>>>This is new to me. I never thought about it. So, how did the years about 2000 years ago? 2 B.C., 1 B.C., then what? You are saying 1 A.D. would be next. Is this correct?
>>>
>>
>>Yep. But there were no year denominations. When the society's decided to denote years they started with 1. If you think about, it would be impossible for anyone other than a psychic to know if the year was 1 BC, BC, etc. So the first 100th year was the year 100, not 99. Unfortunately, Y2K issues have been incorrectly linked with the new millenium and century.
>
>Well, starting with 1 doesn't make sense, according to what I understand B.C. and A.D. to mean. I understood xxxx B.C. to mean the xxxx years before Christ died (or, more correctly, is going to die). I understood xxxx A.D. to mean the xxxx years after Christ died. Which would mean
>0 B.C. = 0 A.D.
>which is the date that Christ actually died.
>
>So, maybe we are just correcting a mistake that society made when they came up with this "start at 1" idea. Hey zero might or might not be a number, but I know for a fact that 0.5 is a number; and I know that 0.5 comes before 1.
>
>I have heard people argue that the new millenium actually comes a year past when we are all celebrating. But I figured they just weren't invited to the party and were a little bitter.
>
>Joe

Actually BC and AD are in reference to when Christ was born, not when he died. He was actually born ( according to the best efforts of the scholars ) approximately in 4 BC and died in approxiamtely 30 AD. Even amongst the scholars this is speculative, of course, since records are not comprehensive of the time. However they decided to work it out, there was no 0 BC or 0 AD. The year "turned over" from 1 BC to 1 AD. Of course this was all reckoned much later. The people back then were using, if I'm not mistaken, the Julian ( or a version of it ) calendar using Roman reckoning.

Bill