Luke 3:1 Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee… In this year, which fell between August, A.D. 28, and August, A.D. 29, the Roman empire lay under the shadow of the darkest years of the tyrant, now an old man of seventy-one. Among those alive at the time, and remembered since, for good or for evil, the elder Pliny — afterwards, when a Roman admiral, killed at the first eruption, in historical times, of Mount Vesuvius — was a child of four; Vespasian, hereafter, with his son Titus, to crush Jerusalem, was full of the ambitions and dreams of a youth of nineteen; Caligula, one day to horrify the world by the spectacle of an insane despot at the head of the empire, was a lad of sixteen; Claudius, one day to be emperor, was a poor lame trembling man of thirty-eight; and among the marriages of the year was that of the daughter of the ill-fated Germanicus, from which, nine years later, was born Nero. Pontius Pilate had been two years procurator of Samaria, Judaea, and Idumea; Herod Antipas had been reigning for about thirty-two years over Galilee and Samaria, and was now a man of about fifty; and Philip, his brother, about the same age, and of the same standing as ruler, was still tetrarch of the rest of the land beyond the Jordan, living a quiet life, usefully and worthily. (Dr. C. Geikie.) Parallel Verses KJV: Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, |
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