Himself during His incarnation, and sits now at the right hand of power as the Head of His church and the Lord of all that is named in heaven and on earth, until visibly and in glory, according to the promise, He returns again at the restitution of all things. § 13.1. In regard to the =year of the birth= and the =year of the death= of the Redeemer no absolutely certain result can now be attained. The usual Christian chronology constructed by Dionysius Exiguus in the sixth century, first employed by the Venerable Bede, and brought into official use by Charlemagne, assumes the year 754 A.U.C. as the date of Christ’s birth, which is evidently wrong, since, in A.D. 750 or 751, Herod the Great was already dead. Zumpt takes the seventh, others the third, fourth, or fifth year before our era. The length of Christ’s public ministry was fixed by many Church Fathers, in accordance with Isaiah lxi. 1, 2, and Luke iv. 19, at one year, and it was consequently assumed that Christ was crucified when thirty years of age (Luke iii. 21). The synoptists indeed speak only of one passover, the last, during Christ’s ministry; but John (ii. 13; vi. 4; xii. 1) speaks of three, and also besides (v. 1) of a ἑορτὴ τῶν Ἰουδαίων. § 13.2. Among the non-biblical =witnesses to Christ= the earliest is probably a Syrian Epistle of =Mara= to his son Serapion, written, according to Cureton (“_Spicileg. Syriacum_.” Lond., 1855), about A.D. 73. The father, highly cultured in Greek wisdom but dissatisfied with it, writes from exile words of comfort and exhortation to his son, in which he places Christ alongside of Socrates and Pythagoras, and honours him as the wise King, by whose death the Jews had brought upon themselves the swift overthrow of their kingdom, who would, however, although slain, live for ever in the new land which He has given. To this period also belongs the witness of the Jewish historian =Josephus=, which in its probably genuine portions praises Jesus as a worker of miracles and teacher of wisdom, and testifies to His death on the cross under Pilate, as well as the founding of the church in His name. Distinctly and wholly spurious is the =Correspondence of Christ with Abgar=, Prince of Edessa, who entreats Christ to come to Edessa to heal him and is comforted of the Lord by the sending of one of His disciples after His ascension. This document was first communicated by Eusebius (_Hist. Eccl._, i. 13) from the Archives of Edessa in a literal translation from the Syriac, and is also to be found in the Syrian book _Doctrina Addæi_ (§ 32, 6). Of a similar kind are the apocryphal =Acta Pilati=, as well the heathen form which has perished (§ 22, 7), as the Christian form which is still extant (§ 32, 4). An =Epistle of Lentulus,= pretending to be from a Roman resident in Palestine on terms of intimacy with Pilate, containing a