I grew up in the 1960’s, a decade that has had a great impact upon our culture. During the early years of my life a battle was taking place in the southern States as African Americans along with others worked to overcome Jim Crow laws that established segregation, leading to the Civil Rights Laws of the mid-60’s under the Johnson Administration. I remember a Friday afternoon in first grade, when my teacher went to the back of the classroom, sat down and began to cry. Then we heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. A couple of days later we watched, when Jack Ruby, pushed through the crowd, stuck a revolver in the abdomen of Lee Harvey Oswald and pulled the trigger, killing the man accused of assassinating our President. We watched the President’s funeral on television. Several years later, my dad took me to sign up for Little League baseball, while we were there, we heard the news that Dr. King had been shot and killed while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis. Then two months later, I remember waking up to my clock radio, tuned to WLS in Chicago and hearing the news that Senator Bobby Kennedy had been shot while walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and would eventually die from his wounds. That summer several cities would erupt in riots, particularly Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.
I was a child during those events and had no history to understand that events of that type weren’t normal. The 1960’s impacted an entire generation and culture so that the decades of the 1970’s and following were quite different that the 1940’s and 1950’s.
The apostle Paul referred to another event that changed not just a generation and a culture, but has and continues to transform the world. In Galatians 4:4, Paul made a surprising statement, when he wrote the words “in the fullness of time”, why? In Greek, the term “pleroma”, translated “fullness” has the concept of conclusion, or completion. Something was completed and coming to an end. The word for time here is “chronos”, we get our word “chronology” from this word. Chronology literally means “the study of time”. We use “chronology” to refer to an ordered list of events, to communicate what happened before and after something. For the Greeks it was the normal word used for the ongoing march of time from past to the present and on to the future.
So when Paul wrote to the Galatians that in the fullness of time/chronos, he made a surprising statement, that time as we know it was changed, when God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those who were under the law. Paul declared that with the birth of Christ the world was radically transformed.
This year is known as 2025, but why? Why not year 288 to count the years since the Declaration of Independence, or 236 since the ratification of the Constitution? Why is it 2025? The method of establishing years was established in the 6th Century when a Christian monk proposed numbering the years from the birth of Jesus, which was dated according to the year in which King Herod died, who was the King of Judea when Jesus was born. Modern scholars date Herod’s death sometime between 4 and 1 BC. The monk proposed this numbering system followed how the Romans numbered their years, according to the years of an emperor’s reign. In fact, after Benito Mussolini became premier of Italy in 1922, he changed the numbering system for Italy to the years of his rule. Particularly in southern Italy, you can still see evidences of that numbering system. In the 6th Century the practice of numbering the years from Jesus’ birth began, which explains why we are in 2025, but also the abbreviations of BC and AD. BC refers to before Christ, that is before his birth. AD is an abbreviation for a Latin phrase, “anno domini”, which translated means year/anno and of the Lord/domini, “year of the Lord”.
However, about 100 years ago Jewish scholars, not being Christian and desiring a more “religiously neutral” approach began using different terms, BCE and CE, which since the 1980’s have become more prevalent. However, even though these phrases do not refer to Jesus, they are not really religiously neutral and are actually as if not more theologically accurate than the traditional terms. Why?
The terms BC and AD refer to an event, “Jesus’ birth”, however the terms BCE, “Before Current Era” and CE, “Current Era” don’t refer to an event, but a period of time, an era. The current usage implies that before there was a “Current Era”, there was another “Era” before that, which is exactly what Paul stated in Galatians 4:4. Paul implies that before Jesus, it was before the fullness of time, one era. Now we live in an era, defined by the fullness of time. Without knowing or intending to, those espousing religious neutrality, actually are promoting a theologically correct terminology to how we count our years, because that is exactly what Jesus did. He started a new era, since the time of Jesus, he has been transforming the world. So much so, that we often do not realize how much Jesus has impacted our life and how different the world is today than it was when Jesus was born. We live in an era, in which British Historian Tom Holland states as: “Time has been Christianized.”
David Freitag 