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Did the year zero never exist ?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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That could work. Calculating across eras would still end up sort of funny (the putative nativity would be a year closer to 233BC than 233AD, for example), but unless you're an archeologist that doesn't come up that often.
I had another conversation about this not that long ago, and it really does boil down to treating intervals as numbers. Unix epoch doesn't officially extend to pre-1970 years, but it's defined as "the number of seconds that have elapsed [past perfect] since" for that reason, and does have a second 0. It fair to guess Bede himself didn't properly distinguish between the two, because that leads directly to an argument 0 is a number, which AFAIK doesn't appear in European mathematics until much later.
I think the only reason that the nativity would be a year closer to 233 ad than 233 bc is because Jesus was born in late December. Had he been born a week later on the 1st of January, it would work out, with 1 ad starting a year after his birth and 1 bc starting a year before (year 0 being that of his birth)
The year was built around it, not the other way. It's all derived from the Christian calendar. I'm not sure off the top of my head how Christmas ended up a few days before New Years, but they're deliberately very close. It has been argued that the real life birth might not have been in winter at all (or even Bethlehem).
I digress, though. It would inevitably be lopsided somehow, because you've centered the numbering system around six months off of the New Years points.