tween the principal ones, though they might serve to distribute and distinguish the order of intermediate events, they would not be so useful for establishing such comprehensive divisions of the whole length of our Saviour's ministry, as its integral periods or years. To sum up, therefore, the results of the preceding survey.

Two evidences of harvest time, and two of spring time-each in a distinct year-which we have discovered—even if they belonged to four successive years, would yet imply an intermediate duration, from first to last, of three complete years at least. The method, therefore, which we have adopted to ascertain the length of our Saviour's ministry, has enabled us to determine its minimum, but not its maximum; viz. that it could not have lasted less than three years' time, though it might have lasted more. But upon this particular question the determination of such a minimum is equivalent to that of a maximum. No harmonist, or commentator, I conceive, would see reason to extend the duration of our Lord's ministry beyond this period of three years, even though the necessity of the case might oblige him to admit that it must have lasted so long. And when we consider that the opinion which restricts its duration to the term of a single year, or of one year, and a few months of a second; is one which comes recommended by a prescription of very remote antiquity, and by the sanction of modern harmonists and commentators of great celebrity; if the above considerations did no more than expose the falsehood of this particular notion, in a manner so plain and intelligible to every one's capacity, as I trust they have now done, they would still render an essential service to the cause of truth in general, and to the business of a gospel harmonist in particular.

I began with an admonition to the reader, that I proposed to confine myself solely to one class of the indications of time, which the gospel history might furnish. That he may see, however, what other arguments the same history supplies, conspiring with the above in the results to which they lead, he may refer to the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the fifteenth, the nineteenth, the twenty-first, the twenty-third, the thirtieth, the thirty-first, and the thirty-fourth of my Dissertations: to which the present must be considered supplementary. As these various modes of resolving the same problem, which is the duration of our Saviour's ministry, are entirely independent of each other, and yet agree precisely in the same result; it becomes a natural inference that they coincide in one result, only because they coincide with the truth. On any other supposition but that, the chances of a coincidence between them would be precarious indeed.

APPENDIX.

DISSERTATION X.

On the time of the imprisonment of John the Baptist, and of the marriage of Herod and Herodias.

BOTH the abovementioned facts are attested by Josephus; but in conjunction with another event, the war between Herod and Aretas, which arose out of the marriage in question. The place of this war in the Antiquities is undoubtedly towards the very close of the reign of Tiberius. For Tiberius, having heard of the defeat of Herod, had written to Vitellius the president of Syria, to give him orders to punish Aretas; and Vitellius was on his way to execute these orders when he received in Jerusalem at the time of some feast, (which the context demonstrates to have been the Pentecost of U. C. 790.) the news of the death of Tiberius; which death took place on the 16th of March in that year. These particulars are attested in

general by Philo ".

It would seem to follow from this representation, that the imprisonment of John, and the marriage of Herod and Herodias, must have coincided with the last year of the reign of Tiberius. It may be proved, however, even from the testimony of Josephus, that this was not the case.

First; the construction which the nation at large put upon the defeat of Herod, as a judgment for the death of John, proves nothing upon the point in

a xviii. v. I.

De Virtutibus.

b Ibid. 3.

c Operum ii. 580. 1.20-25: 588. l. 10—20. d Ant. Jud. xviii. v. 2.

question. Between the twelfth and the twenty-third of Tiberius, until this very rupture with Aretas, there was no war, nor misfortune of any kind, affecting either Herod or any other of his family, on which such a construction could have been put. This then was the first incident of the kind.

The defeat of Herod is ascribed to the treachery of certain exiles belonging to the tetrarchy of his brother Philip, who were serving at that time in his army e. Upon the death of Philip, in the first half of U. C. 787. his tetrarchy was annexed to Syria'. He was alive then at the time of this battle and still in possession of his tetrarchy. The battle therefore could not have been fought before the first half of U. C. 787. at the latest.

John the Baptist was both imprisoned and put to death in Machærus : Macharus therefore both at his imprisonment, and at his death, must have been in the possession of Herod. But when the daughter of Aretas made her escape, she fled to Machærus, Tóte πατρὶ αὐτῆς ὑποτελῆ . Between the time then of the imprisonment and the death of John, and the time of this escape, Macharus had passed out of the hands of Herod into the hands of Aretas. Nor was this an improbable event; for it stood upon the confines of their territories respectively; and even before the time of this flight, they were involved in a dispute, relating to their separate jurisdictions, in the course of which forces had been levied on either side *.

It is evident from the Gospel account, that, at the time of the death of the Baptist, the daughter of Herodias was living with her mother; and was consequently still unmarried. Josephus bears witness that Herodias, by her first husband Herod Mapiáμμns, had a daughter called Salome; who was not yet married at the time of her mother's separation from her father, but was married after it; first to her father's brother, Philip the tetrarch; and again, upon his death, to her cousin Aristobulus, son of Herod of Chalcis her mother's brother. Now Salome could not have been married to Philip after the twentieth of Tiberius; but she might be before it. Consequently, her mother could not have been separated from her first husband after the same year; but she might have been before it.

The Gospel accounts also imply that this daughter was not merely unmarried, but still a young girl, at the time of the death of John. Both St. Matthew and St. Mark call her kopáσtov-the same term which each of them applies to the daughter of Jairus; who was certainly not more than twelve years of age. The age of puberty in females, according to the Jewish law, was twelve years and a day, or nominally thirteen. years; and the same age at Rome, according to Dio, was also fixed at twelvek. I think, then, that this term would not be applied to any one after thirteen or fourteen years of age. age. From fourteen to sixteen was a common age of marriage, both in Greece, and in Rome, and in Judæa*. Let us suppose, then, that

* Γρῆνν ἔγημε Φιλίνος, ὅτ ̓ ἦν νέος· ἡνίκα πρέσβυς | δωδεκέτιν· Παφίῃ δ ̓ ὤριος οὐδέποτε. Anthologia, ii. 175. Leonidæ Alexandrini vii. Τὰν στάλαν ἐχάραξε

1 Ant. Jud. xviii. v. 4.

Βιάνωρ, οὐκ ἐπὶ ματρὶ, ͵ οὐδ ̓ ἐπὶ τῷ | r γενέτᾳ, πότμον ὀφειλόμενον· [ παρθενικᾷ δ ̓ ἐπὶ παιδί. κατέστενε δ', οὐχ Ὑμεναίῳ, ἀλλ ̓ ̓Αΐδᾳ νύμφαν δωδεκέτιν κατάγων. Ibid. 182.

k liv. 16.