Rome — and her teacher had changed it to 'CE 410', with a note: 'more inclusive terminology'. I found myself staring at that correction longer than I should have. The teacher meant well. But something had been quietly erased, and I wanted to work out what.
I am not the sort of father who fires off emails to schools about culture-war flashpoints. The teacher is excellent, my daughter likes her, and I have no intention of dying on the hill of a Latin abbreviation. What interested me, sitting at the kitchen table with the marked-up page, was the strangeness of the gesture itself. The number had not changed. The event had not changed. Alaric still sacked Rome on the same morning, regardless of which two letters trailed behind the figure. So what, exactly, had been corrected?
## The Strangest Number in the Room
Consider how odd the situation actually is. As I write this, banks in Tokyo and Frankfurt and São Paulo are stamping transactions with a year number anchored to the birth of an obscure first-century rabbi from a Roman backwater. Atheist physicists date their papers by it. Buddhist monasteries print calendars that quietly accommodate it. The Chinese Communist Party, having tried various alternatives over the decades, currently uses it for international business. North Korea has its own Juche calendar but reverts to the global one whenever it wants the rest of the planet to read what it has written.
When you look at this directly, it is one of the more peculiar facts about modern civilisation. Every signed contract, every passport, every gravestone, every news headline carries a number whose meaning is: this many years since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. The whole planet, for purposes of commerce and law and history, has agreed to count from one person.
You can call that coincidence, or imperial residue, or path dependency. Christians have always called it something else. Paul, writing to the Galatians, says that "when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son." The phrase suggests a tilt in the structure of history itself, a point around which the rest pivots. Whether or not you find that claim plausible, the calendar is what it is. The number on my daughter's homework was a small monument to it.
## How a Monk with Bad Arithmetic Changed History
The system has an inventor, and he is worth knowing about. His name was Dionysius Exiguus — Dennis the Humble, or Dennis the Short, depending on how you want to translate it — and he was a sixth-century Scythian monk working in Rome. In 525 he was asked to calculate the dates of future Easters. The reigning method, the Diocletian era, counted years from the accession of the Emperor Diocletian, who had presided over one of the bloodiest persecutions of Christians in the early church.
Dionysius found this intolerable. As he put it himself, he did not want to perpetuate the memory of a tyrant who had murdered his brothers and sisters in the faith. So he started counting from a different event: the incarnation of Christ. Anno Domini — in the year of the Lord. The numbering was a quiet protest, a refusal to let imperial chronology dictate Christian memory.