OXFORD, PRINTED BY J. VINCENT, FOR THOMAS TEGG AND SON, LONDON. TEGG AND CO. DUBLIN. AND J. & S. A. TEGG, SYDNEY & HOBART TOWN. 1839. PREFACE. THE Second Part of this History, which I now offer to the public, completes the whole of what I intend. My first purpose was to have concluded it at the birth of our Saviour, and have left what thenceforth ensues to the ecclesiastical historian of the Christian church, to whom it properly belongs. But since what is to connect the Old Testament with the New, will there best end where the dispensation of the Old Testament endeth, and that of the New begins; and since that was brought to pass in the death and resurrection of our Saviour, I have drawn down this history thereto. For then the Jewish church was abolished, and the Christian erected in its stead; then the law of Moses ceased, and that of Christ and his Gospel commenced, and therein the accomplishment of all the prophecies of the Old Testament relating to the person of the Messiah, which began at his birth, was fully perfected. And therefore here I have thought it properest to fix the conclusion of this work. But, to avoid encroaching too far upon the Christian ecclesiastical historian, I have from the time of Christ's birth treated but in a very brief manner of what afterwards ensued to his death; and have passed over the whole time of the public ministration both of him and his forerunner. For all things that were done therein being fully related in the four Gospels, which are, or ought to be, in every one's hands, barely to repeat them here would be needless, and all that can be done beyond a bare repetition, is either to methodise them according to the order of time, or to explain them by way of interpretation; but the former belonging to the harmonist, and the latter to the commentator, they are both out of the province I have undertaken. I having, in a Preface to the First Part of this History, recommended to the reader, for his geographical guidance in the reading of it, the maps of Cellarius, the bookseller hath, in the third edition. of that part, inserted into it as many maps out of him as may be useful for this purpose. And there hath also been added, in the same edition, a map of the temple of Jerusalem, which had been drawn and published by me in a single sheet some years before. All these may serve for the Second Part as well as for the First. Perchance there may be some, who will think the history which I give of the Jewish cycle of eighty-four years, and of the other cycles, which, as well as that, have been made use of for the fixing of the time of Easter, to be too long a digression from that which is the main subject of this work. And therefore I think it necessary to acquaint the reader, that I have been led hereto by these following inducements :-First, To give him an account of the controversies which happened among Christians about the time of celebrating |