86 CHRONOLOG was very jejune for the Christian period—and if so, Eusebius had to find a year as best he could.1 (j8) Felix, on his return to Rome, was prosecuted by the Jews for misgovernment, hut was acquitted through the influence of his brother Pallas. Pallas had been minister and favourite of Claudius, but was removed from office in the winter following Nero’s accession, 54-55. Felix must therefore have been tried at the very beginning of Nero’s reign. But this argument would make Felix’s recall—if Festus came in summer, as Acts xxv. 1, xxvii. 1, 9, seem to prove—fall actually under Claudius. And, in fact, it would be a mistake to look upon Pallas’s retirement as a disgrace. He stipulated that no inquiry should be made into his conduct in office, and was left for another seven years unmolested in the enjoyment of the fortune he had amassed. There is, therefore, every likelihood that he retained for some years enough influence to shield his brother. Of these arguments, then, the first, so far as it is valid, is an argument for the summer, not of a.d. 55 or 56, but of a.d. 57 as that of the recall, while the second will apply to any of the earlier years of Nero’s reign. In the result, then, the arguments brought forward in favour of each extreme fail to prove their case, but at the same time prove something against the opposite view. Thus the point that Josephus catalogues the events of Felix’s procuratorship under Nero cannot be pressed to bring down Felix’s tenure as far as 60 or 61, but it does seem to exclude as early a termination as 56, or even 57. Conversely, the influence of Pallas at court need not be terminated by his ceasing to be minister early in 55; but it would have been overshadowed not later than the year 60 by the influence of Poppma, who in the summer of that year2 enabled the Jews to win their cause in the matter of the Temple wall, and would certainly have supported them against Felix. Thus the choice again appears to lie between the years 58 and 59 for the recall of Felix and arrival of Festus. Identical results follow from another line of argument which, though somewhat precarious, was unduly neglected before Ramsay recalled attention to it, namely, the data of St Paul’s stay at Philippi and Troas in Acts xx. 6, 7. Being anxious to arrive at Jerusalem for Pentecost, the apostle left Philippi, it may be presumed, on the first day after the days of unleavened bread, took four days, according to our method of reckoning, on the voyage to Troas, and stayed there six days, leaving on a Monday. He arrived, therefore, at Troas on a Tuesday, and left Philippi on the preceding Friday, Nisan 22. Nisan 14, therefore, fell on Thursday This would be possible in a.d. 56 (Thursday, 18th March) or a.d. 57 (Thursday, 7th April), but hardly in either a.d. 55 or 58. As this journey of St Paul immediately preceded his arrest, and his imprisonment under Felix lasted two years, 58 and 59 again appear as the possible alternatives for Felix’s recall. If St Paul was arrested in 56 or 57, and appealed to Caesar on the arrival of Festus in 58 or 59, then, as he reached Rome in the early part of the year following, and remained there a prisoner for two full years, we are brought down to the early spring of either 61 or 62 for the close of the period recorded in the Acts. That after these two years he was released and visited Spain in the west, and in the east Ephesus, Macedonia, Crete, Troas, Miletus, and perhaps Achaia and Epirus, is probable, in 1 Dr C. Erbes {Texte und Untersuchungen, new series, iv. 1) attempts to interpret the evidence of Eusebius in favour of the later date for Festus as follows : Eusebius’s date for Festus is to be found in Nero 1, by striking a mean between the Armenian, Claudius 12, and the Latin, Nero 2; it is really to be understood as reckoned, not by years of Nero, but by years of Agrippa; and as Eusebius erroneously antedated Agrippa’s reign by five years, commencing it with A.D. 45 instead of a.d. 50, his date for Festus is five years too early also, and should be moved to Nero 6, a.d. 59-60. The whole of this theory appears to the present writer to be a gigantic mare’s nest: see Journal of 2Theological Studies, October 1901, pp. 120-23. This date appears to be satisfactorily established by Ramsay, « A Second Fixed Point in the Pauline Chronology,” Expositor, August 1900.
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BIBLICAL
the one case, from the evidence of Romans xv. 28, Clem. ad Cor. v., and the Muratorian canon, and, in the other, from the Pastoral Epistles. These j ourneys certainly cannot have occupied less than two years, and it is more natural to allow three for them, which takes us down to 64-65. Early evidence is unanimous in pointing to St Peter and St Paul as victims of the persecution of Nero (Clem. ad Cor. v. vi., Dionysius of Corinth ap. Eus. II. E. ii. 25, &c., combined with what we know from Tacitus of the course of the persecution, and from Gaius of Rome, ap. Eus. ii. 25, of the burial-places of the two apostles); and tradition clearly distinguished the fierce outbreak at Rome that followed on the fire of the city in July 64 from any permanent disabilities of the Christians in the eye of the law which the persecution may have initiated. There is therefore no reason at all to doubt that both apostles were martyred in 64-65, and the date serves as a confirmation of the chronology adopted above of the imprisonment, release, and subsequent journeys of St Paul. Investigation, then, of that part of the book of Acts which follows the death of Agrippa, recorded in chap. xii.—i.e., of that part of the apostolic age which, follows the year 44—has shown that apparent difficulties can be to a large extent set aside, and that there is nowhere room between a.d. 44 and 64 for doubt extending to more than a single year. The first missionary journey may have begun in 47 or 48 ; the arrival of Festus may have taken place in the summer of 58 or of 59 ; the two years of the Roman imprisonment recorded in the last chapter of Acts may have ended in the spring of 61 or 62 ; and the dates which fall in between these extremes are liable to the same variation. The present writer leans to the earlier alternative in each case, 47, 58, 61, but he willingly concedes that the evidence, as he understands it, is not inconsistent with the later alternative. But if the events of a.d. 44-64 can thus be fixed with a fair approximation to certainty, it is unfortunately otherwise with the events of a.d. 29-44. Here we are dependent (i.) on general indications given in the Acts; (ii.) on the evidence of the Epistle to the Galatians, which, though in appearance more precise, can be and is interpreted in very different ways. (i.) The book of Acts is divided, by general summaries from time to time inserted in the narrative, into six periods: i. 1-vi. 7; vi. 8-ix. 31 ; ix. 32-xii. 24; xii. 25xvi. 5; xvi. 6-xix. 20; xix. 21-xxviii. 31. Of these the three last extend respectively from the death of Herod to the start for Europe in the second missionary journey (a.d. 44 to the spring of 50 [51]), from the start for Europe to the end of the long stay at Ephesus (a.d. 50 [51] to the spring of a.d. 55 [56]), and from the departure from Ephesus to the end of the two years’ captivity at Rome (a.d. 55 [56] to the beginning of A.D. 61 [62]). It will be seen that these periods are of more or less the same length, namely, six (or seven) years, five years, six years. There is therefore some slight presumption that the three earlier periods, which together cover about fifteen years, were intended by so artistic a writer as St Luke to mark each some similar lapse of time. If that were so, the preaching of the apostles at Jerusalem and organization of the Church at the capital —the preaching of the seven and the extension of the Church all over Palestine—the extension of the Church to Antioch, and the commencement of St Paul’s work—might each occupy five years more or less, that is to say, roughly, a.d. 29-34, 34-39, 39-44. The conversion of St Paul, which falls within the second period, would on this arrangement fall somewhere between five and ten years after the Crucifixion. Such conclusions are, however, of course general in the extreme. (ii.) A nearer attempt to date at least the chronology of
