Page, Acts, xxxviii.; Zahn, Einleitung, ii., p. 639; Lightfoot, B.D.?, i., 42),
If we adopt Mr. Turner’s date for Festus—a date intermediate between the earlier and later dates assigned above—and work back, we get 56 as the date for St. Paul’s arrest in Jerusalem and im- prisonment in Czesarea, 55 for his leaving Ephesus, 52 for the commencement of his third missionary journey (for he stayed at Ephesus considerably over two years; Lewin, Fasti Sacri, p. 310, says three), 50 for his reaching Corinth (late in the year), where he sojourned eighteen months, 49 for Council at Jerusalem and second missionary journey. But if we identify the Council at Jerusalem, Acts xv., with the second visit to Jerusalem according to Gal. ii. 1, but the third visit according to Acts, the question arises as to whether the notices in Gal. i. 18 and ii. 1 involve seventeen years as an interval between the Conversion and the Council (with Lightfoot, Harnack, Zahn), or whether the fourteen years, Gal. ii. 1, should be reckoned from the Conversion, 1.6Ε., eleven years from the first visit of St. Paul to Jerusalem, including the three in the fourteen (with Ramsay, Turner, McGiffert).?
Against the former view Mr. Turner urges the objection that in this case the first visit to Jerusalem would be carried back to 35-36, whereas in all probability Aretas was not ethnarch of Damascus until 37 (2 Cor. xi. 32, Acts ix. 25, 26; see commentary), and he therefore includes the three years in the fourteen, and thus gets 35-36 for the conversion, and 38 (under Aretas) for the first visit. As Mr. Turner places the Crucifixion 29 a.p., his scheme is thus free from the objection referred to above as against Harnack and O. Holtzmann, since it allows some six or seven years for the events in the early chapters of Acts (see further on the whole question of chronology Mr. Turner’s full and valuable article already mentioned; Zahn, u. s., ii.; Excursus, ii.; Professor Ram- say, ‘‘ Pauline Chronology,’ Expositor, March, 1897; Professor Bacon (Yale), “Criticism of the New Chron. of Paul,” Expositor, February, 1898; Wendt, µ. s. (1899), p. 53 ff.; Biblical World, November, 1897; Mr. Vernon Bartlet’s article on ‘‘ Pauline Hist.
1 But Professor Ramsay, it must be remembered, identifies Gal. ii. with Acts xi. 30, xii. 25 (see notes in commentary), and an interval of fourteen years between St. Paul’s conversion and the famine would be more probable than an interval of seventeen, which would throw the conversion back too early, and Dr. McGiffert identifies the accounts of both visits in Acts xi. and xv.—the former for famine relief and the latter for the settlement of the controversy with the Judaisers—with the visit mentioned in Gal. ii. 1, Apostolic Age, p. 208.