“701 BCE”:
BCE/CE = Political Correctness = Cultural Marxism. (Think: Christmas Break = Holiday Break.)
The timeline was devised by Dionysius Exiguus to calculate the birth of Christ, so as then to calculate Easter in future years. (He was limited to Roman Numerals, sans the Zero, hence the errors.)
The atheist leftists did not devise a new timeline; they did not revise the existing timeline.
Instead, they stole it and renamed it so as to excise its raison d’etre: the life of Jesus Christ.
The Marxist academics did what such parasites always do: usurp and subvert, not create.