OP THE NATIVITY WAS 8 B.C. 



213 



as A.D. 32, that having been the time God appointed for the 

 Crucifixion, as spoken by His servant Daniel. 



He wished before he sat down, to draw their attention to Sir 

 Robert Anderson's book (eighth edition) called The Coming Prince. 

 Therein they would find the calculation set forth in full. (See pages 

 121 to 129.) 



One thing was certain, and that was that in this case they were 

 dealing with fulfilled prophecy, which could therefore be tested by 

 history, and no date which would not fit, and fall in precisely with 

 God^s predicted date, could by any human possibility be the true date of 

 the Crucifixion, and he had shown by quotations from the paper 

 read, that it would be rather too late to affirm that this did not in 

 any way affect the date of the Nativity or the date of the beginning 

 of Christ's Ministry. 



Sir Egbert Anderson said that he had been much interested 

 by his friend Colonel Mackinlay's paper, but could not accept his 

 conclusions. At the Bar, and more recently in a position where he 

 had to deal still more closely with evidence, he often found proof 

 that it was easy to make out a clear case in support of a false issue 

 if some salient fact were left out. And Colonel Mackinlay had 

 left out the fact recorded in Luke iii that our Lord's Ministry 

 began in the fifteenth year of Tiberius. Sir W. M. Ramsay, whom he 

 had freely quoted, began life under the influence of the Tiibingen 

 school of criticism, and was thus led to give up the New Testament. 

 But in the course of exploration work in Asia Minor he discovered that 

 the Acts of the Apostles was the most accurate of ancient histories, 

 and he was thus led to write a book in defence of the Gospel of Luke. 

 Now even if that Gospel were treated merely as history the fact 

 remained that the chronological statement of the 3rd chapter is 

 one of the most definite in history, sacred or profane. It specifies 

 the fifteenth year of Tiberius, and names seven diff'erent personages 

 as holding certain specified offices in that year; and each of them in 

 fact held the post assigned to him in the year in question. He was 

 well aware of the nightmare system of exegesis, by which Scripture 

 was always made to mean something diff'erent from what it says. 

 But he had no patience with it. They were told that the fifteenth 

 year meant really the twelfth year of his reign. But no historical 

 statement, no coin, had ever been found in which the reign of Tiberius 

 was reckoned in any but one way, and to suppose that the 



