While reading A Source Book for Medieval History (1905), I came across the following documents whose opening words reminds me of the verbiage of D&C 20:1 (read: fanciful way of stating the date, not giving the exact number of years, months, and days since the birth of Jesus):
In the name of the Lord God, our
Saviour Jesus Christ, in the 1059th year from his incarnation, in the month of
April, in the 12th indiction, in the presence of the holy gospels, the most reverend
and blessed apostolic pope Nicholas presiding in the Lateran patriarchal basilica
which is called the church of Constantine . . . (“The Papal Election Decree of
Nicholas II, 1059,” in A Source Book for Medieval History: Selected
Documents Illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. Oliver
J. Thatcher and Edgar Holmes McNeal [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905], 128)
