as we contend, is precisely the inaccuracy which has produced the difficulty in St. Luke. At any rate, it appears from the form of the expression, that he had two taxings or enrolments in contemplation. And if Cyrenius had been sent upon this business into Judea before he became governor of Syria (against which supposition there is no proof, but rather external evidence of an enrolment going on about this time under some person or other 1), then the census, on all hands acknowledged to have been made by him in the beginning of his government, would form a second, so as to occasion the other to be called the first. II. Another chronological objection arises upon a date assigned in the beginning of the third chapter of of St. Luke 42. "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar,"―Jesus began to be about thirty years of age: for, supposing Jesus to have been born, as St. Matthew and St. Luke, also himself, relate, in the time of Herod, he must, according to the dates given in Josephus and by the Roman historians, have been at least thirty-one years of age in the fifteenth year of Tiberius. If he was born, as St. Matthew's narrative intimates, one or two years before Herod's death, he would have been thirty-two or thirty-three years old at that time. This is the difficulty: the solution turns upon an alteration in the construction of the Greek. St. Luke's 41 Josephus (Antiq, xvii. c. 2. sect. 6) has this remarkable passage: "When therefore the whole Jewish nation took an oath to be faithful to Cæsar, and the interests of the king." This transaction corresponds in the course of the history with the time of Christ's birth. What is called a census, and which we render taxing, was delivering upon oath an account of their property. This might be accompanied with an oath of fidelity, or might be mistaken by Josephus for it. 42 Lardner, part i. vol. ii. p. 768. words in the original are allowed, by the general opinion of learned men, to signify, not "that Jesus began to be about thirty years of age," but "that he was about thirty years of age when he began his ministry." This construction being admitted, the adverb "about" gives us all the latitude we want, and more, especially when applied, as it is in the present instance, to a decimal number; for such numbers, even without this qualifying addition, are often used in a laxer sense than is here contended for 43. III. Acts, v. 36. "For before these days rose up Theudas, boasting himself to be somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves; who was slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered and brought to nought. وو Josephus has preserved the account of an impostor of the name of Theudas, who created some disturbances, and was slain; but according to the date assigned to this man's appearance (in which, however, it is very possible that Josephus may have been mistaken **), it must have been, at the least, seven years after Gamaliel's speech, of which this text is a part, was delivered. It has been replied to the objection 5, that there might be two impostors of this name: and it has been observed, in order to give a general probability to the solution, that the same thing appears to have hap 43 Livy, speaking of the peace which the conduct of Romulus had procured to the state during the whole reign of his successor (Numa), has these words *:- "Ab illo enim profectis viribus datis tantum valuit, ut in quadraginta deinde annos, tutam pacem, haberet :" yet afterwards in the same chapter, "Romulus," he says, 66 septem et triginta Numa tres et quadraginta." regnavit annos. 44 Michealis's Introduction to the New Testament (Marsh's translation), vol. i. p. 61. 45 Lardner, part i. vol. ii. p. 922. * Liv. Hist. c. i. sect. 16. pened in other instances of the same kind. It is proved from Josephus, that there were not fewer than four persons of the name of Simon within forty years, and not fewer than three of the name of Judas within ten years, who were all leaders of insurrections: and it is likewise recorded by this historian, that, upon the death of Herod the Great (which agrees very well with the time of the commotion referred to by Gamaliel, and with his manner of stating that time, "before these days"), there were innumerable disturbances in Judea 46. Archbishop Usher was of opinion, that one of the three Judases abovementioned was Gamaliel's Theudas 47; and that with a less variation of the name than we actually find in the Gospels, where one of the twelve apostles is called, by Luke, Judas; and by Mark, Thaddeus 8. Origen, however he came at his information, appears to have believed that there was an impostor of the name of Theudas before the nativity of Christ 49. 48 IV. Matt. xxiii. 34. "Wherefore, behold I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes; and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city; that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar." There is a Zacharias, whose death is related in the second book of Chronicles 50, in a manner which , per 47 Annals, p. 797. 50 "And the Spirit of God came upon Zechariah, the son of Jehoiada the priest, which stood above the people, and said unto them, Thus saith God, Why transgress ye the commandments of the Lord, fectly supports our Saviour's allusion. But this Zacharias was the son of Jehoiada. There is also Zacharias the prophet; who was the son of Barachiah, and is so described in the superscription of his prophecy, but of whose death we have no account. I have little doubt but that the first Zacharias was the person spoken of by our Saviour; and that the name of the father has been since added or changed by some one, who took it from the title of the prophecy, which happened to be better known to him than the history in the Chronicles. There is likewise a Zacharias, the son of Baruch, related by Josephus to have been slain in the temple a few years before the destruction of Jerusalem. It has been insinuated that the words put into our Saviour's mouth contain a reference to this transaction, and were composed by some writer, who either confounded the time of the transaction with our Saviour's age, or inadvertently overlooked the anachronism. Now suppose it to have been so; suppose these words to have been suggested by the transaction related in Josephus, and to have been falsely ascribed to Christ; and observe what extraordinary coincidences (accidentally as it must in that case have been) attend the forger's mistake. First, that we have a Zacharias in the book of Chronicles, whose death and the manner of it corresponds with the allusion. Secondly, that although the name of this person's father be erroneously put down in the Gospel, yet we that ye cannot prosper? Because ye have forsaken the Lord, he hath also forsaken you. And they conspired against him, and stoned him with stones, at the commandment of the king, in the court of the house of the Lord. 2 Chron. xxiv. 20, 21. have a way of accounting for the error, by showing another Zacharias in the Jewish Scriptures, much better known than the former, whose patronymic was actually that which appears in the text. Every one, who thinks upon the subject, will find these to be circumstances which could not have met together in a mistake which did not proceed from the circumstances themselves. I have noticed, I think, all the difficulties of this kind. They are few: some of them admit of a clear, others of a probable solution. The reader will compare them with the number, the variety, the closeness, and the satisfactoriness, of the instances which are to be set against them; and he will remember the scantiness, in many cases, of our intelligence, and that difficulties always attend imperfect information. CHAP. VII. Undesigned Coincidences. BETWEEN the letters which bear the name of St. Paul in our collection, and his history in the Acts of the Apostles, there exist many notes of correspondency. The simple perusal of the writings is sufficient to prove that neither the history was taken from the letters, nor the letters from the history. And the undesignedness of the agreements (which undesignedness is gathered from their latency, their minuteness, their obliquity, the suitableness of the circumstances in which they consist to the places in which those circumstances occur, and the circuitous references by which they are traced out) demonstrates that they have not been produced by meditation, or by any fraudulent |