Numerous parallels to the Golden Rule of Matt. 7, 12 and Luke 6, 31 have been found in various writers. Most of these are Jewish or Christian, but some of them are far remote in time and place from Judaism and Christianity. Sometimes the precept is put in the positive form and sometimes in the negative, more frequently in the latter. A Syriac parallel, particularly interesting because it combines the two forms, seems to have been hitherto overlooked. It occurs in the philosophical dialogue entitled The Book of the Laws of the Countries, and is as follows: “For there are two commandments set before us, which are meet and right for free-will: one, that we should depart from everything that is evil and we hate to have done to ourselves; and the other, that we should do whatever is good and we love, and are pleased to have it done so also to ourselves.”

“So the whole number of generations from Abraham to David is fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah fourteen generations.” Matt. 1, 17.

In the late Professor Camden Cobern's useful book entitled The New Archaeological Discoveries and their Bearing upon the New Testament a section is devoted to Tatian's Harmony of the Gospels, and on pages 205–207 a list of its remarkable readings is given, according to the Arabic text published by Ciasca. The list is misleading, for many of the supposed examples of variation from, the standard text are not such in reality. Hamlyn Hill's English translation, on which Cobern relied, is not always correct, and the Arabic translator himself was sometimes unfortunate in his rendering of an ambiguous Syriac word or phrase.

Καὶ ἐλθὼν ἐκεῖνος ἐλέγξει τὸν κόσμον περὶ ἁμαρτίας καὶ περὶ δικαιοσύνης καὶ περὶ κρίσεως˙ περὶ ἁμαρτίας μέν, ὅτι οὐ πιστεύουσιν εἰς ἐμέ˙ περὶ δικαιοσύνης δέ, ὅτι πρὸς τὸν πατέρα ὑπάγω καὶ οὐκέτι θεωρεῖτέ με˙ περὶ δὲ κρίσεως, ὃτι ὁ ἄρχων τοῦ κόσμου τούτου κέκριται

In my “Style and Literary Method of Luke” I have argued that the attempt to confirm by means of so-called technical medical terms the tradition that Luke and Acts were written by a physician has failed to establish the presence in these writings of words that were not used freely also by non-medical writers. Indeed, the attempt was bound to fail for the reason that unlike the present medical profession the ancient physician scarcely had a technical vocabulary at all. As Professor G. F. Moore there pointed out (pp. 53 f.), while modern medical terminology is largely made up of foreign words, the scientific words of the Greeks were native to the living language and congenial for ordinary use.

In a note on Matt. 1, 17 in the January number of this Review, I remarked that to squeeze the fourteen generations from Abraham to David into a period of four hundred and ninety years it was necessary to ignore the biblical chronology, which demands nearly twice as long. Professor Louis Ginzberg has suggested another possible explanation. In Yebamot 64b, Rabbah (b. Abuha), a Babylonian teacher of the third century, observes that it was in the days of David that the years of a man's life were first reduced to seventy (Psalm 90, 10). This inference from the Psalm might have been drawn at any time; and if it was current in the circle from which the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew comes, the author may not have applied his thirty-five year scheme to the generations before David.