B.C. vs B.C.E. (#157, Topic H)

No sooner have I done an entry on Kentucky (#156), it makes news again. Over WAMU, an AM radio station licensed to the American University in DC, I heard, this morning, that Kentucky becomes the first state in the nation to enact laws requiring, in textbooks used in the state, that designation of B.C. [= Before Christ] be changed to B.C.E. [= Before the Common Era], and A.D. [= Anno Domini] to C.E. [= Common Era], thereby rendering references to historical dates a secular matter, devoid of any religious connotations. This is very much to my liking. This issue first came to my attention when I started to translate Confucius's (551-479 BCE) Analects. Translators with western-language as mother tongues invariably use phrases such as "before our era" to refer to Confucius's time. In invoking "before our era," the impression those translators wish to leave is that there was no history "before our era," where, in fact, there was great civilization in China -- unrivaled anywhere and, indeed, any time, whether before or after western civilization began to materialize. Thus, in my translation of the Analects, BCE is invariably used to identify historical dates. Later, I saw an exhibition of Dead Sea Scrolls at the Library of Congress; scholars responsible for assigning dates invariably use BCE, underscoring, emphatically, that there was history, culture, and civilization centuries or even millennia earlier.