nacles, and Encænia, of the first twelve months, and the Passover, and Pentecost, of the last six,) our Lord could not once have been up to Jerusalem. It will be said, however, that this conclusion depends on the assumption that the feast mentioned, John v. 1. is a feast of the Passoverand not any other feast; the truth of which assumption may be rendered presumptively certain as follows.

I. The absence of the Greek article in speaking of this feast, unless its presence would infallibly have denoted the Passover, proves nothing at all; but leaves the question as open as before. The truth is that, as the Jewish calendar contained at least three feasts, all of equal antiquity, and of equal authority, the article could not stand xar' ¿§oxǹv before one, any more than before the rest, unless that one had come, in the lapse of time, to be placed, for some reason or other, at the head of the rest; a circumstance of distinction which, as I have shewn elsewheret, from Josephus and from other authorities, (and which St. John's expression, directly after—ἦν δὲ ἐγγὺς ἡ ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων, ἡ Σκηνοπηγία—contributes critically to confirm,) might have held good of the feast of Tabernacles, but could not of the feast of the Passover.

II. If the feast, John v. 1. was not the next Passover to ii. 13. the Passover, vi. 4. must have been so; and the feast, v. 1. must have been some feast between the two; and, consequently, some feast in the first year of our Saviour's ministry; after the Passover, belonging to that year, but before the Passover, at the beginning of the next: that is, it must have been either the Pentecost, or the feast of Tabernacles, or the Encænia, within the first twelve months of his ministry. It could not have been the Pentecost; for, as I have shewn in the last Dissertation, our Lord's return into Galilee out of Judæa, was just before the arrival of this feast. Nor could it have been the Encænia; for the Encania fell out in the depth of winter, at which time no such assemblage of sick and infirm persons, as was supposed at the time of this feast, could have been found about the

pool of Bethesda. Nor could it have been the feast of Tabernacles; because at that feast of Tabernacles, and in the first year of his ministry, our Lord was engaged upon the circuit of Galilee: and it is a general argument why it could have been no feast in the first year of our Lord's ministry whatever, that, as I have in part observed already, the strain of the reflections, from v. 17. to the end, which were then delivered, would be incompatible with such a supposition. The ministry of our Saviour, and, consequently, the trial of the Jews, must have been going on at least for one year, before the futurity of his rejection—and the consequent fact of their infidelity-could be so far certain, as to admit of their being argued with, as we find them argued with on this occasion.

III. There is, in each of the three former Evangelists", an account of a miracle performed on the sabbath day, and in the presence of our Lord's enemies, and followed by a specific design, on their part, to put its author to death: there is also, in each of these Gospels, immediately before this account, an instance of another supposed breach of the sabbath, which, though it is not said to have been followed by the same resolution, is yet seen to have been followed by the same kind of offence, and at the commission of the same kind of crime, which afterwards produced that. It is manifest, then, that, at this particular juncture, the Scribes and Pharisees had not merely made up their minds to reject our Lord, but also to reject him on this score-his systematic breach and contempt, as they construed this part of his conduct, of one of their most sacred laws, the obligation of the Sabbatic rest-and, with this feeling, they were not only watching his actions, and putting the most sinister interpretation upon them, but prepared, with the first favourable opportunity, to go even to the length of effecting his death. Their present conduct is the more remarkable, because the very first miracle which any of these Evangelists relate the miracle performed on the demoniac in the

"Matt. xii. 9-14. Mark iii. 1-6. Luke vi. 6—11.

synagogue at Capernaum —and another, the same day, in the cure of Peter's wife's mother-were both wrought upon the sabbath; the former, publicly; and the latter, not in secret; yet were both performed without any such effect. It took some time, then, either to convince our Lord's enemies of his non-observance, in this respect, of their traditional law, or to confirm them in their unbelief-so as to except against this circumstance in his demeanour particularly. This instance, therefore, may be justly considered not merely the first instance of any such exception, to be found in the three first Gospels, but also the first which could be found there; the first, which it came within their plan to have recorded, until they notice the present. It is an instance, consequently, perfectly distinct from John v. 1-16. not simply as taking place on a different scene of things somewhere in Galilee, and, certainly, not in Jerusalem-but also as taking place at a different juncture of time; and, therefore, since that in St. John was the first instance of its kind, this in the other Evangelists was later than that in which case, how aptly, and yet how critically, the former comes in to prepare for, and illustrate the latter, is too obvious to require any proof.

:

Now, in St. Luke's account of the transaction immediately prior to this, which was the walking through the cornfields on the sabbath day, a term is employed to denote the sabbath in question, which, it will be shewn hereafter, was intended to denote the first regular sabbath after the sixteenth of the Jewish Nisan, and, consequently, either in, or directly after, the Paschal week. Either in, or directly after this week, then, our Saviour was travelling on a sabbath; and he performed the ensuing miracle, as I shall also shew with a degree of probability amounting almost to a certainty, in the neighbourhood of the Lake of Galileeand, perhaps, at Capernaum-on the next sabbath, or the next but one; which miracle was followed on that account by the design against his life.

What, then, is a more obvious conclusion than that, at

the former of these times, he had been up to Jerusalem; and, at the latter, was got back to Capernaum? If so, we have evidence at Luke vi. 1. of an attendance at a Passover, which the course of events from that time forward in the same Evangelist, (as well as in St. Matthew and in St. Mark,) compared with St. John, proves to have been at least one year before the Passover, John vi. 4. when the miracle of feeding took place. No reasonable person, then, will hesitate to conclude, that the attendance at Jerusalem, John v. 1. which must have been prior to the Passover, vi. 4. as well as to the miracle, Luke vi. 6—11. must have been the attendance at this Passover itself: the account of which, if we admit the fact, St. Luke and his predecessors had manifestly omitted, and the circumstances of which, notwithstanding this omission, were yet necessary to explain both Luke vi. 1—5. and vi. 6-11. which they all three do record. These are coincidences which in my opinion do as plainly and as strongly determine the time and occasion of the visit to Jerusalem, at John v. 1. to have been the time and occasion of the attendance at the second Passover, as if the statement of both had been totidem verbis prefixed to the account*.

* Among the arguments intended to prove that the feast, indefinitely mentioned John v. I. could not be a Passover, none, perhaps, is more confidently put forward, and none is in reality more weak and inconclusive, than the following-that the events, which are recorded in the fifth chapter of St. John, are not sufficient to have occupied a year, and another Passover is mentioned directly after at vi. 4. It would have been strange, indeed, if they had been intended to occupy a year—since it must be self-evident that very possibly they did not occupy a single day. But this argument proceeds upon the supposition that St. John's Gospel is entire and complete in itself; and that it neither has, nor was intended to have, any supplemental relation to the rest: a supposition, which is purely precarious, and not more precarious than contrary to the matter of fact. The truth of the supplemental relation of this one Gospel in particular is among the few positions, which happily do not admit of a question-and while this

We may conclude, then, with as much certainty as the nature of the case admits of, that for the whole of eighteen months, before the last feast of Tabernacles, our Lord had never been present at Jerusalem; and with regard to any attendance there, between the commencement of that period, and the time of the Passover, John ii. 13. the conclusion, thus established, demonstrates of itself that he was under no necessity of attending; and, therefore, might not have attended. Prudential reasons chiefly seem to have produced his absence after the Passover, John v. 1. and from that time forward; but any adequate motive, such as the commencement and prosecution of his ministry exclusively in Galilee, might have produced the same absence before. The feast of Pentecost, in the first year of his ministry, is certainly out of the question; and enough has been said to render it probable that both the feast of Tabernacles, and the Encænia, in the same year, must be excepted likewise. I shall therefore make an end of this review of the ministry in Judæa, with one or two observations more, by way of corollary.

I. We have confirmed the presumption, otherwise established as it was, of the regular order, and the supplementary relation, of St. John's Gospel; for we have shewn

is the case, it is not to be considered whether St. John's Gospel, per se, between v. 1. and vi. 4. supplies matter sufficient to have occupied a year, but whether St. Matthew's, St. Mark's, and St. Luke's, in that portion of their Gospels respectively, the true place of which is between these extremes in St. John's, can presumptively be shewn to have done so. And upon this point there is so little room for doubt, that the affirmative may be confidently asserted. The interval in question between John v. 1. and John vi. 4. is in fact our Lord's second year-and with respect to that year, as it was the fullest of incident itself, so its incidents have been the most minutely related, of any. From its beginning, by the attendance at this Passover, to its ending, by the miracle of the five thousand, there is no part of it which was unemployednor the mode of whose employment it is not possible clearly to ascertain.