indicate here the system of chronology which has been adopted. Provisionally, the dates assigned to the principal events of St. Paul's life by Mr. Turner! will be taken as a basis for investigation. It is now pretty generally agreed among scholars that the dates formerly accepted, ¢.g., by Wieseler and Lightfoot, are two years too late; but this does not, of course, affect materially the accuracy of Light- foot’s conclusions as to the order in which the several incidents of the Apostle’s career took place. Indeed, the scheme of recon- struction of St. Paul's history while at Ephesus, which has approved itself to the present editor, is in the main that put forward by Lightfoot,? although his dates have not been followed. This scheme is not without difficulties ; but it is dependent on fewer subsidiary hypotheses than any other which has been proposed, and it possesses special claim to consideration from the fact that it is an attempt to explain the documents as they stand without resort to the heroic measures of dissection which some critics have found it necessary to adopt.
3. I start, then, with the assumption that St. Paul's sojourn of over two years at Ephesus ® (Acts xix. 10) lasted from December, 52, or January, 53, to March or April, 55, and 1 proceed to examine his communications with Corinth during that period. The Church at Corinth had been founded by the Apostle on his second missionary journey, late in the year 50 (Acts xviii. 1 f.);* but, all too soon after its foundation, it became apparent that the laxity of morals, for which Corinth was notorious, was showing itself in the lives of the Christian converts. Men do not easily shake themselves free from evil traditions and associations ; and the power of the new faith took time to establish itself there as elsewhere. When the restraints imposed by the Apostle’s presence were removed, various scandals betrayed the moral weakness of these clever Greeks who had welcomed the new teaching but a short time before. It would appear that while St. Paul was at Ephesus bad news reached him from Corinth as to the morals of his converts; and in consequence of this he paid to that city a brief disciplinary visit, of which indeed no account has been given by St. Luke, but which is alluded to in St. Paul's Epistles (see especially 2 Cor. xii, 21, where we are informed
ὁ See article ‘‘ Chronology of N.T.” in Hastings’ Bible Dictionary.
2See Biblical Essays, pp. 222, 274.
‘It is probable that the “‘ three months” of ver. 8 is to be reckoned in addition to the ‘two years" of νετ, 10; cf. τριετίαν, Acts xx. 31.
*On the Church at Corinth, see the first chapter of Prof. Findlay’s Introduction οἱ Corinthians (vol. ii., p. 729 ff.).