What's so common about our era?

Is this the year A.D. 2008, or is it 2008 C.E.?

And what's the difference?

Anyone who has been around academia the past few years has seen the rise of an alternative nomenclature to describe our dating system. The BC ("Before Christ") and AD ("Anno Domini") is being replaced by BCE ("Before the Common Era") and CE ("Common Era").

I saw this new nomenclature explained on a recent visit to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences' exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls (an exhibit I highly recommend if you're in the Raleigh area, by the way. You can find the website here.).

A sign in the middle of the exhibit reads, "BCE means 'Before Common Era' and is the scholarly equivalent to BC, meaning 'Before Christ.' CE means 'Common Era' and is equivalent to AD, meaning 'Anno Domini' or 'Year of Our Lord.' BCE and CE have no religious connotations and are more acceptable to people of all beliefs and backgrounds."

Wikipedia gives a pretty good account of the background of the BCE/CE usage, although its attempts to tie the contemporary scholarly preference for it with previous historical examples are dubious. I encountered the BCE/CE notation for the first time as a divinity student in the late 1990s, ironically enough. And though there may be some parallel examples in previous Jewish and Communist history (as Wikipedia notes), my understanding of the academic use of BCE/CE is that it is very recent and has no real organic connection to past alternative nomenclatures.

The real crux of the issue is not the abbreviations themselves, but the dating system that underlies them. The year A.D. 1 cooresponds exactly with the year 1 C.E., and both of them refer to the traditional date of the birth of Jesus Christ. So regardless of the abbreviation used to describe the year in question, the date still refers to a system based on a Christian ordering of history.

I really have two questions for those who prefer BCE/CE: First, if you are really wanting to get away from a religious connotation to our dating system, why wouldn't you try to change the system itself rather than just the outward terms? And second, what in the heck does "common" refer to in the BCE/CE references?

After the French Revolution, the government of France adopted a completely new numbering system based off of the beginning of the revolution itself. Their system didn't survive as long as Napolean did, but it seems a more logical way of replacing the Christian calendar for those who want to do so. The key is that you need a starting point; for Christians, it is the birth of Jesus, while for the French, it was the beginning of their new republic.

But just changing the outward terms while retaining the system isn't really de-Christianizing the calendar at all. So long as this is the year 2008, we still date world history by the birth date of Jesus Christ.

And that is just how it ought to be.