on the
It is therefore impossible to arrive, ground of custom or etiquette, at any sure con- clusion about the sense that should be attached to the date in Lk 3!; and the meaning can be deter- mined only by the general chronology of the life of Christ, which is not within the scope of this article. In this place there is only one further remark to make. St. Luke counte according to current years: but what, in his case, are to be understood as current years? He was certainly influenced in various ways by Roman feeling, but it seems highly improbable that he would count according to the Roman year ; and there are absolutely no other facts mentioned in his writings
* Tt will be argued in the sequel that the local year probably began at or soon after the autumn equinox.
EXTRA VOL,—3I
to show with certainty what was his custom in respect of Si coaslowital rece eae, He was, how- ever, Greek, and it seems improbable that he used any kind of year other than the Macedonian, Ana- tolian, and North Syrian, beginning at or near the autumn equinox. If we may start from this strong presumption, the fifteenth year of Tiberius began in autumn A.D. 25 or A.D. 27 (in the latter case year 1 of Tiberius would last only from 19 Aug. to 22 or 80 Sept. A.D. 14).
The passage is encumbered by another difficulty. The call of John the Baptist took place in that fifteenth year ; but what relation does the call bear to the baptizing of Jesus, or, in other words, how long had John’s preaching lasted before Jesus came to be baptized? It seems probable that the call of John and the coming of Jesus are to be placed within that fifteenth year, for otherwise the dating, which is here stated in such careful detail, would be valueless. But when an ancient historian speci- fies a date so elaborately as St. Luke does in this case, his object (as we shall see *) is to fix chrono- logically a critical event according to which the rest of the history is to be grouped.
Moreover, the narrative distinctly gives the im- pression that Jesus was one of Jolin’s early hearers. The baptism of Jesus in the Jordan belongs prob- ably to the late winter season, as Lewin has shown; and the call of John then must have taken place in the late autumn immediately pre- ceding. The ancient customs of reckoning seem to leave only two possibilities : Jesus was baptized by John either in the beginning of A.D. 26 or in the beginning of A.D. 28, according as Tiberius’ reign is counted as beginning from his collegiate power or dynastically from the death of Augustus.
2. Dating by periodically elected magistrates.— Far more difficult than the date according to the years of monarchs was the custom of dating by eponymous magistrates, which was introduced by the proud self-consciousness of Greek city life. No means existed of determining the interval between two events, for example, dated respectively in the archonship of Euclid and the archonship of Pytho- dorus, except to consult a list of archons and find out the number of names between them. Except in Athens, it would be extremely difficult to find a list of Athenian archons; even in Athens it would not always be easy to find such a list.
Almost every city in Greece made it a point of honour to date by its own magistrates. Thus the difficulty of this system was so much increased that in the majority of cases such dates are useless, and convey no chronological information. When we remember that in many towns those magis- trates held office for only part of a year, the cum- brousness and absurdity of this pompous method of dating can be understood.
Only in the case of the Roman eponymous magis- trates, the consuls, is a nearly complete list pre- served ; and the power of Rome spread the custom of dating by consuls far beyond the limits of the city. Consular dating was practised frequently even under the empire. It was complicated by the fact that the consuls who began their office on 1 January did not always remain in office through- out the year, and especially it became common under the empire that several pairs of consuls, the original and the later suffects, held office in succes- sion during each year. ‘The old Roman rule, that the date should be given according to the existing consuls, whether or no they had come into office
* See below, 4.
+ Fasti Sacri, p. 177: a slight change is needed to accommo- date the reasoning to the difference of year in that admirable book. Though we disagree with its conclusions, itis by far the most useful work on the subject, on account of the care, fair- ness, completeness, and ingenuity with which it collects the evidence bearing on every single separate point.
482 NUMBERS, HOURS, AND YEARS
on 1 January, was in force until the latter part of the Ist cent.; but at that time it began to be allowed that the whole year should be specified by the names of the pair of consuls who entered on office on 1 January; and gradually the superior convenience of this practice established it as the rule.