Christ; events happened, therefore, ‘in the year of the Lord’, or,
in Dionysius’ Latin, Anno Domini. Unfortunately, and notoriously,
Dionysius’ calculations went awry, placing the birth of Christ
some four or five years after it actually may have occurred.
Nevertheless, this is the system we use today, with the term Anno
Dominiabbreviated as AD. The corresponding system of dating
events prior to Christ’s birth is altogether later, seeming not to
have originated until the seventeenth century. From this we get
the system of dating events according to years (counted back-
wards) ‘Before Christ’, or BC.
BCandADdating is, then, an explicitly Christian reckoning
of time, and as a consequence it has been the focus of much
vigorous scholarly debate, however nit-picking and preposterous
that may seem to those outside academic circles. Frequently BC
andADare replaced with BCEandCE, a convention that seems
to have arisen, in a commendable spirit of religious inclusivity,
among biblical scholars, and which is becoming common, even
in books on aspects of non-biblical antiquity. BCEandCEstand
for ‘Before the Common Era’ and ‘Common Era’, and thus divest
the calculation of time of its Christian element. But it seems to
me that making a Christian era a common one seems a surrepti-
tious way of imposing a Christian conception of time on non-
Christians. It strikes me, moreover, that this debate will not
matter much to many readers of this book, for whom BCandAD
are familiar and uncontroversial. In any case, most dates in this
book are to be assumed to be AD: I have only appended the
abbreviations ADandBCwhere there is ambiguity.
The structure of this bookEarly Christianity is a complex subject, encompassing all areas
of human endeavour, and too large to be covered by a single
volume of modest proportions. The topics touched on in the
following chapters could be (indeed, have been) the subject of
numerous and lengthy books in their own right. For example, I
could have written much more about the interpenetration between
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