(5) Between April 11, A.D. 27, March 18, A.D. 29, April 7, A.D. 30, April 3, A.D. 33, all of which seem to be Nisan 14, except the last, which is either the 14th or 15th, we have now, if we can, to choose, and to choose in the first place with the help of ancient traditions of Christian writers (a) What days then are given in early Christian tradi tion? March 25 is given for the Crucifixion by Hippolytus, (Pseudo-) Tertullian, the Liberian Chronicler of A.D. 354, by Julius Hilarianus, and by Augustine, in the West: in the East by the Acts of Pilate, by a Paschal Homily of (Pseudo-) Chrysostom in A.D. 387, and by an Egyptian system inserted in the Paschal Chronicle; March 23 for the Crucifixion (and therefore March 25 for the Resurrection) by Lactantius, by 'some' persons according to Epiphanius, and by the Paschal Chronicler himself. March 20 is Epiphanius's own date for the Crucifixion, while he alludes to copies of the Acts of Pilate which he had found, where the Crucifixion was placed on March 18; this would place the Resurrection on March 20. Finally, Basilidians are quoted by Clement of Alexandria as fixing on March 21, and others of them on April 14 or April 20. Now March 25 (with which the 23rd is not improbably connected, as though the 25th were the date not for the Crucifixion, but for the Resurrection) is among extant witnesses first testified to by Hippolytus, and Dr. Salmon has proposed the view that this day was originally due to the fact that March 25 was the true full moon in A.D. 221, at the time when Hippolytus was preparing his system, so that on his erroneous cycle of sixteen years, the full moon of A.D. 29 ought to have fallen on the same day. But March 18 was the true full moon in A.D. 29, as we have already seen, and it is therefore at once a striking phenomenon which demands examination that March 18 was the date actually given, according to Epiphanius, by manuscripts he had seen of the Acta that year, and that therefore Phlegon confirms independently the Evangelists' statement of a miraculous darkness. But even if the premiss be correct, since Phlegon obviously had access, directly or indirectly, to Christian sources (cf. Origen, contra Celsum, ii. 14), it is not impossible that his information ultimately rests on the Gospels themselves. 1 Cf. Hippolytus, Chronicle; Ps.-Tert. adv. Jud. 8; Chron. Lib. in Lightfoot's Clement, i. 253; Julius Hilar. quoted by Hort, p. 79; Aug. Civ. Dei, xviii. 54; Acta Pilati in Tischendorf's Apocrypha, p. 204; Chrysostom, ed. Savile, v. 940; Paschal Chronicle, ed. Dufresne, p. 225; Lactantius, Div. Inst. iv. 15; Tuvès ap. Epiph. Hær. 50. 1; Pasch. Chron. p. 221; Epiph. Hær. 50. 1, 51. 23; Clem. Alex. Strom. i. 147, ed. Potter, p. 408. Many of these references we owe to Lipsius, PilatusActen, p. 27. Pilati. Is this then an accidental coincidence or a fragmentary survival of genuine tradition? The introductory historical notice in the extant Acts is as follows: 'In the fifteenth (7.7. nineteenth) year of the rule of Tiberius Cæsar, King of the Romans, and of Herod, King of Judæa, in the nineteenth year of his reign, on the eighth before the kalends of April, which is the 25th of March, in the consulship of Rufus and Rubellio, in the fourth year of the two hundred and second Olympiad, in the high-priesthood of Joseph the Caiaphas,' &c. (Lipsius, p. 21, n.) There can be no doubt that as this now stands it is posterior to and dependent on Eusebius, for the years of Herod and of the Olympiads are indubitably taken from his Chronicle, and similarly the varia lectio of the nineteenth' year of Tiberius. But it is equally certain that there are elements in it both independent of and contradictory to the system of Eusebius such are the consulship of Rufus and Rubellio, the two Gemini (=A.D. 29), and if genuine the 'fifteenth' year of Tiberius. We have not space here to argue out the question whether Lipsius is right in postponing the composition of these Acts to the fourth century: it is enough for our purpose to say that if the author was not early himself he must certainly have made use of early material. But all that we are at this moment directly concerned with are the various readings, March 18 or 25. The latter is supported by (1) all existing manuscripts and versions; (2) the Quartodecimans against whose deduction from these Acts Epiphanius is arguing; (3) the Paschal Homily of PseudoChrysostom in A.D. 387, who accepts the date of March 25 on the authority of the Acts. Against this we can only set the antigrapha which Epiphanius (c. 375 A.D.) had found. External evidence is not favourable to the 18th; but, on the other hand, if the alteration was an intentional one, the unusual March 18 (a date, too, which would have seemed impossibly early for the 14th Nisan to the Christians of the fourth century) was much more likely to have been assimilated to the prevalent March 25 than vice versa. It would seem that the choice must lie between the hypothesis of an accidental corruption of the H' before the Kalends of March (March 25) into the IE' (March 18) - a corruption certainly not impossible-and the hypothesis that the earlier date represents the original text, though now only guaranteed to us by the statement of Epiphanius. And if anything more than a mere accidental corruption, the very fact that it is too early a day for Nisan 14, according to the later computators, shows that it must mount back at least into the ante-Nicene age; for the system of Hippolytus, the only one in which the 14th of the Paschal moon could fall as early as March 18, was superseded in the East before the end of the third century. But we should still ask why this particular day was fixed on, and to this question there would seem to be only two tenable answers: although it might intelligibly be urged that we are not called upon to explain such vagaries at all. It may have been that some theorist, taking March 18 as the date of the equinox, and therefore, also, according to a common parallelism, of the creation of the world, thought it fit that the Redemption of the world should fall upon the same day as its creation, and the belief would then rest entirely on à priori grounds. It may also have been that it represents a tradition which, by channels unknown to us, did survive from the Apostolic to a later age, and reappears to our sight in this composite document of the Acts of Pilate. Since we shall see that there are weighty arguments for adopting the year A.D. 29 as that of the Crucifixion, then, since we know that March 18 is the only conceivable Friday Nisan 14 of that year, the witness of the Acta acquires some confirmation, and becomes more probable than we should otherwise be inclined to allow. But taken by itself, too many alternatives are possible for us to feel compelled to accept the testimony. It may be a scribe's unintentional corruption; it may be a romancer's fortuitous precision; it may be a theorist's parallelism of creation and redemption; it may also possibly be a genuine tradition. (b) We proceed to the more tangible evidence of the early writers to the year of the Crucifixion, and we put aside once for all those systems which have no ante-Nicene evidence at their back. If Eusebius selects the nineteenth year of Tiberius, this was partly, as we have seen, owing to his erroneous inferences from Phlegon, partly owing to his reckoning (as we shall see) as many as four passovers in St. John's Gospel after the fifteenth year of Tiberius. Again, if Jerome's version of the Chronicle alters Eusebius' nineteenth into the eighteenth of Tiberius, this was because he reckoned one passover less to the ministry. All such evidence is, therefore, really in place only in the discussion on the duration of the ministry, and we shall reserve it till we reach that point. The case is different with those who place the Crucifixion in the fifteenth or sixteenth year of Tiberius, or in the consulship of the two Gemini (A.D. 29); for, in the first place, there is ante-Nicene evidence for each of these statements; and in the second, whatever their origin, they cannot be mere deductions from the text of the Gospels as we have them. On both grounds, then, they demand investigation at this point. The consulship of the two Gemini, Rufus and Rubellius, is given alone by the Liberian Chronicler of A.D. 354, by Sulpicius Severus (A.D. 400), and by St. Augustine; and, together with the fifteenth year of Tiberius,' by Prosper, Lactantius, and (Pseudo-)Tertullian, as well as (in all probability) by the Acta Pilati. The second date, the fifteenth year of Tiberius,' is given alone by Clement of Alexandria, and by Julius Africanus as represented in the Latin of Jerome; while the same author, in the Greek of Eusebius, is made to say the 'sixteenth year,' and this latter is also the date given by the pseudo-Cyprianic paschal computation of A.D. 243. And, finally, the year A.D. 29 is supported by Hippolytus, and by the legend of Abgarus of Edessa.' Now, of these statements, those that refer to the sixteenth year' may very possibly be a combination of St. Luke iii. 1 (the Baptist's ministry in the fifteenth year), with the doubtless erroneous belief (with which we shall have presently to deal) that the ministry of Christ lasted no more than a year. But of the authors quoted this only applies to Pseudo-Cyprian, for it seems more likely that the text of Africanus should have been altered from fifteenth' to 'sixteenth' than vice versa, just because the fifteenth year for the Passion seems prima facie to contradict St. Luke, for no one reckoned the ministry at less than a year, and therefore it appeared that the Crucifixion must be postponed to the sixteenth. We have, then, several early and important writers who, in apparent contradiction to the Gospel text, and therefore, of course, following some theory or tradition independent of it, agree on the fifteenth year. Can we say why? It might be possible to maintain that the starting-point was the belief, certainly expressed by some fathers (eg. by Hippolytus and Clement of Alexandria), that Christ was only thirty years of age when He suffered, and that the Passion falls, therefore, in the same year as the Baptism (Luke iii. 23 compared with iii. 1). But we are inclined to adopt the converse as more probable, and take the 'fifteenth year' for the Passion as the starting-point for the 'thirty years;' and the fifteenth year, in turn, is probably The references are mainly as before, adding Sulp. Sev. Hist. Sac. ii. 40; Prosper, Chronicle; Hieron. in Dan. ix. 27 (ed. Bened. iii. 1110); Eus. Dem. Ev. viii. (ed. Paris, A.D. 1628, pp. 389-90); Abgar in Eus. H. E. i. 13 (year of the Greeks 340 September A.D. 28 to September A.D. 29). Cf. for most of them, Browne, Ordo Sæclorum, p. 73 sq. derived from—at any rate is in full agreement with the mention of the consulship of the two Gemini in A.D. 29. For the years of Tiberius might be variously reckoned. He succeeded Augustus in the August of A.D. 14, and his fifteenth year will run from August A.D. 28 to August A.D. 29, so that on the strict reckoning the Passover which belongs to the fifteenth year, will be that of A.D. 29 in the consulship of the Gemini. But the method of adjustment between the imperial and consular years (which were the same as our own, from January 1 to December 31) might perhaps be the complete assimilation of the former to the latter, so that a fresh year of Tiberius would begin on January 1, A.D. 15. But would such a year be called the first or the second? would the fraction of the previous year count as a whole one, or be neglected altogether? In favour of the first alternative might be urged the parallel instance of the emperors, from Trajan onwards, who started a fresh year of tribunician power on the annual day of the inauguration of the ordinary tribunes, so that any previous fraction of a year of office counted as a whole one. In favour of the latter would be the practice of a chronographer like Eusebius who, in constructing a continuous chronology, could not, for instance, reckon A.D. 14 both as the fifty-sixth of Augustus and the first of Tiberius, and therefore postpones the first of Tiberius to A.D. 15. On these lines the fifteenth year, while strictly from August A.D. 28 to August A.D. 29, might be reckoned as equivalent simply either to A.D. 28 or to A.D. 29; and thus the consuls of A.D. 29 might be considered those of the fifteenth or of the sixteenth year. So far, then, we are led to state tentatively the hypothesis that the chronological notices of the Passion in the earliest writers rest ultimately on the mention of the consulship of the two Gemini, and we can see no reason at all why this may not have been actually handed down by tradition from the Apostolic age. The year was one of those which we saw to be astronomically possible, and the conclusion is strengthened by the coincidence of the mention of the true day for Nisan 14 of that year in Epiphanius' manuscripts of the Acts of Pilate. But of course the whole is no more than an hypothesis to be tested by its agreement or disagreement with the best results attainable from other lines of inquiry. Explanations which have seemed at the moment less probable in themselves, may acquire a high degree of likelihood from comparison with further evidence; and it would be conceivable that we might have in the end to conclude that all refer1 Lightfoot's Ignatius (ed. 1), ii. 398. 1 |