¹ Adversus Haereses 2.22.6, responding to the Valentinian claim that the thirty aeons of their pleroma were expressed by the years of Christ.

² See Brown, R. E., The Gospel according to John (New York: Doubleday, 1966) 360Google Scholar on this reading of Chrysostom's; also Schnackenburg, R., The Gospel according to St John 2 (London: Burns & Oates, 1980) 223Google Scholar on the variant reading ‘has Abraham seen Thee?’ Either reading implies contemporaneity.

³ Delebecque, E., ‘Jésus contemporain d'Abraham’, Revue Biblique 93 (1986) 85–92Google Scholar, suggests rather a mocking ‘have you seen Abraham in the last fifty years?’ The battery of corroborative citations does not persuade me that this rendering is plausible, and in any case it still fails to explain why the Pharisees did not say ‘forty’.

⁴ Brown, Gospel of John, 360 and Schnackenburg, St John, 223 have little to add to the observations mentioned in n. 2 above; Bultmann, R., The Gospel of John (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971) 327–8Google Scholar deplores the literalistic pedantry of the Pharisees, while Barrett, C. K. (London: SPCK, 1978)Google Scholar, proposes to apply this remark to other commentators who do not take ‘fifty’ merely as a ‘round number’. I have consulted a number of other commentaries, but discovered no original hypothesis.

⁵ Kokkinos, N. in Vardaman, J. and Yamauchi, E., ed., Chronos, Kairos, Christos (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1989)Google Scholar; Fox, R. Lane, The Unauthorised Version (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) 34–5.Google Scholar

⁶ Kokkinos, Chronos maintains the date of 12 BC for the Nativity, not only from John 2.20–1, but from observations of Halley's comet. Lane Fox, Unauthorised Version, 35 is rightly sceptical. See further Ogg, G., ‘The Age of Jesus When He Taught’, NTS 5 (1958) 291–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar and especially p. 293 for the presence of the same reasoning in the Pseudo-Cyprianic De Montibus Sina et Sion.

⁷ Lane Fox, Unauthorised Version, 207–9.

⁸ Matt 2.1ff.; Luke 1.5,1.26. Pace Derrett, J. D. M., ‘Further Light on the Narratives of the Nativity’, Novum Testamentum 17 (1976) 83Google Scholar, the usage of Josephus and Matthew does not suggest that Luke's audience would have understood the name Herod to refer to Archelaus.

⁹ Luke 3.1. Ogg, ‘Age of Jesus’, 291–3 discusses the possibility that Luke 3.23 might mean that Jesus was thirty years old at the beginning of his ministry.

¹⁰ That is, Paul would be converted in 30 AD, he would visit Jerusalem for the second time after fourteen years (taking Gal 2.1 to refer to the time since his conversion), the date of 44 AD coinciding with the death of Herod Agrippa as described in Acts 11, and with the second visit of Paul to Jerusalem mentioned in this chapter. So early a date for Paul's conversion makes a problem of 2 Cor 11.32; on the other hand, Ramsay's theory, which I have followed here in making Acts 11 the record of Paul's second visit, does not entail (a) that Luke inserted a suppositious visit into the Acts, or (b) that Paul in Gal 2 has misrepresented the judgment of the Council of 51 AD described in Acts 15, or (c) that Peter ignored that Council in his conduct at Antioch, as Paul reports it at Gal 2.11ff. The relation of Paul and Acts is studied at length, though in my view not without prejudice, by Lüdemann, G., Paul: Apostle of Christ (London: SPCK, 1984).Google Scholar

¹¹ Luke 2.1ff., on which see Lane Fox, Unauthorised Version, 27–31; Creed, J. M., The Gospel according to Luke (London: Macmillan, 1942) 28–32Google Scholar. Wiseman, T. P., NTS 33 (1987) 479–870Google Scholar maintains the possibility of a general census in the time of Quirinius; but that does not enable us to reconcile the dates. Wiseman suggests that Luke confused the census of 8 BC with that of 6 AD, but at the former date Galilee was not part of the Roman dominions. P. Benoit, in his article ‘Quirinius’, Supplément au Dictionnaire de la Bible, 9.693–720, considers, but does not endorse, the argument that Luke's evidence is to be preferred to that of Josephus (see esp. 707–13).

¹² See Kokkinos, Chronos, 133ff.; Lane Fox, Unauthorised Version, 32–4; McNeile, A. H., The Gospel According to Matthew (London: Macmillan, 1961) 211–13.Google Scholar

¹³ The chief difficulty is that the marriage of Herod Antipas to Herodias must be later than 33/4, the date of the death of her former husband Philip. See Josephus Antiquities 18.109. But Josephus may be wrong in supposing that Philip was already dead at the time of the marriage; and the war which Aretas undertook to avenge the repudiation of his daughter on this occasion, though firmly dated to 36 AD, need not have been the direct or immediate consequence of its pretext.

¹⁴ See Mark 9.13; John 3.30. The notion of a forerunner of the Messiah, if this appeared in Jewish sources, would perhaps not be so important as the sense that it was wrong for John to continue his inadequate ministry after that of Jesus had become manifest.

¹⁵ So explicitly Lane Fox, Unauthorised Version, 34: ‘people over fifty were no more likely to see Abraham than anyone else’.

¹⁶ Leviticus 25 passim. Morgenstern, J., ‘The Calendar of the Book of Jubilees’, Vetus Testamentum 5 (1955) 74–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar suggests that the Holiness Code is intended to restore the discarded ‘pentecontal calendar’, in keeping with the decline from a mercantile to a second agricultural age.

¹⁷ On the origin and purpose of the calendar see Jaubert, A., ‘Le calendrier des Jubilés et la secte de Qumran’, Vetus Testamentum 3 (1953) 250–64Google Scholar; Morgenstern, ‘Calendar’, 34–76; Baumgarten, J. M., ‘Some Problems of the Jubilees Calendar in Current Research’, Vetus Testamentum 32 (1982) 485–9Google Scholar. On the currency of the text in Christian circles see Schürer, E., The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ 3 (revised G. Vermes, F. Millar and M. Goodman; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986) 315–16.Google Scholar

¹⁸ See Schürer, Jewish People, 311.

¹⁹ Translation Charles, R. H., rev. Rabin, C., in Sparks, H. F. D., The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University, 1984) 10Google Scholar. This translation is used throughout. The word ‘Jubilee’ in this document refers to a term of forty-nine years; but for the Jews' objection in the Fourth Gospel it is enough that the completion of a Jubilee requires a man to enter his fiftieth year.

²⁰ On the week and its vicissitudes throughout Middle Eastern history see Morgenstern, ‘Calendar’, 35–48.

²¹ See Finkelstein, L., ‘The Book of Jubilees and the Rabbinic Halaka’, HTR 16 (1923) 39–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² Lowe, M., ‘Who Were the ‘ΊΟΥΔΑΙΟΙ?’, Novum Testamentum 18 (1976) 101–30Google Scholar has shown that the ‘Jews’ are usually adherents of the Jewish religion living in Judaea; by extension, therefore, the term will always denote the Pharisees of Jerusalem, and it is they who in the other gospels play the part allotted to the ‘Jews’ by the Fourth Evangelist.

²³ On the time of ministry, frequently related to the ‘time and times and half a time’ of Daniel 12.7 and Revelation 12.14, see Ogg, ‘Age of Jesus’, 293–4, who is perhaps unduly sceptical. For another thesis according a central place to the number seven in this Gospel see Dodd, C. H., The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1960) 289–389Google Scholar; Fortna, G., The Gospel of Signs (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1970).Google Scholar

²⁴ See Schürer, Jewish People, 309 n. 1 for a bibliography of publications.

²⁵ For a recent study see Ashton, J., Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Oxford University, 1991) 205–37.Google Scholar

²⁶ See Grélot, P., ‘Jean 8.56 et Jubilés 16.16–29’, Revue de Qumran 13 (1988/9) 621–8.Google Scholar

²⁷ For a recent discussion of the significance of Abraham in this passage, see Wieser, P. E., Die Abrahamvorstellungen im Neuen Testament (Bern/Frankfurt: Lang, 1987) 128–47Google Scholar. Such a passage may have encouraged Paul to identify the promised ‘seed’ with a single heir at Gal 3.15ff.

²⁸ See Schnackenburg, St John, 221–3.

²⁹ Translation R. H. Charles, as in n. 19 above. Grélot, ‘Jean 8.56’, 627, notes that the festival instituted by the rejoicing Abraham is the Feast of Tabernacles, which may also be the occasion of the dialogue in John (see 7.2).

³⁰ Perhaps these words imply, with reference to Exodus 3.15 and 6.3, that this was the name of Christ when he met Abraham at Mamre and elsewhere, although the patriarch did not know it.

³¹ See Puech, E., ‘Notes sur le Manuscrit de XIQ Melkisedeq’, Revue de Qumran 12 (1985–7) 483–513.Google Scholar

³² See Bereshith Rabba 25d (on Abel's life-span) and Morgenstern, ‘Calendar’, 53.

³³ On the ‘aeon’ see Dodd, Interpretation, 144–51. Note that a controversy about the Sabbath immediately succeeds the claim to be older than Abraham (John 9.Iff.), just as one excited by another breach of the holiday is terminated in the previous chapter (John 7.24).

³⁴ I am grateful for the encouragement of Robin Lane Fox, and for the comments of the editor and a referee of New Testament Studies.