408 CHRONOLOGY OF NEW TEST.
CHRONOLOGY OF NEW TEST.
he cured the paralytic, the third at the Crucifixion (,B<bt. n. xxii. 3). This Father is so ea^jer, it is urped, to swell the number of Passovers that he includes the unnamed feast of 6^ and it is impossible that he should have failed to note so clear ft case 08 6* would be, if the word Passover had stood there in his text. But, in fact, lren»u8 is professing to quote only the Pass- over* at which Christ was present, quoties geetnidum tempiu patdut Dmiiinug pogt baptig}iui ancetulerit in Hi^ruiaLmn • and with this aim he catalogues minutely the journeys to and fro. He if not professing to exhaust the number of Passovers, for he goes on to ar^fue that the Ministry lasted for ten years or more.
The Alotri, aocording to Epiphanius (Uan: li. 22), rejected St. John's Gosiiel u inconsistent with the rest, for the reason, among others, that instead of one Passover it records the observance of two. While they were about it, says Epiphanius, they might have accentuated the inconsistency by pointing to, not two, but three Passovers in this Gospel. Here the answer is again that St. Joiln does not speak of the ' observance ' of more than two Passovers by visits to Jerusalem.
Origen's Corrnn. on St. John is defective for chi. B-7. But on ch. 4.*&(tom. xiii. 39, 41), against the view of the Valentiniau conunentator Heracleon, that the material hanest was four months off, and the season therefore winter, he pleads for the alternative of actual harvest-time from the sequence of the events in the SBCceeding chapters, where 43fl is followed almost at once by the feast of 61, and the feast of &1 by a mention of the Tabernacles as ' nii;h at hand" (0* or 7^?). The argument clearly postulaus the absence of any intervening Passover at 6* ; and though it is possible in the loss of the commentary on the verse iwelf to attribute this to mere oversight, yet the omission of T« rxffx^ In Origen's text is made more probable by the evidence of hla follower Cyril, the fourth and last witness alleged.
Cyril of Alexandria's Commentary, like those of w many later Fathers, is composite ; his own contributions are in- extricably mixed up with those of hie predecessors, notably of Origen. Hence, if Cyril (ed. Pusey, i. 398, 399, 404) both gives the disputed words « trotrxBt, not only in the biblical text at the head of the section (a position where, no doubt, scribes were prone to replace the more familiar reading), but in two allusions at an earlier point ; and at the same time explains our Lord's removal beyond the Sea of Galilee (Jn 61) by his desire to avoid the thronging crowds whom the near approach of the Feast (not of Passover but) of Tabernacles would attract to Jerus., — the simplest solution of the inconsistency is to suppose that re *«(rya rcallv stood in Cyril's own text, and that the connexion ds' the Tabernacles with the retreat beyond Tiberias is repeated from Origen.
Thus of Horfft four witnesses the evidence of two, IrensDus and the Alogi, does not really hear on the point raised at all ; while the testimony of Cyril, so far as it is adverse to the words, appears to resolve itself into the testimony of urigen. But it is much easier to suppose that Origen in his Coninientary either conjecturally emended or altogether passed over a notice that he Mw to be irreconcilable with his earlier conception of a single- year Ministry, than that he has alone preserved the apostolic "text against the concurrence of all other authorities.
On no ground, external or internal, can the omission of the reference to a Passover in 6* be defended as original or genuine. The Fourth Gospel excludes the possibility of anything less than a two-year Ministry. The result is a quite Biniple chronology for the second half of the Gospel. From 6* to 11" the space covered is exactly a year, the autumn Feast of Tabernacles (1^) and the winter Feast of Dedication (lU") being signalized in the course of it. The earlier chapters (2" to 6') present a more complicated problem, the solution of which depends primarily on the meaning to be attached to the notices of the season in 4" and of the feast in 5'.
(2) Jn 4". Allusion is here made to two seasons of the year, a period four months from harvest : 'Say ye not, There are yet four montlis, and then Cometh harvest 1 ' ; and the harvest it.self : * ' Behold the iields, for they are white already to harvest.' Of these, only one of course can be meant in the literal sense ; and the question is, which ? The patristic exegesis of the passage shows that the dilhculty was felt from the first. Tlie earliest recorded commentator, the Valeiitinian Heracleon, Mike the majority, interpreted literally, and said tliat the material harvest was four months otf, but that the harvest of which the Saviour was speak- ing, the harvest of souls, was reatly and ripe.' Origen answers that it was rather the middle or end of harvest-time, for the connexion of the
• The tint ears of barley harvest would be ready in the most forward districti at the end of March ; the most backward wheat would be cut in June. April and Uay would be the principal hftrv«et month*