406 CHRONOLOGY OF NEW TEST.
CHEONOLOGY OF NEW TEST.
Btereotjped Ut«rar7 usage upon the point. St. Luke's contem- poraries, U Romans, would probably have been employing the old system of dating by the consuls of each year ; if Orientals, they mij,'ht still be usmg the Olympiads (B.C. 776), the era of Alexander or the Greeks (B.C. 812), the era of Sulla (B.C. 85), or the era of Actium (B.a 31). So when he himself elected to adopt the still novel reckoning by imperial years, he would find DO absolutely fixed tradition as to the moment from which to compute them ; and it has lately been pointed out (Kamsay, St. Paul the Trav. p. 387) that not very long before the prob- able date of the Uospel, Titus had been associated in the empire with his father Veepaaian by the simultaneous reception of the proconsular and tribunician power, together witn other insignia of imperial rank (July 1, A.D. 71). The conditions of his own day, Kamsay thinks, may have led the evangelist to emphasize the similar elevation of Tiberius, on whom a special enactment had already in Augustus' lifetime conferred a position in the provinces co-ordinate with the elder emperor's, so that provincial custom may have taken that as the starting- point of his reign (Velleiua Paterculus, ii. 121 ; Suetonius, Tib, 21 ; compare Bury, StutUnW Roman Empire^ p. 54 ; Mommsen, Staat^echt, ii. ed. 3, p. 1159, n. 3). As to the exact year of the law. authorities differ ; most of them connect it with the ^nt of the tribunician power for life In A.D. 13 ; but there is no necessity to sj-nchronize the two, and Mommsen, on the ground of the context in Velleius, puts it two years earlier, in a.0. 11.
If this solution is possible — and it is not given here for more — the various data are brought into complete harmony. The mission of the Baptist in the 15th year of Tiberius, calculated from A.D. 11, wUl fall in A.D. 25-26 ; the Baptism of Christ may be assigned to A.D. 26-27 ; and the first passover of the Ministry, being at the same time the passover of the 46th year of the temple building, will follow in the spring of A.D. 27.
D. The interval between the Baptism and the Crucifixion, or Duration of the Ministry. — a. St. Mark's Gospel, the closest representative of the common synoptic tradition, contains few pre- cise indications of time ; events are strung together by no more than the vague expressions ' straight- way,' 'after not many days,' 'after many days.' The general impression, however, which the iynoptlc narrative seems calculated to produce, »nd probably in primitive times did produce, is thai the period described was one of no consider- able length. In the absence of other data, especial importance accrues to two episodes which contain in themselves or their surroundings evidence of the season of the year. Describing the feeding of the 5000, St. Mark adds to the common tradition the descriptive touch that the grass showed the fresh green of early spring (^irl t<;J x^'^PV X^I"'V Mk 6'» : cf. Mt W, Lk 9^). And the plucking of the ears of com (Mk 2»'=Mt 12' = Lk 6M, the harvest being ripe but not yet cut, wUl fall, if the ears were barley, at earliest in April, and if wheat, at latest in June ; see R. Samuel, quoted by Wetstein on Jn 4*°.
Here, then, a spring or early summer in Mk 2 is succeeded by early spring in en. 6, the lapse of one year intervening ; while a second year is postulated oy the events of chs. 6°'-10'", which include jour- neys to the districts of Phoenicia, of Upper Galilee, and of I'er.nea (7" 8" 10"), and shut out the possi- bility that the miracle of ch. 6 and the passover of the Crucifixion can belong to the same spring ; so that, at least if the order is even roughly chrono- logical, a two years' ministry would already underlie the record. And though our earliest authority, Papias, seems to deny just this characteristic to St. Mark, sayin-' that, while the facts were all accurate, the order was not {aKpijiCJt lypa^pc ov fUvToi rditi, quoted in Eusebius, HE iii. 39), yet he probably does not mean by this more than the absence of a framework for the history such as St. Luke supplies by notices of movement towards Jerus., and St. John by notices of Jewish festivals. In any case an investigation of the internal evi- dence borne by the Gospel itself, though neces- sarily cursory, and limited to a single section, will best show to what extent it may be allowed or denied to be chronological.
From the opening of the Galilean ministry to Mk 1" the narrative nins continuously, the scene, the actors, the horizon being all Galilean, and GalUean only, as far as 3'. At this point a change takes place, and the larger world of Palestine begins to play a part on the stage. The audience is drawn, not from Galilee only, but from Jerus., Judsea, Idumsea, Persea, and Phcenicia ; the opposi- tion is reinforced by scribes from the capital; the apostles are organized into a body for more system- atic evangelization {3'' '*■ ''^). To this division, under which the first two chapters mark the inchoate stage of the Ministry, the character of the say- ings and doings recorded in them fairly corre- sponds. Five miracles arouse the attention of the populace, and spread the fame of their author (13i_2i3), just as five episodes bring out teaching which provokes the criticism, and soon the hostility, of the scribes and Pharisees (2'-3") ; the cure of the paralytic with the forgiveness of his sins, where the miracle suggests the teaching, forming the transition from the first half of the section to the second. This presentation of development and progress is an argument for the substantially chronological character of the record, so far at least that an episode of the opening section, such as that of the ears of com, would primd facie be dated in the actual order of events before an episode so much posterior to the great break in 3' as the feeding of the 5000. With much less hesitation it may be laid down that the miracle of ch. 6 cannot possibly be placed in the same spring as the Crucifixion ; so that these three d<ita, the late spring of one year, the early spring of another, and the passover time of a third, suggest the testimony of St. Mark's Gospel to at least a two years' Mmistry (but see below, p. 410").