omputation of the Gospel
chronology they derived from the notices in St Luke as interpreted by
themselves. At the commencement of His ministry, so they maintained, He
had completed His twenty-ninth and was entering upon His thirtieth year,
and His ministry itself did not extend beyond a twelve-month, 'the
acceptable _year_ of the Lord' foretold by the prophet. Irenaeus
expresses his astonishment that persons professing to understand the
deep things of God should have overlooked the commonest facts of the
evangelical narrative, and points to the three passovers recorded in St
John's Gospel during the term of our Lord's ministry. Independently of
the chronology of the Fourth Gospel, Irenaeus has an _a priori_ reason
of his own, why the Saviour must have lived more than thirty years. He
came to sanctify every period of life--infancy, childhood, youth,
declining age. It was therefore necessary that He should have passed the
turn of middle life. From thirty to forty, he argues, a man is still
reckoned young (_juvenis_).

But from his fortieth and fiftieth year he is already declining
into older age, which was the case with our Lord when he taught, as
the Gospel and all the elders who associated with John the disciple
of the Lord in Asia testify that John delivered this account. For
he remained with them till the times of Trajan. But some of them
saw not only John, but other Apostles also, and heard these same
things from their lips, and bear testimony to such an account.

Irenaeus then goes on to argue that the same may be inferred from the
language of our Lord's Jewish opponents, who asked: 'Thou art not yet
fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?' This, he maintains, could
not properly be said of one who was only thirty years of age, and must
imply that the person so addressed had passed his fortieth year at
least, and probably that he was not far off his fiftieth.

On this passage it must be remarked that the Valentinian chronology was
derived from a _prima facie_ interpretation of the Synoptic narrative;
whereas the Asiatic reckoning, which Irenaeus maintains, was, or might
well have been, founded on the Fourth Gospel, but could not possibly
have been elicited from the first three Gospels independently of the
fourth.

On this question generally I have spoken already in a former paper
[247:1]. Though it seems probable that our Lord's ministry was confined
to three years, yet the