But so far from finding any _agreement_ in the opinions of the Christian Fathers and commentators on a subject which, in Newton's view, was so momentous, we only find ourselves weltering in a chaos of uncertainties and contradictions. Thus Eusebius records the attempt of some early Christian commentators to treat the _last_ of the seventy weeks as representing, not, like all the rest, seven years, but seventy years, in order to bring down the prophecy to the days of Trajan! Neither Jewish nor Christian exegetes have ever been able to come to the least agreement between themselves or with one another as to the beginning or end--the _terminus a quo_ or the _terminus ad quem_--with reference to which the seventy weeks are to be reckoned. The Christians naturally made great efforts to make the seventy weeks end with the Crucifixion. But Julius Africanus[190] († A.D. 232), beginning with the twentieth year of Artaxerxes (Neh. ii. 1-9, B.C. 444), gets only four hundred and seventy-five to the Crucifixion, and to escape the difficulty makes the years _lunar_ years.[191]
Hippolytus[192] separates the last week from all the rest, and relegates it to the days of Antichrist and the end of the world. Eusebius himself refers "the anointed one" to the line of Jewish high priests, separates the last week from the others, ends it with the fourth year after the Crucifixion, and refers the ceasing of the sacrifice (Deut. ix. 27) to the rejection of Jewish sacrifices by God after the death of Christ. Apollinaris makes the seventy weeks begin with the birth of Christ, and argues that Elijah and Antichrist were to appear A.D. 490! None of these views found general acceptance.[193] Not one of them was sanctioned by Church authority. Every one, as Jerome says, argued in this direction or that _pro captu ingenii sui_. The climax of arbitrariness is reached by Keil--the last prominent defender of the so-called "orthodoxy" of criticism--when he makes the weeks not such commonplace things as "earthly chronological weeks," but Divine, symbolic, and therefore unknown and unascertainable periods. And are we to be told that it is on such fantastic, self-contradictory, and mutually refuting calculations that "the Christian religion is all but founded"? Thank God, the assertion is entirely wild.