VI
(p. [142])
On the Date for Christmas in Hippolytus
Considering the uncertainty as to the day of our Lord’s birth shown by Clement of Alexandria, and the reserve which Irenæus and Tertullian maintain on the same point, it is surprising to find the most precise data given for its determination by a writer very little posterior to those just mentioned. In the commentary of Hippolytus on Dan. iv. 23 (in Bratke’s ed., 19), we read in the text discovered in 1885; “The first Advent of our Lord in the flesh, when He was born in Bethlehem, happened on the eighth day before the calends of January, on a Wednesday, in the forty-second year of Augustus, in the year 5500, reckoning from Adam. He suffered in His thirty-third year, on the eighth day before the calends of April (25th March), on a Friday, in the eighteenth year of Tiberius, when Rufus and Rubellius were consuls.”[860]
Not merely the astonishing minuteness of the data, but also the circumstance that this passage is to be found in a shorter form in a fragment, long well known to scholars, preserved in the Chigi Library in Rome, coupled with the fact that ancient ecclesiastical writers quote from it the year of world alone,[861] must give rise to doubts concerning the longer form of the passage in itself, as well as concerning the separate data of which it is composed.
If we turn our attention first to these separate data, we find the names of the consuls wrongly given; their names are Fufius and Rubellius, not Rufus and Rubellius. Mistakes in the names of consuls are certainly not rare in Eastern writers, but in the case of a man like Hippolytus, who lived in Rome, such a mistake is very astonishing, since he could easily have found out the right names. Next, according to the authentic Hippolytus, our Lord’s life lasted only thirty-one years, and not thirty-three; this appears from the passage in the so-called Liber Generationis representing in a Latin translation part of the “Chronicle” which, according to the inscription on his statue, Hippolytus had composed.[862] Again, the eighteenth year of Tiberius is also wrong. The forty-second year of Augustus and the two week-days may be correct (see Comm. Dan., 4, 9; in Bratke 8), for the latter appear also in the same connection in the inscription on the statue. Wednesday found acceptance as the day of Christ’s birth owing to the Messias being called in Malachy iv. 2, “the Sun of Justice,” from which it was inferred that He must have been born on the same day of the week as that on which the visible sun had been created (Gen. i. 19).
But, moreover, the days of the week have been interpolated into the text, since they do not fit in with the sequence of thought but rather disturb it. The aim of Hippolytus was here to calm the Christians agitated by the persecution of Severus; many went so far as to think that the last day was close at hand, and Hippolytus opposed himself to this alarm by declaring God had created the world in six days, with God a thousand years are as one day (Ps. lxxxix. 4), and thus the world would last six thousand years. Until the birth of Christ only five thousand five hundred years had passed, and so the end of the world was not to be expected yet. In such a train of thought, what place is there for days of the week and consulates? The late origin of the passage is also betrayed by the parallel grouping of the data given, for elaborate attempts of this kind were popular in the Middle Ages, but not in primitive times. Accordingly only the year 5500 of the world, and perhaps also the forty-second year of Augustus, belong to the original form of the passage in Hippolytus, all the rest having being added by a later hand.[863]