Rest in peace united in Christ." The abbreviation R.I.P., meaning "Requiescat in pace" "Rest in peace", continues to be engraved on the gravestones of Christians, especially in the Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican denominations. In the Tridentine Requiem Mass of the Catholic Church the phrase appears several times. To satisfy a vogue for rhyming couplets on tombstones, the phrase has been parsed ungrammatically as: This verse has been found inscribed in Hebrew on gravestones dating from the 1st century BC, in the graveyard of Bet Shearim. It speaks of the righteous person who died because he could not stand the evil surrounding him. A
Common Era "before the beginning of the vulgar æra, by which we now compute the years from his incarnation." A 1796 book uses the term "vulgar era of the nativity". The first so-far-discovered usage of "Christian Era" is as the Latin phrase "aerae christianae" on the title page of a 1584 theology book. In 1649, the Latin phrase "æræ Christianæ" appeared in the title of an English almanac. A 1652 ephemeris is the first instance so-far-found for English usage of "Christian Era". The English phrase "common Era" appears at least as early as 1708, and in a 1715 book on astronomy is