CRITICISM) .
No ms. of the pre-Peshitta Syriac of the Acts or Epistles sur vives. For the Acts we have the Armenian translation of Eph raim's "Commentary," which is little more than an abridged para phrase, almost worthless for textual purposes. For the Pauline Epistles we have many quotations in Aphraates (A.D. 345) and the Armenian translation of Ephraim's Commentary, which con tains some valuable information, though the Armenian translator in too many cases has rendered Ephraim's quotations by the equivalent words of the Armenian vulgate. The only Catholic Epistles received in the Syriac-speaking Church before Rabbula's revision were I. John and I. Peter, to which Rabbula added James.
The Peshitta N.T. is extant in many mss., some actually of the 5th century. All present the same text with hardly any various readings.
The Armenian nation, together with its king, Tiridates III., be came Christian about the year 30o : somewhere about that date the first Armenian version seems to have been made, apparently from the Old-Syriac. This original version was revised from the Greek by Mesrob about 400, but traces of the Syriac are still evident (see J. A. Robinson, Euthaliana, pp. 76-91) . It was from this earlier Armenian version that the Georgian (or Iberian or Grusinian) version was made, the Adysh codex of which (dated 897) is said to present it in a very pure form.
The critical value of both the Georgian and Armenian versions is therefore the help they give towards better knowledge of the Old-Syriac version: when the Georgian N.T. has been critically edited it is likely to take a high rank for that purpose. Most Armenian mss. represent substantially the same text, viz., the mixed one resulting from Mesrob's revision. The most interesting ms. known is the Etchmiadzin codex of A.D. 989 discovered by F. C. Conybeare, which contains the Longer Conclusion to Mark (omitted by most old Armenian mss.) with the heading Ariston Eritzu ("of the Presbyter Arist [i] on") , and a peculiar recension of the Pericope de Adultera ( [John] viii. I–I I ).
A fragment of a bilingual Gothic-Latin codex containing a few verses of Luke xxiii. and xxiv. turned up at Antinoe in Egypt in 1908 and is now at Giessen (see Streitberg, vol. ii., p. BIBLIOGRAPHY.-W. Streitberg, Die Gotische Bibel, 2 vols. (HeidelBibliography.-W. Streitberg, Die Gotische Bibel, 2 vols. (Heidel- berg, 1908-10) .
Ethiopic is the name given to Ge'ez, the classical language of the Abyssinians. Abyssinia became a Christian nation in the 4th century, and the Ethiopic version of the N.T. undoubtedly goes back to that period, but the existing mss. which are all late, have been much revised, chiefly from the Arabic version current in Egypt in the 13th century, when the Abyssinian Church was re organized. It is this late revised text which has been printed, the only ancient piece of the older form being Matt. i.–x. as edited by Hackspill. Even in the revised text many relics of ancient read ings are found, some possibly reflecting an early stage of Syriac speaking Christian missionaries, but all readings agreeing with the (printed) Arabic version must be held to have little authority.
The Harclean Syriac was made in A.D. 616 by Thomas of Harkel (or Heraclea), bishop of Mabbog and one of the Mono physite exiles who lived in Egypt after the deposition of Severus of Antioch. Like other writings of the same school of transla tors Thomas follows the Greek with pedantic literalness, so that it is particularly easy to ascertain what Greek text he followed. For the most part this is the ordinary Byzantine vulgate, but in Acts he used in addition to his usual authority another exemplar which was full of very valuable "Western" readings, which he inserted sometimes in his text, sometimes in the margin (see Ropes's Acts, especially pp. clvi. n., clxxviii. f.). Thomas's work was based on a revision of the Syriac N.T. by Philoxenus of Mab bog, the greater part of which (if it really consisted in more than additional tables of contents, etc.) is no longer extant. What sur vives is the text of those parts of the N.T. not included in the Peshitta, viz., the f our minor Catholic Epistles and the Apoc alypse, all of which have been edited by J. Gwynn.
Palestinian Syriac (or "Jerusalem" Syriac) is the name given to the Christian ecclesiastical literature in the vernacular Aramaic of Palestine. This literature is not old : it seems to owe its ori gin to the efforts of Justinian in the 6th century to root out pa ganism and Judaism from the country districts of the Orient. The surviving documents reflect the usages of the Greek-speaking Church of Jerusalem : they include a Lectionary of the Gospels, and another from other books ; also fragments of the continuous text of most N.T. books. The text attested is a curious variety of the Byzantine, with some elements due to the Peshitta, and perhaps some relics of the ancient text of Caesarea.
Arabic versions must be noted at the end, though none of them are older than the 8th century : their only critical importance is the influence they have exercised since the i3th century upon the much older Ethiopic version.
Erasmus (Basle, 1516) : the actual first edition.
Complutensian Polyglot, printed 1514-17; published 15 2o.
Stephanus (i.e., Robert Etienne), ed. 3 (Paris, 155o). This edi tion, which in all essentials follows Erasmus, gave what was till the time of Lachmann the received text (hence the sym bol S, i.e., 0"T for Stephanus). The Elzevir editions of 1624 and 1633 are reprints of Stephanus with a few errors and corrections. Full details of the minute differences between these editions are given in H. C. Hoskier's Full Account of Cod. 604 (= 700) (London, 189o) .
J. sl'Iill (Oxford, 1707) : the first large collection of various read ings.
J. J. Wetstein (Amsterdam, 1751) : a still larger collection of readings, and a very valuable collection of illustrative paral lels, especially from classical authors.
K. Lachmann (Berlin, 1842--5o) : the first thoroughgoing attempt to construct a text from ancient authorities alone, uninflu enced by printed editions. It took a scholar of Lachmann's calibre to make this, to us obvious, advance. Karl Lachmann is the famous editor of Lucretius : it was his study in Studien and Kritiken for 1835 (repeated in the Preface to vol. ii. of his N.T., 185o) that set the doctrine of the priority of Mark to Matthew and Luke on a firm philological foundation.
C. Tischendor f (8th ed., Leipzig, vol. i., 1869; vol. ii., 1872; vol. iii. [Prolegomena by C. R. Gregory], 1894). This edition was, until v. Soden's appeared, the largest collection of various readings. Tischendorf's text is rather capricious, but his notes are a model of clearness and compression combined, so that the work is still indispensable to the textual student.
Westcott and Hort (London, 1881-82). Vol. ii., containing the Introduction (reprinted 1896), was written by Dr. F. J. A. Hort, but the work is usually quoted by the symbol WH. Hort recognized three main families: the Antiochian or Con stantinopolitan, to which belong most Greek mss. and the later versions (Gothic, Slavonic, etc.) ; the Western, to which belong D, the Old-Latin and the Old-Syriac versions; and the Alexandrian, to which belong many of the older Greek mss. (especially such as seem to have an Egyptian origin), and also the Egyptian versions, particularly the Memphitic (now called Bohairic). The Western family represents the careless, unrevised and often interpolated state of the text in ante-Nicene times; the Antiochian family is a smooth and plausible revision, made probably by the martyr Lucian of Antioch and adopted by the Church in the new royal city of Constantinople; the Alexandrian family is a comparatively pure form of text approved by the more careful Alexan drians, and is characterized mainly by minute scholastic emendations. Besides these a few very old documents exist, which attest a text not indeed perfect, but belonging to neither of the three main families: this text (or texts) Hort calls Neutral. Its most consistent representatives are B and ,, particularly B, so that Hort's text in the main is not un like a corrected transcript of "Codex Vaticanus," which he refused to the end to regard as specially connected either with Alexandria or Caesarea.
The weak point in Hort's theory is the failure to incorporate B and K into the Alexandrian phalanx, to which they obviously belong, whether or no we connect B and Alexandrians, as Bousset (1894) and v. Soden do, with the recension of Hesychius (about which we know nothing but the name) . In this connection it should be borne in mind that the actual attestation of the text approved by Hort is only rarely that of N or B alone : it usually has support from the Old Syriac or Old Latin documents, i.e., from some of the "Western" group, and so Hort called B "Neu tral," meaning unlocalized.
For modern views, including B. H. Streeter's, see below on Textual Criticism, where note that what is there called "Byzan tine" is Hort's Antiochian and what is called "Alexandrian" is Hort's Alexandrian and Neutral.
The edition of Hermann v. Soden (Berlin, vol. i. [Introduc tion] , 1902-10; vol. ii. [Text and full Apparatus] , 1913) : this was an ambitious attempt to supersede Tischendorf in giving a complete conspectus of variants, including the newest discoveries, together with a new textual theory which necessitated a totally new notation for the documents. The new notation is almost in comprehensible in actual use, except to specialists, the textual theory has not commended itself to scholars, either in Germany or elsewhere, and there are grave inaccuracies in certain parts of the work, e.g., vol. i., p. 1,059, which destroy confidence in state ments about readings which otherwise cannot be controlled. It is therefore a work for specialists alone. Tribute must be paid to the immense industry of the large staff of workers, who have at least examined all the known Greek mss. whether in Europe or the Orient. Little of first-rate importance indeed has been brought to light in v. Soden's pages alone, for the full and most accurate presentation of new discoveries such as W and 0 must be sought elsewhere in separate publications. The outstanding merit of the work consists in this, that the investigator is never quite confident that he has mustered all the evidence for and against a given reading until he has verified his statements by consulting "von Soden." The Textual Criticism of the New Testament has for its primary object the reconstruction of the original text from the Greek mss. versions and quotations in early writers described above. A secondary object is to trace the history of the text, to identify and characterize the various editions or recensions cur rent in different times or localities. It is noteworthy that till the invention of printing neither in the original Greek nor in Latin was a complete uniformity of text arrived at, notwithstanding the authority ascribed to the words by ecclesiastical theory. Only in Syriac was uniformity reached.
A leading cause of this remarkable state of things must be sought in the very extensive variations which were current in early times, particularly in the Gospels. Apart from some half dozen remarkable readings (such as the omission of "in Ephesus" in Eph. i. I) the text of the Pauline Epistles resembles that of most ancient works: there are plenty of scribes' errors, etc., and the mss. fall into groups as is natural, but the variations are of small account and are mostly explicable from the context. In a word, the variations are accidental. In the Gospels, on the other hand, the characteristic variations are intentional, such as the ad dition or insertion of whole passages, some of which must certainly have been supplied from an external source. The longest is the whole story of the Woman taken in Adultery, inserted between John vii. 52 and viii. 12 ; others are a long insertion after Matt. xx. 28 (61 words), the saying about the Face of the Sky in Matt. xvi. 2-3 (31 words), the story of the Angel and the Bloody Sweat in Luke xxii. 43-44 (26 words), and many other shorter passages. No satisfactory palaeographical explanation has ever been found for these variants ; they are evidently made on purpose, by persons who had new matter to insert into the text and felt themselves at liberty to do so. The fact of the occurrence of these longer Inter polations (as they are usually called) prepares us to find that very many of the shorter variants are of the same nature, i.e., that they did not arise through scribal errors but by intentional efforts to improve or enrich the original. It is further evident, from the general course of ecclesiastical sentiment, that such violent modi fications of what was regarded as Sacred Scripture must have taken place very early. Blunders may occur at any time, with whatever reverence a text is regarded ; efforts to remove minor stumbling blocks, such as differences in parallel narratives, may have been made in later times, with the naďve idea that the less familiar wording was itself a scribal error. But the longer inser tions, whether genuine additions to the Gospel History or not, must have come from sources literary or oral of which there is no trace in later times. In other words, both the longer and the shorter texts must go back into the 2nd century.
This is certainly true of the most important variations of all, viz., those connected with the end of the Gospel of Mark. The two oldest Greek mss. (N and B), the better ms. of the Old-Syriac version (Syr. S), and some other authorities, end at xvi. 8 (i4oj3ovvro yap); the oldest and best Latin text (k), with some secondary support, adds a short sentence evidently intended to round off this abrupt conclusion; the great majority of our author ities, including W (5th century) and also Irenaeus (A.D. 18o), possibly also Justin Martyr, Apol. i. 42 fin., 45 (A.D. 153), attest the Longer Conclusion (Mk.) xvi. 9-20. The sentence (the so called Shorter Conclusion) runs as follows: "But all the things which they had been commanded they also declared shortly to those with Peter. After these things Jesus himself also appeared, and from the East even to the West sent by them the holy and incorrupt tidings of eternal salvation. Amen." It is obvious that these variations imply a mutilated archetype, preserved in some branches of transmission with singular fidelity, and edited in others to supply an obvious defect.
A text formed by choosing intelligently between the readings attested by KB, by k, and by Syr. S—neglecting all other author ities—would differ little from the best that can be constructed. But if we are to get an idea of the history of the text, and the forms in which it was read in various regions in ancient times we must make a wider induction. If all the readings of all our authorities be tabulated it soon becomes evident that they fall into three main groups, for which the most convenient names are Byzantine, Alexandrian and "Western." The Byzantine group is that of the majority of the Greek mss.: if you construct a text of the Gospels by always accepting the reading of the majority, the result would be the Byzantine text. With it would generally agree the later versions, such as the Slavonic and the Gothic ; the Latin Vulgate (A.D. 383) and the Syriac Peshitta (A.D. 411) would often, but not consistently, agree also. The Alexandrian group contains K and B, sometimes with a few other Greek mss. and often with the Egyptian versions. The most consistent support of the West ern group comes from the Old-Latin versions (k e, a b, f., etc.) together with D, a codex certainly written in the West; the two Old-Syriac mss. (Syr. SC) also very of ten support characteristic "Western" readings, and they are often attested by some later Greek mss.
The Byzantine text is found in the quotations of the Greek ecclesiastical writers from Chrysostom (400) onwards, the Alexandrian text in Egyptian writers as early as Origen (c. 215) ; it is of fundamental importance to observe that in all earlier Greek writers, including Clement of Alexandria, the Gospel quo tations are (a) generally allusive and inaccurate, (b) "Western" in character.
It must further be remarked that while the Byzantine and Alexandrian texts are definite entities, easily constructible by the general agreement of their most consistent supporters, the "Western" texts differ widely among themselves. Moreover, the triple division above spoken of coalesces in most variations into two texts. That the three groups do exist as groups is proved by the occurrence of "ternary variations," i.e., where there are three readings attested severally by the Byzantine. the Alexandrian and the "Western" groups, e.g., Matt. xxii. 13. To this class belong Hort's "conflate" readings, where an Alexandrian and a Western reading is combined in the Byzantine text (Hort § 134-149), e.g., the last words in Luke. But very often Byzantines and Westerns stand together against the Alexandrians, also Byzantine and Alexandrians against Westerns; not infrequently also the Alexan drian group attesting a given reading is reinforced by important "Western" authorities.
The chief inferences to be drawn from these facts are :—(i) The Byzantine text is a recension properly so called, the form in which th8 Gospel was introduced into the new Christian metro polis of Constantinople; it was an eclectic fusion of texts pre viously current, and contains hardly any ancient element not better preserved elsewhere. (2) The Alexandrian text seems to have some connection with the great Christian scholar Origen, who (so far as we know) was the first to pay attention to the exact word ing of the Gospels-and to make any comparison of mss. (3) The "Western" text is not exclusively Western in the geographical sense, nor is it a single definite recension; it is more accurate to say that "Western" readings represent the variegated and uncor rected state of the text in the ante-Nicene period, especially from about A.D. 150 (when the Gospels were first collected together into a common corpus) until the time of Constantine.
Modern textual investigation is mostly connected with this mixed crop of "Western" readings, so as to sort them out into significant groups, whereby we may not only have better criteria for ascertaining the original in cases of doubt, but also get some idea of the kind of text current in various regions in early times. The most fruitful of these investigations in the last few ears has been that of B. H. Streeter, whose book, The Four Gospels (Lon don, 1924), treats of textual criticism at length. Dr. Streeter recognizes three divisions in the so-called "Western" group : there is the true Western text ( =D Wmic lat-afr lat-eur), the Old-Antiochian text ( = Syr. S and C), and what he has called the Caesarean text (0-565, etc., 69 etc., 28, 7oo). It should be noted that Streeter recognizes that all the witnesses to his Caesa rean text have often been assimilated to the Byzantine standard. Strictly speaking, therefore, the attestation consists of the read ings of 0 etc. which differ from the 13zantine. The corner stone of his construction is his demonstration that whereas Ori gen in the earlier parts of his Commentary on John, written in Alexandria, is a consistent witness to the text of ti B, nevertheless in the latter parts of the same work and in his Commentary on Matthew, written after he had removed to Caesarea in Palestine, his quotations attest a text more like that of 0 and its allies. Streeter concludes from this that B represents the local text of Alexandria about the year 200, while the non-Byzantine read ings of 0 and its allies represent the text current at Caesarea early in the 3rd century.
In the opinion of the present writer the weak point in Streeter's attractive theory is that the "interesting" readings of 0-565, etc., 69 etc., 28, 7oo, are regarded as fragments of one text, which nevertheless is separated from the Old-Syriac version with which they (particularly etc., and 28) have much in common. (See e.g., Mark ii. 27, iii. 17, vi. 2 2 f., x. f. ; viii. 10 [TO 6pos W 28= Syr. S] )• It is noteworthy that the whole "Western" pha lanx does occasionally go wrong together, as when in Mark vi. 53 rpoo-cop,uto-Ono-av is omitted by D W 0-565, etc., 28, 7oo, 983, a b c ffiq r, Syr.S vg arm: see J. Theol. Stu,dies, xvii. p. 19 (Oct. 1915). It seems better to take the readings of 0, etc., together with those of Syr. S C, as representing variants cur rent in the East, just as the often discordant but yet very nearly connected readings of D and the various branches of the Old-Latin represent the state of the text in the West about A.D. 200 in its considerable but not unlimited variety. Some errors were very widely spread, others (though ancient) seem to have had always a limited circulation. It is a vain hope to imagine that we can arrive at the original text by constructing the Alexandrian, the Old-Western, and the Old-Eastern texts, and then accepting the agreement of either two against the other.
Two special points may be noticed here. For those who are convinced that Mark is the actual source of Matthew and Luke there is a difference of interest between the various readings in the text of Mark and those in the parallel passages of Matthew and Luke. A change of text in Mark may conceivably alter our view of the thing narrated: if "to the other side" in Mark vi. 45 be omitted (so W etc., Syr. S), or "through Sidon" be read instead of "and Sidon" in Mark vii. 31, the whole course of the itinerary of Jesus is altered. On the other hand the omission or retention of Matt. xvi. 2-3 is a matter of merely literary interest: the authority for what happened on the occasion in question, both f or ourselves and for "Matthew," is Mark viii. 10-13, and whether it was Matthew or a later editor who thought that the Saying about Weather could be introduced at that particular place is a secondary consideration. The other point is very well treated by Dr. Streeter in chap. xi. of The Four Gospels: it con cerns the few and relatively insignificant agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark, in which Streeter shows that almost all the cases not otherwise accounted for may be reasonably ex plained as harmonistic scribal alterations in the text, from which either the Old-Latin or the Old-Syriac, or both, have generally escaped.
Some Continental scholars, notably v. Soden, regard Tatian's Diatessaron (see above) as a prime cause of harmonistic read ings: we know of this Gospel Harmony in two forms, (a) in Latin, (b) in Syriac. In Syriac, as explained above, it certainly played a great part; according to tradition the Gospel reached Edessa in the fonn of the Diatessaron, and the extant remains of Syriac literature before A.D. 411 show that the separate Gospels were much less used than this Harmony. It is not surprising, therefore, that the text of Syr. S and C, the two surviving mss. of the pre-Peshitta Syriac, should often exhibit harmonistic read ings, many of which were no doubt due to the influence of the Diatessaron. In Latin there survives Codex Fuldensis (a ms. cor rected in the year 546 by Victor, bishop of Capua), and also four Dutch Harmonies of the i3th and i4th centuries, their Latin original being closely connected with Fuld in text but not appar ently derived directly from it. The wording in all these has been almost entirely assimilated to the Vulgate, but there are sufficient relics of Old-Latin renderings to show that the Harmony must have existed in pre-Vulgate times in Latin, with a text akin to lat-eur. There is little sign of its use by Latin Fathers, and its connection with Tatian is only inferred from a learned guess of Victor's, probable in itself but not traditional. The arrangement of the Gospel mosaic in the Latin and Syriac texts is so much alike as to demonstrate their kinship, but sufficiently different to make it improbable that the Old-Latin parent of Fu/d was a translation from the Syriac. No tangible evidence of a Greek Diatessaron has appeared.
It is not likely, therefore, that this Harmony was ever widely used, or that it exerted any influence on the text of the Gospels, except in Syriac. To the present writer it seems probable that it never did exist in Greek, and that in both forms, Latin and Syriac, it was in origin a missionary substitute for a translation of the complete text of the Canonical Four. The Latin form, the arrangement of which though not the original wording is well preserved in Fuld, must have been the earlier: what "Tatian" took back with him to his native land (Epiphanius, Haer. xlvi. I), where it became "The Gospel" to his converts, was a revised and improved edition.
Acts.—The text of Acts is connected with that of the Gospels, but the problem is in some ways different, as (except in the case of the great Bibles, which can hardly have existed in ante Nicene conditions) the transmission of Acts has been separate from that of the Gospels. We have in Acts an Alexandrian and a Western text as in the Gospels. The Byzantine text is little more in Acts than a modification of the Alexandrian, with a few minor Western readings taken up here and there. But the Western text, as read in D and the Old-Latin texts (very little information in detail about the Old-Syriac of Acts survives), differs considera bly from the Alexandrian, so much indeed as to have suggested to various scholars, notably Blass, that the Western was the original form and the Alexandrian a "second edition revised and corrected," perhaps by the author himself. The important "West ern readings" preserved in the Harclean Syriac version are derived from Greek mss. and are not a survival from the lost Old-Syriac (Ropes, ccxvii.). The objections to Blass's theory are to be found in J. H. Ropes, The Text of Acts (especially p. ccxxviii. ff.). Ropes regards the Western form as a text rewritten in accordance with the reviser's own literary taste, "which was somewhat dif ferent from that of the author" (p. ccxxxi.), and inferior to the original in dignity, force and charm. But here and there, as in the Gospels, this early corrupt recension preserves isolated good readings lost elsewhere, most of which will be found in the mar ginal variants marked J.H.R. below Prof. Ropes's transcript of co dex B. The two most important various readings in Acts are at xv. 29 and at the beginning of the book. In xv. 29 the Western phalanx omits "and from things strangled" from the list of things to be avoided by Gentile Christians, whereby it was possible to in terpret the Apostolic Decree as a moral standard (forbidding idolatry, murder and unchastity) rather than as a food-law. Prof. Ropes, though he is inclined to omit Kai ir-vterwv with the Westerns, shows clearly that the Decree must even so have been intended as a food-law : the only doubt that remains, after his careful discussion, is whether Kai 71'PLKTCJV be not original after all. The opening sentence of Acts is best preserved in the African Latin as quoted by Augustine : it points back, according to Ropes, p. 257, to a form like the ordinary text, but without as and avE Xrlµ4671, so that the true text would run "'The former treatise have I made . . . of all that Jesus began . . . 'what time he gave commands to the apostles by holy Spirit and chose them . . . 'to whom he showed himself alive, etc." It is appropriate to notice here that the last chapter of the Gospel of Luke contains in the ordinary text (including B) some eight or nine interpolations omitted by D and the best Old-Latin texts. These are all obviously one series, made at the same time, and they include the reference to the Ascension of Jesus in Luke xxiv. 51b. It is likely that both these interpolations and the re writing of Acts i. 1 ff. were made at the same time and under the same circumstances, viz., when the two volumes of "Lucas ad Theophilum" were separated, the one to form a constituent member of the Canon of Four Gospels, the other to circulate as an independent account of the early days of the Church. In the original undivided work the actual Ascension will only have been chronicled in Acts i. 9-12.
The words "in Ephesus" in Eph. i. I are omitted by B, by Origen, and apparently by the Old-Syriac (as appears from the Commentary of Ephraim). Marcion called this Epistle "To the Laodiceans." Probably, therefore, it was originally a circular let ter, with a blank left for the name in the opening address. This explanation may also be held to account for the diverse forms in which the Epistle to the Romans has been handed down. It is known that Marcion's text wanted chaps. xv. and xvi. ; the great doxology at the end (xvi. 25-27) is given after chap. xiv'. in most Byzantine documents, many of them repeating it at the end as well, while on the other hand GPaul and some other Western texts omit it altogether; further Gpaul (and apparently also the text un derlying Dp.u1) omits all mention of "Rome" in i. 7 and 15. It seems likely, therefore, that "Romans" was an earlier circular letter of St. Paul's, a dogmatic epistle suitable for any early Chris tian community that the Apostle had not yet visited, which was turned into a letter to the Roman Church by the addition of chaps. xv. and xvi., when he had made his plan to go there after his final visit to Jerusalem.
It should be noted that Hebrews comes before the Pastoral Epistles in the best Greek tradition ; in the Sa.hidic it comes after II. Corinthians (a rearrangement of the Epistles more or less ac cording to length) ; in the West, before the Vulgate appeared, Hebrews was hardly included at all. Philemon, though in Marcion's collection, comes after Timothy and Titus.
There is little special to say about the text of the Catholic Epistles which are usually found bound up with mss. of Acts. The Apocalypse has a textual history of its own. Apart from the great Bibles it is generally found separate, or in volumes of miscellaneous content. Sometimes Apocalypse-Acts-Catholic Epistles together form one volume, as in the African Latin h (6th century). The true grouping of our authorities in the Apocalypse is still obscure, but for the most part the variants are of minor importance. It may be noted that in xiii. 18 the Number of the Beast, given as 666 in most documents, is 6i6 in the 5th cen tury uncial C, a curious variant current in the West as early as Irenaeus.
The New Testament is a series of early Christian writings which the Church came to regard as canonical, i.e., they were placed in the same category as the Old Testament, the writings which the Christian had inherited from the Jewish Church. Just as the ancient Scriptures were considered to be the Word of God, and therefore that what they contained was the true and inspired doc trine, so also the New Testament was available for proving the Church's dogma. The assured canonicity of the whole New Testa ment resulted in its use by the mediaeval theologians, the School men, as a storehouse of proof-texts. Thus the New Testament seemed to exist in order to prove the Church's conclusions, not to tell its own tale.
Literary criticism of the Gospels points to a similar conclusion. A hundred years' study of the synoptic problem, i.e., the causes which make the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke at once so much alike and so different, has resulted in the demon stration of the priority of Mark, which "was known to Matthew and Luke in the same state and with the same contents as we have it now." (J. Wellhausen, Einl. in die drei ersten Evangelien, p. 57 [1905] ). This Gospel may be dated just before A.D. 7o. Luke and Matthew appear to have been published between 8o and ioo. If Luke used Josephus, as F. C. Burkitt and others believe, the later date must be taken; but in any case it should be within the lifetime of a companion of St. Paul. Besides the Gospel of Mark these Evangelists made use of another document, now lost, which contained many sayings of Jesus and some narratives not found in Mark. This document was by many scholars identified with the "Logia," mentioned by Papias (Eusebius, Ch. Hist. iii. 39) as being the work of Matthew the Apostle, but the identification is not certain, and since Wellhausen it has been commonly dubbed Q (for Queue "Source") .
The discoveries of papyri in Upper Egypt during recent years, containing original letters written by persons of various classes and in some cases contemporary with the Epistles of the New Testament, have immensely increased our knowledge of the Greek of the period, and have cleared up not a few difficulties of language and expression. More important still is the application of Semitic study to elucidate the Gospels. It is idle indeed to rewrite the Gospel narratives in the Aramaic dialect spoken by Christ and the apostles, but the main watchwords of the Gospel theology—phrases like "the Kingdom of God," "the World to come," the "Father in Heaven," "the Son of Man,"—can be more or less surely reconstructed from Jewish writings, and their mean ing gauged apart from the significance which they received in Christian hands. This line of investigation has been specially followed by G. Dalman in his Worte Jesu.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. See the separate bibliographies to the separate Bibliography. See the separate bibliographies to the separate articles on the books of the New Testament. The selection here given of the vast literature of the subject has been drawn up with the idea of setting the student on his way. 1. General and Historical —Jerome's Prefaces (to be found in any R.C. edition of the Vulgate) ; Luther's Prefaces (to be found in German-printed editions of Luther's Bible) ; F. Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers (3rd ed., London, 1887)— f or Erasmus; M. Creighton, "Chillingworth" in the Dict. of Nat. Biogr.; Chr. Schrempf, Lessing als Philosoph (Stuttgart, 1906) ; J. Estlin Carpenter, The Bible in the 19th century (London, 1903) ; A. Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede (Tubingen, 1906) : see next section. 2. For the Synoptic Gospels.—W. G. Rushbrooke, Synopticon (London, 1880) ; Sir J. C. Hawkins, Horae Synopticae (Oxford, 2nd ed., 1909) ; Julius Wellhausen, Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien (Berlin, 1905; 2nd ed., 1911) ; Das Evangelium Marci (1903; 2nd ed., 1909) ; Das Ev. Matthaei (19o4) , Das Ev. Lucae (1904)—these four books make one work. 3. For the Fourth Gospel. —K. G. Bretschneider, Probabilia (Leipzig, 1820) ; Matthew Arnold's God and the Bible, chaps. v., vi. (still the best defence in English of a Johannine kernel, new ed. 1884) ; W. Sanday, Criticism of the Fourth Gospel (Oxford, 1905) ; A. Loisy, Le Quatrieme Evangile (Paris, 1903) ; P. W. Schmiedel, Das vierte Evangelium gegenuber den drei ersten (Halle, 1906) . 4. For the Semitic Elements in the N.T. G. Dalman, Die Worte Jesu (Leipzig, 1898) (Eng. trans. The Words of Jesus, 1905) ; Johannes Weiss, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1st ed., 1892, 2nd ed., 1900). The Protestant view of the New Testament in A. Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums (Berlin, 1900) (Eng. trans. What is Christianity? London, 1901) may be compared with the Liberal Catholic view in A. Loisy, L'Evangile et l'Eglise (2nd. ed., 1903) .
Modern critical work on the New Testament is so enormous in bulk that all that can be noticed here is a small selection of things which seem to the present writer particularly characteristic and significant. The subjects treated of may be grouped under three heads : Eschatology, Attempts to Reconstruct "Q," and the His toricity of Mark.
For a long time, therefore, the tendency of "enlightened" scholarship was to ignore or to explain away the clearly escha tological passages of the New Testament, or else to make dis tinctions between the "spiritual" ideas of Jesus and the "material istic superstition" of the early disciples. Much effort was expended in the attempt to make the message and teaching of Jesus into something like the "liberal" ideas of religion current in the 19th century. The history of this attempt and its failure is brilliantly written in Albert Schweitzer's Von Reimarus sit Wrede (1906) , called in the English translation "The Quest of the Historical Jesus" (1910).
The effect of Schweitzer's book has been very marked, and it is generally now acknowledged that the New Testament is a col lection of writings by persons who, much as they differed in other things were agreed in this, that they lived in a world that was rapidly coming to an end, a world in which men and women might indeed rear children, but no one could look forward to a next generation. The effective reason for-not taking thought for the morrow was the improbability that to-morrow would ever arrive. Hence the discouragement of marriage, the little care for the training of children, and the absence of public spirit and interest in the affairs of the world, manifested in the New Testa ment. It should be added that, although the writer of I John ii. 18 declares it was then "the last hour," it is in the Johannine writings that we see the beginnings of a tendency to reinterpret the earlier Christian expectations of an immediate conclusion of world history.
A further development, which has gone side by side with the full recognition of the fact that Jesus and His disciples were expecting the near approaching End, is a more thorough study of Jewish popular beliefs in the age between that of the Maccabees (from 168 B.c.) and that of the 1st century A.D. It was no special superstition of the Christians, but the general expectation of the Jewish people that "the Kingdom of God was immediately to appear" (Luke xix. 11). This belief sent them to war with Rome in A.D. 66, a war which ended with the extinction of the Jewish state and the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 7o. The belief had been engendered by two centuries of peculiar history, and it is only just to Jews and Christians alike to remember that this belief was the form in which they expressed faith in God's providential government of the world and in the ultimate triumph of justice. These ideas are best studied in the series of Jewish Apocalypses—Enoch, Assumption of Moses, Baruch, "Second Esdras" ( = 4 Ezra)—which have all received their due measure of attention in the last 20 years.
Nevertheless the arguments which establish the fact of Q remain, and an attractive attempt to restate the problem has been made in B. H. Streeter's The Four Gospels (1924). Streeter believes in the fact of Q (his reconstruction is to be found on p. 291 of his book) ; as used by Matthew and Luke it was a Greek document, current probably at Antioch. But both Matthew and Luke had a special source. In the case of Matthew it seems to come from the tradition of the Christians of Jerusalem (Matt. xxvii. 8, xxviii. 15) , mere legend so far as narrative is concerned, but preserving genuine Sayings of Jesus. These legends and Say ings, together with "Q," the Evangelist has worked into his main source, which is Mark, so that the Gospel of Matthew may be described as a "second edition of Mark, revised and enlarged." The place of writing was almost certainly Antioch, and the point of view is not that of the conservative Church of Jerusalem which had James for its leader, but the more liberal and catholicizing Church of Antioch which looked to Peter (Matt. xvi. 18 seq.: Streeter, p. 515) : Streeter's view of the sources of Luke is more complicated. He sees that the Gospel of Luke is not so much a narrative based on Mark as one into which detached blocks of Mark have been inserted. He supposes, therefore, that the Evan gelist had drawn up a narrative based on Q and his own researches, possibly conducted when a companion of St. Paul during his two years' imprisonment at Caesarea (Acts xxiv. 27) ; this may be represented graphically as and is called by Streeter "Proto Luke." Some years later Luke came across the Gospel of Mark : he saw its value and published a second edition of his former work, incorporating long sections of Mark into it and at the same time prefixing his story of the Infancy of Jesus. (This is inferred from Luke iii. 1, "surely . . . written as the opening section of a book," p. 209.) The attraction of this ingenious theory lies in its historical possibility, its explanation of the actual literary phenomena of the Third Gospel and also of the large amount of fresh matter there found, for on this hypothesis the peculiar matter of Luke is the tradition of Caesarea, a distinct centre of the earliest Chris tianity. But if accepted it shows all the more clearly how little we know of the public career of Jesus, apart from the nar rative of Mark. The present writer has compiled a precis of the career of Jesus drawn from Luke alone in Beginnings of Chris tianity, vol. ii., p. 486: any one who reads that precis or makes a similar one for himself will see the total inadequacy of this framework, and if we withdraw from it the details supplied by Mark it comes to no more than that Jesus first preached in Galilee and then proceeded to Jerusalem. Of the course of His ministry or the train of circumstances that led up to His visit to Jerusalem there is no intelligible picture in "Proto-Luke." (A line of investi gation might be pursued, enquiring whether the evidence does not suggest that Q, as known to Luke and Matthew, was itself com posite, viz., a set of Sayings, originally in Aramaic, and a Greek set dealing particularly with John the Baptist and his relation to Jesus. It is in sections about John the Baptist that verbal coin cidences between Matthew and Luke chiefly occur.) The Historicity of Mark.—The whole tendency of modern critical investigation has been to emphasize the priority of the Gospel of Mark. The old conception that. from earliest times there had been a coherent oral tradition of the career of Jesus, of which the written Gospels are slightly individual embodiments, has dissolved. Investigation into the written Gospels has revealed glimpses of earlier documents such as Q or "Proto-Luke," but they are not "Lives" of Jesus in the sense that Mark is a Life of Jesus. As far as we can see it was the writer of "Mark" who turned the Gospel into a Biography. That, in fact, was his great achievement. But in proportion as Mark is regarded as the unique source for the Biography the question of its historical value becomes acute.
History is not a deductive science and there are no generally recognized rules for detecting fact. There are rules for detecting fiction, but that is a different thing altogether. It is not sur!. prising, therefore, that very different views of the value of Mark as an historical document have been put forward in recent times.
There are a few writers who disbelieve altogether in the ex istence of Jesus as an historical personage, who regard Jesus as a dogma personified. For most people it will suffice to say of this theory with C. G. Montefiore: "Without Jesus, no Mark" (The Synoptic Gospels, i. 169). But a good answer at length and from a rationalistic standpoint is to be found in The Historical Christ, by F. C. Conybeare (London, 1914). More important is the scepticism about all details exhibited by Loisy in France and by Bultmann in Germany. Prof. R. Bultmann of Marburg is one of the most influential of the younger theologians in Germany; his literary analysis of the sources is to be found in his History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921) and his view of the Gospel Sayings in his "Jesus" (1926). In Bultmann's opinion the Sayings are all that is historical: the tales of Jesus, together with the general framework of the Gospel History, he regards as a product of the missionary needs of early Hellenistic Christianity. Jesus was an eschatological prophet, a herald of the coming kingdom or rule of God: no doubt He was crucified and believed by disciples to have been seen alive again, but that is all we know about Him for certain, according to Bultmann.
The discussion of this radical scepticism belongs to another department of study: it is given prominence here, because it is a characteristic result of the literary criticism of the Gospels, which has ended in tracing the authority for the Gospel narrative to the work of Mark. The present writer is very far from shar ing Bultmann's views. When the theological beliefs of the early Christians are considered, their belief in the Lord Jesus over whom death had no power, who was now sitting in heaven at God's right hand and was shortly to come again to judge all man kind, living and dead, it seems difficult to believe that an account of the career of Jesus like that in Mark can be due to anything but somebody's reminiscences, or at least that somebody's remi niscences are an important constituent part of it. Not only the poignant scene in Gethsemane and the cry of despair from the Cross, but many minor touches, such as the tame ending to the Entry into Jerusalem (Mark xi. 1), or the boat that waited on Jesus because of the crowd (Mark iii. 9), betray the eyewitness. What should we think of these things if they had recently for the first time been disinterred from a newly-discovered papyrus? What is really valuable and edifying in Bultmann's historical scepticism—and the same may be said of Loisy—is that it points out real historical difficulties in the Gospel History, real incon sequences which require a sound historical view if the whole nar rative is not to fall to pieces. It may be said with little exag geration that scholars regard Mark as serious history according as they take Mark vii. 31 to be historical or not, i.e., according as they think it probable that a whole summer and autumn were spent by Jesus practically in retirement outside the land of Israel (see K. L. Schmidt, Rahmen, p. 200, note). It is not only the "miracles" which require explanation, it is the whole historical situation, and if we have a false idea of that situation or no idea at all, as is more often the case, the tale becomes incoherent and we ask, with Bultmann and Loisy, why we are expected to believe it. "At the same time, the more we study the special aims and tendencies of the Synoptic Evangelists, the greater the gap ap pears between the theories which they themselves elaborate and the circle of ideas in which the Sayings of Jesus move. Again and again we find ourselves in the presence of something which may or may not be authentic historical reminiscence, but is in any case totally unlike the other remains of early Christian literature. We cannot tell whether the tale be well remembered, or how many steps there may have been in its transmission, but the difference of spirit is unmistakable, and we take knowledge of the Evangel ists that they have been with Jesus" (quoted by Montefiore, The Synoptic Gospels, vol. i., p. 82).
The subject of the chronology of the New Testament falls naturally into two distinct sections: the chronology of the Gospels, that is, of the life of Christ; and the chronology of the Acts, that is, of the apostolic age.
I. The date of the Nativity as fixed according to our common computation of Anno Domini (first put forward by Dionysius Exiguus at Rome early in the 6th century) has long been rec ognized to be too late. The fathers of the primitive church had been nearer the truth with the years 3 or 2 B.C. (see Irenaeus, Haer. III. xxi. 3 [xxiv. 2] ; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. i. 21, p. 147 ; Hippolytus, in Dan. iv. ed. Bonwetsch, p. 242 ; [Ter tullian], adv. Jud. 8). What may be called the received chronology during the last two centuries has pushed the date farther back to 4 B.C. But the considerations now to be adduced make it probable that the true date is earlier still.
(a) Evidence of St. Matthew's Gospel (i. 18–ii. 22).—The birth of Christ took place before the death of Herod, and the evidence of Josephus fixes the death of Herod with some approach to cer tainty. His various calculations are not indeed quite easy to harmonize, but the extent of choice for the year of Herod's death is limited to the years 4 and 3 B.C., with a very great preponder ance of probability in favour of the former. How long before this the Nativity should be placed the Gospel does not enable us to say precisely.
(b) Evidence of St. Luke's Gospel (ii. 1-8).—The birth of Christ took place at the time of a general census of the empire ordered by Augustus: "it was the first census, and was made at the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria." Against this account it has been urged that we know that the governorship of Syria from I o or 9 B.C. down to and after Herod's death was held successively by M. Titius, C. Sentius Saturninus, and P. Quintilius Varus; and further, that when Judaea became a Roman province on the deposition of Archelaus in A.D. 6, Quirinius was governor of Syria, and did carry out an elaborate census. The notice in the Gospel, it is suggested, grew out of a confused rec ollection of this later operation. But the confusion in question would only be likely, if there really was a census at the time of the Nativity; and it is no more improbable that Herod should have held, or permitted to be held, a local census than that Archelaus of Cappadocia in the reign of Tiberius (Tacitus, Ann. vi. 41) should have taken a census of his own native state "after the Roman manner." At the same time St. Luke's account, when the name of Quirinius is subtracted from it, ceases to contain any chronological evidence.
(c) Evidence of Tertullian.—Strangely enough, however, the missing name of the governor under whom the census of the Nativity was carried out appears to be supplied by a much later writer. Tertullian, in fact (adv. Marc. iv. 19), argues against Marcion that it was well known that Sentius Saturninus carried out a census under Augustus in Judaea, by consulting which the family and relationships of Christ could have been discovered. This Saturninus was the middle one of the three governors of Syria named above, and as his successor Varus must have arrived by the middle of 6 B.C. at latest (for coins of Varus are extant of the 25th year of the era of Actium), his own tenure must have fallen about 8 and 7 B.C., and his census cannot be placed later than 7 or 7-6 B.C. The independence of Tertullian's information about this census is guaranteed by the mere fact of his knowl edge of the governor's name ; and if there was a census about that date, it would be unreasonable not to identify it with St. Luke's census of the Nativity.
The traditional Western day for the Christmas festival, Dec. 25, goes back as far as Hippolytus, loc. cit.; the traditional Eastern day, Jan. 6, as far as the Basilidian Gnostics (but in their case only as a celebration of the Baptism), mentioned by Clement of Alexandria, loc. cit.
2. The interval between the Nativity and the Baptism.
Evidence of St. Luke's Gospel (iii. 23).—At the time of his baptism Jesus was apxou€vos WUEL ETWV TpcaKovra. But (i.) apXoµevos does not mean (as Valentinian interpreters thought, Iren. ii. xxii. 5 [xxxiii. 3] ; so also Epiphanius, Haer. li. 16) "beginning to be 3o years" in the sense of "not yet quite 3o," but "at the beginning of His ministry," as in Luke xxiii. 5; Acts i. 22, x. 37: (ii.) d OEL ET&V TpcaKOVTa does not mean "on ing the full age of 3o, before which he could not have taught," for if there was by Jewish custom or tradition any minimum age for a teacher, it was not 3o, but 4o (Bab. Talm. ed. 1715, fol. 19 b; Iren. loc. cit.). St. Luke's phrase is a general one, "about 3o years old." 3. The date of the Baptism.
(a) Evidence of St. Luke's Gospel (iii. 1) .—A terminus a quo for the Baptism is the synchronism of the commencement of the Baptist's public ministry with the 15th year of the rule (7)yfµovt a) of Tiberius. Augustus died on Aug. 19, A.D. 14, and, reckoned from that point, Tiberius's 15th year might be, accord ing to different methods of calculation, either A.D. 28, or 28-29 or 29. But any such result would be difficult to reconcile with the results yielded by other lines of investigation in this article; among alternative views the choice seems to lie between the following:— (i.) The years of Tiberius are here reckoned from some earlier starting-point than the death of his predecessor— perhaps from the grant to him of co-ordinate authority with Augustus over the provinces made in A.D. I I (see, for the parallel with the case of Vespasian and Titus, Ramsay, St. Paul the Roman Traveller, p. 387), so that the 15th year would be roughly A.D. 25 ; or (ii.) St. Luke has made here a second error in chronology, caused perhaps in this case by reckoning back from the Cruci fixion, and only allowing one year to the ministry of Christ.
(b) Evidence of St. John's Gospel (ii. 13, 20).—A terminus ad quem for the Baptism is the synchronism of the first Passover mentioned after it with the 46th year of the building of Herod's Temple. Herod began the Temple in the 18th year of his reign, probably 20-19 B.C., and the Passover of the 46th year is probably that of A.D. 27. This year suits so well with our other data that, while too much stress must not be laid on it, it is not unreason able to regard it as one of those curiously accurate details that the Fourth Gospel has preserved.
On the whole, then, the Baptism of Christ may be placed in A.D. 26-27 ; and as the Nativity was placed in 7-6 B.C. (at latest), this would make the age of Christ at his Baptism to be about 32, which tallies well enough with St. Luke's general estimate.
4. The interval between the Baptism and the Crucifixion, or, in other words, the duration of the public ministry of Christ.
(a) Evidence of St. Mark's Gospel (ii. 23, vi. 39, xiv. 1).—If the order of events in St. Mark is roughly chronological (as cer tainly appears to be the case), then Christ's ministry lasted at least two years, since the plucking of the ears of corn (April–June) marks a first spring; the feeding of the 5,000 when the grass was fresh green (XXcwpos: about March), a second; and the Passover of the Crucifixion a third.
(b) Evidence of St. Luke's Gospel (ix. 51–xix. 28 compared with iv. 14–ix. 50; iv. 19).—An impression of a briefer ministry is, however, suggested by St. Luke. The second and larger half of the narrative of the ministry is introduced at ix. 51 with the words, "It came to pass as the days of His assumption were coming to the full, He set His face firmly to go to Jerusalem," under which phrase the evangelist cannot have meant to include more than a few months at most ; so that even if the earlier and shorter half of the account, which describes a purely Galilean ministry is to be spread over a longer period of time, the com bined narrative can hardly have been planned on the scale of more than a single year. St. Luke himself may have understood literally, like so many of his readers in ancient times, the reference which he records to the "acceptable year of the Lord" (iv. Isaiah lxi. 2) : see, too, above 3 (a) ad fin.
(c) Evidence of St. John's Gospel (ii. 13, "the Passover of the Jews was near," and 23, "He was in Jerusalem at the Passover at the feast"; v. I, "After these things was a feast [or `the feast'] of the Jews"; vi. 4, "and the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was near"; vii. 2, "and the feast of the Jews, the Tabernacles, was near"; x. 22, "at that time the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem"; xi. 55, "and the Passover of the Jews was near"; be sides iv. 35, "say ye not that there is yet a period of four months and harvest cometh? Behold, I tell you, lift up your eyes and see the fields that they are white to harvest"). This catena of time references is of course unique in the Gospels as a basis for a chronology of the ministry ; and it is not reasonable to doubt that the evangelist intended these notices as definite historical data, possibly with the express purpose of correcting current but er roneous impressions. Whatever difficulties either of reading or of interpretation have been raised in regard to one or other of these notices, the general conclusion that the fourth evangelist drew up his narrative on the basis of a two years' rather than a one year's ministry appears to be irrefragable.
Not only do the Fourth and Second Gospels thus agree in indications of a two years' ministry, but the notes of the middle spring of the three (John vi. 4; Mark vi. 39) both belong to the feeding of the 5,000, one of the most striking points of actual contact between the two Gospels. And in questions of this sort the evidence of Mark and John quite decisively outweighs the evidence of writers so far less precise in detail as Matthew and Luke.
The question, however, may still be raised, whether these time indications of the two Gospels are exhaustive, whether (that is) two years, and two years only, are to be allotted to the ministry. Irenaeus (ii. xxii. 3-6 [xxxiii. 1-4] ), in favour of a ministry of not less than ten years, appeals (i.) to the tradition of Asia Minor; (ii.) to the record in St. John that Christ, who was 30 years old at the time of His Baptism, was addressed by the Jews as "not yet (i.e. nearly) 5o years old": but both his arguments are probably derived from a single source, Papias's interpretation of John viii. 57. With this exception, however, all ancient writers, whether they enumerated two or three or four Passovers in the Gospel history, believed that the enumeration was exhaustive; and their belief appears correctly to represent the mind of the author of the Fourth Gospel. Moreover, the wide currency in early times of the tradition of the single-year ministry (Ptole maeus ap. Iren. loc. cit.; Clem. Horn., xvii. 19; Clem. Alex. Strom. i. 145, vi. 279; Julius Africanus, ap. Routh, Rell. Sacr. ii. 240, 306; Hippolytus, Paschal Cycle and Cliron.; Origen, in Levit. Hom. ix. 5, de Princ., iv. 5) becomes perhaps more difficult to account for, the farther it is removed from the actual facts.
5. The date of the Crucifixion.
(a) The Roman Governor.—Pontius Pilate was on his way back to Rome, after ten years of office, when Tiberius died on March 16, A.D. 37 (Josephus, Ant. xviii. ii. 2, iv. 2) . For the Crucifixion "under Pontius Pilate" the Passover of A.D. 28 is therefore the earliest possible and the Passover of A.D. 36 the latest. Further, Luke xiii. 1, xxiii. 12, show that he was not quite a newcomer at the time of the Crucifixion.
(b) The Jewish High-Priest.—Caiaphas was appointed before Pilate's arrival, and was deposed at a Passover apparently not later than that of the year of Herod Philip's death, A.D. 34 (Josephus, Ant. xviii. ii. 2, iv. 3—V. 3) . The Crucifixion at some previous Passover would then fall not later than the year A.D. 33.
(c) The Day of the Week. The Resurrection on "the first day of the week" (Sunday) was "on the third day" after the Crucifixion; and that "the third day" implies an interval of only two days hardly needed to be shown, but has been shown to dem onstration in Field's Notes on the Translation of the New Testa ment (on Matt. xvi. 21). The Crucifixion was therefore on a Friday in some year between A.D. 28 and 33 inclusive.
(d) The Day of the Jewish Month Nisan.—The Passover was kept at the full moon of the lunar month of Nisan, the first of the Jewish ecclesiastical year; the Paschal lambs were slain on the afternoon of the 14th Nisan, and the Passover was eaten after sunset the same day—which, however, as the Jewish day began at sunset, was by their reckoning the early hours of the i 5th Nisan; the first fruits (of the barley harvest) were solemnly offered on the 16th. The synoptic Gospels appear to place the Crucifixion on the 15th, since they speak of the Last Supper as a Passover;' St. John's Gospel, on the other hand (xiii. 1, 29, xviii. 28), distinctly implies that the feast had not yet taken place, and thus makes the Crucifixion fall on the 14th. Early 'If the Passover celebration could be anticipated by one day in a private Jewish family (and we know perhaps too little of Jewish rules in the time of Christ to be able to exclude this possibility), the evi dence of the synoptic Gospels would no longer conflict with that of St. John. In any case Christians in the Apostolic Age can hardly have kept the evening of the anniversary of the Crucifixion as a feast.
Christian tradition is unanimous on this side; either the 14th is mentioned, or the Crucifixion is made the antitype of the slaughter of the Paschal Lamb (and the Resurrection of the first fruits), in the following authorities anterior to A.D. 235 : St. Paul, I. Cor. v. 7, xv. 20 ; Quartodecimans of Asia Minor, who observed the Christian Pascha on the "i4th," no matter on what day of the week it fell; Claudius Apollinaris, Clement of Alexandria, Hippo lytus, all three quoted in the Paschal Chronicle; Irenaeus (ap parently) iv. x. 1 [xx. I] ; [Tertullian] adv. Jud., 8; Africanus, in Routh, Rell. Sacr. ii. 297. The Crucifixion, then, should be placed rather on the 14th than on the 15th of Nisan.
These four lines of inquiry have shown that the Crucifixion fell on Friday, Nisan 14 (rather than 15), in one of the six years 28-33 A.D.; and therefore, if it is possible to discover (i.) ex actly which moon or month was reckoned each year as the moon or month of Nisan, and (ii.) exactly on what day that particular moon or month was reckoned as beginning, it will, of course, be possible to tell in which of these years Nisan 14 fell on a Friday. To neither question can an answer be given in terms so precise as to exclude some latitude, but to both with sufficient exactness to rule out at once three of the six years. (i.) The difficulty with regard to the month is to know how the commencement of the Jewish year was fixed—in what years an extra month was inter calated before Nisan. If the Paschal full moon was, as in later Christian times, the first after the spring equinox, the difficulty would be reduced to the question on what day the equinox was reckoned. If, on the other hand, it was, as in ancient Jewish times, the first after the earliest ears of the barley harvest would be ripe, it would have varied with the forwardness or backwardness of the season from year to year. (ii.) The difficulty with regard to the day is, quite similarly, to know what precise relation the first day of the Jewish month bore to the astronomical new moon. In later Christian times the Paschal month was calcu lated from the astronomical new moon ; in earlier Jewish times all months were reckoned to begin at the first sunset when the new moon was visible, which in the most favourable circum stances would be some hours, and in the most unfavourable three days, later than the astronomical new moon.
Jewish traditions represented the Sanhedrin as retaining to the end its plenary power over the calendar, and as still fixing the first day of every month and the first month of every year. But as it is quite inconceivable that the Jews of the Dispersion should not have known beforehand at what full moon they were to present themselves at Jerusalem for the Passover, it must be assumed as true in fact, whether or no it was true in theory, that the old empirical methods must have been qualified, at least par tially, by permanent, that is in effect by astronomical, rules. The beginning of the Jewish year according to the state of the harvest must have been supplanted by some more fixed relation to the solar year, that is, presumably according to the date of the spring equinox. But if so, the equinox itself must have been put earlier than the Christian reckoning of the 3rd century put it, since Christian controversialists from Anatolius of Laodicea (A.D. 277) onwards accused the Jews of disregarding the equinoctial limit, and of sometimes placing the Paschal full moon before it. There fore we must allow for the possibility that in the time of Christ the i4th of Nisan might have fallen as far back as, say, March 17. In the following table the first column gives the terminus paschalis, or 14th of the Paschal moon, according to the Christian calendar; the second gives the i4th, reckoned from the time of the astronomical new moon of Nisan ; the third the i4th, reckoned from the probable first appearance of the new moon at sunset. Alternative moons are given for A.D. 29, according as the full moon falling about March 18 is or is not reckoned the proper Paschal moon.
It will be seen at once that Friday cannot have fallen on Nisan i4th in any of the three years A.D. 28, 31 and 32. The choice is narrowed down to A.D. 29, Friday, March 18 (Friday, April 15 would no doubt be too early even for the 14th of Nisan) ; A.D. 3o, Friday, April 7; and A.D. 33, Friday, April 3.
(e) The Civil Year (consuls, or regnal years of Tiberius) in early Christian tradition. It is not a priori improbable that the year of the central event from which the Christian Church dated her own existence should have been noted in the apostolic age and handed down to the memory of succeeding generations; and the evidence does go a. little way to suggest that we have in favour of A.D. 29, the consulate of the two Gemini, a body of tradition not derived from the Gospels.
The consulship of the two Gemini is given by Lactantius, Div. Inst. IV x. 18, and (Lactantius?) de morte pers. § 2; the consulship of the two Gemini=Tiberius 18 by Hippolytus, Comm. in Danielem, iv. (ed. Bonwetsch, p. 242); the consulship of the two Gemini = Tiberius 15 by [Tertullian] adv. Judaeos, 8; the consulship of the two Gemini=Tiberius 15 (al. 18 or '9)=01. 2°2.4 (this last is a later interpolation from Eusebius) in the Acts of Pilate. Other methods of expressing the year 29 appear in Hippolytus's Paschal Cycle and Chronicle, and in the Abgar legend (ap. Eusebius, H.E. 13). Tiberius 15 is given by Clem. Alex. Strom. i. 147; Origen, Hom. in Jerem. xiv. 13, cf. c. Cels. iV. 22: Tiberius 16 by Julius Africanus (Routh, Rell. Sacr. 3oi-3o4), and pseudo-Cyprian de pascha computus (A.D. 243), 20. The date by the consuls has an independent look about it; it was apparently well established by about A.D. zoo, and it is just possible that it had been handed down in early Christian circles independently of the Gospels.
(f) The Civil Month and Day.—The earliest known calcula tions, by Basilidian Gnostics, quoted in Clem. Alex. Strom. i. 147, gave alternative dates, Phamenoth 25, Pharmuthi 25, Pharmuthi 19; that is, according to the fixed Alexandrian calendar of 26 B.c., March 21, April 20, April 14. But to look for genuine tra ditions among Egyptian Gnostics, or even in the church of Alex andria, would be to misread the history of Christianity in the 2nd century. Such traditions must be found, if anywhere, in Palestine and Syria, in Asia Minor, in Rome, not in Egypt; within the Church, not among the Gnostics. The date which makes the most obvious claim to satisfy these conditions would be March 25, as given by Hippolytus, (Tert.) adv. Judaeos, and the Acts of Pilate (according to all extant mss. and versions, but see below), /occ. citt.—the same three authorities who bear the earliest witness for the consuls of the year of the Crucifixion— and by many later writers. It cannot be correct, since no full moon occurs near it in any of the possible years; yet it must be very early, too early to be explained with Dr. Salmon (Diction ary of Christian Biography, iii. 92b), as originated by Hippoly tus's Paschal cycle of A.D. 221. Now Epiphanius (Haer. 1. 1) had seen copies of the Acts of Pilate in which the day given was not March 25, but a.d. xv. kal. Apr. (=-March 18); and if this was the primitive form of the tradition, it is easy to see how March 25 could have grown out of it, since the i8th from com paratively early times, in the East at any rate, would have been thought impossible as falling before the equinox, and no substi tution would be so natural as that of the day week, March 25. But March 18, A.D. 29 was one of the three alternative dates for the Crucifixion which on astronomical and calendar grounds were found (see above, 5d) to be possible.
Thus A.D. 29 is the year, March 18 is the day, to which Chris tian tradition (whatever value, whether much or little, be ascribed to it) appears to point. Further, the Baptism was tentatively placed in A.D. 26-27 ; the length of the ministry was fixed, with some approach to certainty, at between two and three years, and here too the resultant date for the Crucifixion would be the Pass over of A.D. 29.
To sum up: the various dates and intervals, to the approxi mate determination of which this article has been devoted, do not claim separately more than a tentative and probable value. Perhaps their harmony and convergence give them some addi tional claim to acceptance, and at any rate do something to secure each one of them singly—the Nativity in 7-6 B.c., the Baptism in A.D. 26-27, the Crucifixion in A.D. 29—from being to any wide extent in error.
27).
1. The death of Herod Agrippa I. This prince, son of Aris tobulus and grandson of Herod the Great, was made (i.) king over the tetrarchy which had been Herod Philip's, "not many days'' after the accession of Gaius, March 16, A.D. 37; (ii.) ruler of the tetrarchy of Antipas, in A.D. 39-40; (iii.) ruler of the whole of Palestine (with Abilene) on the accession of Claudius at the be ginning of A.D. 41. Josephus's Jewish TV ars and Antiquities agree in the important datum that he reigned three years more after the grant from Claudius, which would make the latest limit of his death the spring of A.D. 44. The Antiquities also place his death in the seventh year of his reign, which would be A.D. 43-44 On the other hand, coins whose genuineness there is no apparent reason to doubt are extant of Agrippa's ninth year; and this can only be reconciled even with A.D. 44 bY supposing that he com menced reckoning a second year of his reign on Nisan I A.D. 37, so that his ninth would run from Nisan I , A.D. 44. On the balance of evidence the only year which can possibly reconcile all the data appears to be A.D. 44 after Nisan, so that it will have been at the Passover of that year that St. Peter's arrest took place.
After Agrippa's death Judaea was once more governed by pro curators, of whom Cuspius Fadus and Tiberius Alexander ruled from A.D. 44 to 48; the third, Cumanus, was appointed in A.D. 48 ; and the fourth, Felix, in A.D. 52. Under Tiivrius Alexander, i.e. in A.D. 46 or 47, occurred the great famine when the Antiochene church sent help to that of Jerusalem by the ministry of Barna bas and Saul (Acts xi. 3o, xii. 25). Thus the earliest date at which the commencement of the first missionary journey (Acts xiii. 4) can be placed is the spring of A.D. 47. The journey ex tended from Salamis "throughout the whole island" of Cyprus, and on the mainland from Pamphylia to Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, at each of which places indications are given of a prolonged visit (xiii. 49, xiv. 3, 6, 7, 21). The same places were visited in reverse order on the return journey. Now it must be remembered that a sea voyage could never have been undertaken, and land travel only rarely, during the winter months, say Novem ber to March; and as the amount of work accomplished is ob viously more than could fall_ within the travelling season of a single year, the winter of 47-48 must have been spent in the interior, and return to the coast and to Syria made only some time before the end of autumn A.D. 48. The succeeding winter, at least, was spent again at Antioch of Syria (xiv. 28). The council at Jerusalem of Acts xv. will fall at earliest in the spring of A.D. 49, and as only "certain days" were spent at Antioch after it (xv. 36) the start on the second missionary journey might have been made in the summer of the same year. The "confirmation" of the existing churches of Syria and Cilicia, and of those of the first journey beginning with Derbe (xv. 41, xvi. 5), cannot have been completed under several months, nor would the Apostle have commenced the strictly missionary part of the journey, in districts not previously visited, before the opening of the travel ling season of A.D. 5o. No delay was then made on the Asiatic side: it may still have been in spring when St. Paul crossed to Europe and began the course of preaching at Philippi, Thessalo nica, Beroea and Athens which finally brought him to Corinth. The stay of eighteen months at the last-named place (xviii. I) will naturally begin at the end of one travelling season and end at the beginning of another, i.e. from the autumn of A.D. 50 to the spring of A.D. 52. From Corinth the Apostle went to Jeru salem to "salute the church," and then again to Antioch in Syria, where he stayed only for "a time" (xviii. 22), and soon left (on the third missionary journey, as conventionally reckoned), pro ceeding "in order" through the churches of the interior of Asia Minor. These journeys and the intervening halts must have oc cupied seven or eight months at least, and it must have been towards the end of the year when St. Paul established his new headquarters at Ephesus. The stay there lasted between two and three years (xix. 8, i o, xx. 31), and cannot have terminated before the spring of A.D. 55. From Ephesus he went into Europe, and after "much teaching" given to the churches of Macedonia (xx. 2), spent the three winter months at Corinth, returning to Philippi in time for the Passover (xx. 3, 6) of A.D. 56. Pentecost of the same year was spent at Jerusalem, and there St. Paul was arrested, and kept in prison at Caesarea for two full years, until Festus succeeded Felix as governor (xx. 16, xxiv. 27), an event which, on this arrangement of the chronology of the missionary journeys, would therefore fall in A.D. 58.
So far it has been shown, firstly, that the missionary journeys cannot have commenced before the spring of A.D. 47, and secondly, that between their commencement and the end of the two years' imprisonment at Caesarea not less than 11 full years must have elapsed. Consequently A.D. 58 appears to be the earliest date possible for the arrival of Festus, though a later date is not absolutely excluded. It is possible also that the first missionary journey should be placed in A.D. 48 instead of A.D. 47 ; so that the alternative is open that every date given above, from A.D. 47 to A.D. 58, should be moved on one year, with the result of plac ing Festus's arrival in A.D. 59.
2. In a fragmentary inscription found recently at Delphi occur the words "in Gallio's proconsulship" and the words "Claudius being Imperator for the 26th time." We know from other sources that Claudius was Imp. XXIII. and XXIV. some time in 51, and Imp. XXVII. not later than Aug. 1, 52. He may there fore have become Imp. XXVI. some time in the first half of 52: but as the proconsul's year of office ran from May to May, the data still leave it open whether the proconsulship is to be placed between May, 51 and May, 52, or between May, 52 and May, 53, with some probability in favour of the former alternative. In other words, the inscription tallies very well with the date given above for St. Paul's appearance before Gallio, spring of 52, but is reconcilable at a pinch with a date one year later, spring of 53• 3. The replacement of Felix by Festus. This is the pivot date of St. Paul's later life, but unfortunately two schools of critics date it as differently as A.D. 55 and A.D. 6o (or 61). The former are represented by Harnack, the latter by Wieseler, whom Light foot follows. It can be said confidently that the truth is between these two extremes, for the arguments urged in each case appear less to prove one extreme than to disprove its opposite.
Arguments for the Later Date, A.D. 6o or 6i.—(a) St. Paul, at the time of his arrest, two years before Felix's recall addresses him as "for many years past a judge for this nation" (Acts xxiv. 1o, 27). It is certain that Felix succeeded Cumanus in A.D. 52, for Tacitus mentions Cumanus's recall under that year, Josephus immediately before the notice of the completion of Claudius's twelfth year (Jan. A.D. 53) . It is argued that "many years" cannot mean less than six or seven, so that St. Paul must have been speaking at earliest in 58 or 59, and Felix will have left Judaea at earliest in 6o or 61. But Felix was at the time of his appointment iampridem ludaeae impositus (Tacitus, Annals, xii. 54) ; and even Josephus implies that Felix had been in some position where the Jewish authorities could judge of his fitness when he tells us that the high priest Jonathan used to press an Felix, as a reason for urging him to govern well, the fact that he had asked for his appointment to the procuratorship (Ant. XX. viii. 5) . If Felix had acted in some position of responsibility in Palestine before 52 (perhaps for some time before), St. Paul could well have spoken of "many years" at least as early as the year A.D. 56.
(13) Josephus enumerates after the accession of Nero (Oct. 54) a long catalogue of events which all took place under the pro curatorship of Felix, including the revolt of "the Egyptian" which was already "before these days" at the time of St. Paul's arrest, two years from the end of Felix's tenure. This suggests, no doubt, that the Egyptian rebelled at earliest in 54-55, and makes it prob able that St. Paul's arrest did not take place before (the Pentecost of) A.D. 56; and it implies certainly that the main or most im portant part of Felix's governorship fell, in Josephus's view, under Nero. But ae two years only of Felix's rule (52-54) fell under Claudius, this procedure would be quite natural on Josephus's part if his recall were dated in 58, so that two-thirds of his office fell under Nero.
The arguments, then, brought forward in favour of A.D. 6o or 61 do' not do more than bring the recall of Felix down to 58 or 59.
Arguments for an Early Date, A.D. 55 or 56.—(a) Eusebius's Chronicle places the arrival of Festus in Nero 2, Oct. But (i.) Nero 2 is really, on the system of regnal years em ployed by Eusebius, Sept. 56–Sept. 57, (ii.) it is doubtful whether Eusebius had any authority to depend on here other than Josephus, who gives no precise year for Festus—and if so, Euse bius had to fix the year as best he could.
(0) Felix, on his return to Rome, was prosecuted by the Jews for misgovernment, but was acquitted through the influence of his brother Pallas. Pallas had been minister and favourite of Claudius, but was removed from office in the winter following Nero's accession, : Felix must therefore have been tried at the very beginning of Nero's reign. But it would be a mistake to look upon Pallas's retirement as a disgrace. He stipulated that no inquiry should be made into his conduct in office, and was left for another seven years unmolested in the enjoyment of the for tune he had amassed. There is, therefore, every likelihood that he retained for some years enough influence to shield his brother.
Of these arguments, then, the first, so far as it is valid, is an argument for the summer, not of A.D. S5 or 56, but of A.D. 57 as that of the recall, while the second will apply to any of the earlier years of Nero's reign.
In the result, then, the point that Josephus catalogues the events of Felix's procuratorship under Nero cannot be pressed to bring down Felix's tenure as far as 6o or 61, but it does seem to exclude as early a termination as 56, or even 57. Conversely, the influence of Pallas at court need not be terminated by his ceasing to be min ister early in 55; but it would have been overshadowed later on by the influence of Poppaea, who in the summer of the year 6o en abled the Jews to win their cause in the matter of the Temple wall, and would certainly have supported them against Felix.
The balance of the two lines of argument suggests the year 58 for the recall of Felix and arrival of Festus.
If St. Paul was arrested in 56, and appealed to Caesar on the arrival of Festus in 58, then, as he reached Rome in the early part of the year following, and remained there a prisoner for two full years, we are brought down to the early spring of 61 for the close of the period recorded in the Acts. That after these two years he was released and visited Spain in the west, and in the east Ephesus, Macedonia, Crete, Troas, Miletus and perhaps Achaea and Epirus, is probable, in the one case, from the evidence of Romans xv. 28, Clem. ad Cor. v. and the Muratorian canon, and, in the other, from the Pastoral Epistles. These journeys certainly cannot have occupied less than two years, and it is more natural to allow three for them, which takes us down to 64.
Early evidence is unanimous in pointing to St. Peter and St. Paul as victims of the persecution of Nero, and tradition clearly distinguished the fierce outbreak at Rome that followed on the fire of the city in July 64 from any permanent disabilities of the Christians in the eye of the law which the persecution may have initiated. There is, therefore, no reason at all to doubt that both apostles were martyred in 64-65, and the date serves as a con firmation of the chronology adopted above of the imprisonment, . release and subsequent journeys of St. Paul.
Investigation, then, of that part of the book of Acts which fol lows the death of Agrippa, recorded in chap. xii.—i.e., of that part of the apostolic age which follows the year 44—has shown that apparent difficulties can be to a large extent set aside, and that there is nowhere room between A.D. 44 and 64 for doubt extending to more than a single year.
But if the events of A.D. 44-64 can thus be fixed with a fair ap proximation to certainty, it is otherwise with the events of A.D. Here we are dependent (i.) on the general indications given in the Acts, but these general indications can at best only lead to general conclusions. The most that we can say is that the first half of the book, down to xii. 24, covers the period from the Crucifixion to the death of Herod, A.D. 29-44, and that it is divided into three sections by the general summaries of vi. 7, ix. 31, xii. 24, just as the later half of the book is similarly divided at xvi. 5, xix. 20, xxviii. 31. But though these divisions are probably intended to be in a rough sense chronologically equal divisions, it is obvious that this rough equality cannot be pressed in detail.
(ii.) A nearer attempt to date at least the chronology of St. Paul's earlier years as a Christian could be made by the help of the Galatian Epistle if we could be sure from what point and to what point its reckonings are made. The apostle tells us that on his conversion he retired from Damascus into Arabia, and thence returned to Damascus ; then of ter three years (from his conver sion) he went up to Jerusalem, but stayed only a fortnight, and went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia. Then after 14 years (from his conversion? or from his last visit?) he went up to Jeru salem again to confer with the elder apostles. Most critics are now agreed that the 14 years are to be calculated from the conver sion ; and an increasing number of critics is coming round to the view that the two visits to Jerusalem are those recorded in Acts ix. 26 and xi. 3o. If so, the epistle was written before, but appar ently only just before, the Council of Acts xv., or in other words in the early months of A.D. 49. The 14 years reckoned back from the famine visit (c. A.D. 46) would bring us to A.D. 33 as the latest possible date for the conversion.