102 



DISCOVERY 



Quirinius must be placed not earlier than .',-2 B.C. 

 I say the " first " governorship, because Quirinius 

 actually governed Syria twice, the second time being 

 in A.D. 6, when the census mentioned in Acts v. 37 

 was taken in Palestine. What, then (so it was argued), 

 would be more natural than that Luke, using a tradition 

 that Christ was bom during the taking of a census, while 

 Herod was alive and Quirinius was governing Syria, 

 should have confused the census of a.d. 6 with an earlier 

 group of events, and produced a clumsy combination 

 of two different occurrences, a census under Quirinius 

 and a census in the lifetime of Herod ? So it appeared 

 to Mommsen. 



The effect of the new evidence has been to bring out 

 the true character of Ouirinius's first governorship of 

 Syria, and to prove that this governorship must have 

 been earlier than 6 B.C., and in all probability covered 

 the 3'ears 10-7 B.C. 



Return now to the tribes on the north-west frontier 

 of the double province of Syria and Cilicia. During the 

 troubled years which intervened between Pompey's 

 organisation of the East and the establishment of the 

 Roman Empire (about 30 B.C.), the Romans attempted 

 to control this region by means of a series of client 

 kings, who were legally vassals of Rome, and were em- 

 ployed to keep the peace, to educate outlying districts 

 in the ways of civilised life, and to train them for 

 eventual absorption in the Roman Empire. One of 

 the most efficient of these client kings was a Galatian 

 called Amyntas, who at the beginning of the empire 

 controlled a large part of the centre of Asia Minor, 

 lying between the Roman territories in the west and 

 north-west and those in the south-east. The main 

 task of Amyntas was to free the road across Asia Minor, 

 and to protect the central plains, from the inroads of 

 the tribes in the southern mountains, and he attacked 

 the tribes among their strongholds, had some successes, 

 but was killed by one of the tribes, the Homanades, 

 in 25 B.C. 



Augustus now incorporated the kingdom of Amyntas 

 in the Roman Empire, and undertook direct responsi- 

 bility for the policing of the southern mountains. The 

 literary tradition contains vague references to a war, 

 fought by Quirinius, which brought peace at last to this 

 turbulent region. The inscriptions, whose discovery 

 extends from 1886 to 1914, illustrate the character of 

 the war, and show that it was over in 6 b.c. 



We have seen that Quirinius was consul in 12 B.C. 

 He was a man of humble birth, to whom high office did 

 not come in the ordinary course. Nor was the com- 

 mand of the Syrian legions held, in the ordinary vi'ay, 

 immediately after the consulship. Quirinius must 

 have been made consul expressly in order to qualify 

 him for the command of the Syrian legions in the 

 impending war, and his governorship of Syria had the 



character of a special mission. This is why we find a 

 second governor in Syria at the same date : a governor 

 of the ordinary type was required for the routine civil 

 government of the province while Quirinius led the 

 army on a distant, arduous, and lengthy campaign. 



That the war was successful is proved by two pieces 

 of evidence. An inscription now in the Lateran 

 Museum of Christian Antiquities mentions that Qui- 

 rinius received the Roman equivalent of an Earldom 

 for the subjugation of a people — the name of the 

 people was on a part of the inscription now broken 

 away, but there is no doubt that it was the Homa- 

 nades, who killed Amyntas, and who were specially 

 aimed at in the campaign of Quirinius. A series of 

 inscriptions, scattered throughout Pisidia, show that 

 in 6 B.C. a number of garrison cities were being founded, 

 guarding all the key positions in Pisidia and the country 

 of the Homanades. These garrison cities were joined 

 by a series of military roads provided with milestones, 

 which give us the date. 



Now it is obvious — especially to those who know 

 the forbidding character of the Pisidian country- — that 

 those garrison cities could not have been founded, nor 

 those roads built and measured by milestones, until 

 the country was completely subdued. Quirinius's 

 engineers could no more have constructed this elaborate 

 system of roads — one of them through the x'ery heart 

 of the Homanadensian country — before the complete 

 subjugation of the mountain tribes than General \\'ade 

 could have built his fortresses and roads in the Scottish 

 Highlands before Culloden. In point of fact the 

 Pisidian mountaineers gave no further trouble to the 

 Roman Empire for centuries. 



The most recently discovered inscriptions actually 

 mention the name of Quirinius, and show that he held 

 an honorary magistracy in Pisidian Antioch — the 

 G.H.Q. of the campaign — along with the governor of 

 Galatia, in whose province the campaign was fought. 

 This honorary magistracy — whose actual duties were 

 carried out by an officer in Quirinius's army — had the 

 effect of establishing a military dictatorship in Antioch, 

 and was thus an essential step in the campaign. An 

 argument too intricate to repeat here dates this magis- 

 tracy about 9-7, and probably in 8 B.C. It may be 

 regarded as proved beyond dispute by these inscriptions 

 that Quirinius was fighting in Pisidia during at least 

 two of the years 10-7, and that he was fighting there 

 during his first governorship of Syria. 



While Quirinius was fighting in Pisidia, Syria was 

 being administered by an official called Sentius Satur- 

 ninus, who held office in 8-7 B.C. Various ancient 

 authorities mention Satuminus as the Syrian governor 

 of that period, and Tertullian, a Christian who wrote 

 about A.D. 200, and had access to Roman official sources, 

 tacitly corrects Luke when he says that Christ was bom 



