Note 147 — Chapter X · SYRIA AND THE LAND OF THE NABATAEANS.

The city of Damascus voluntarily submitted under the last Seleucids about the time of the dictatorship of Sulla to the king of the Nabataeans at the time, presumably the Aretas, with whom Scaurus fought (Josephus, Arch. xiii. 15). The coins with the legend βασιλέως Ἀρέτου φιλέλληνος (Eckhel, iii. 330; Luynes, Rev. de Numism. 1858, p. 311), were perhaps struck in Damascus, when this was dependent on the Nabataeans; the reference of the number of the year on one of them is not indeed certain, but points, it may be presumed, to the last period of the Roman republic. Probably this dependence of the city on the Nabataean kings subsisted so long as there were such kings. From the fact that the city struck coins with the heads of the Roman emperors, there follows doubtless its dependence on Rome and therewith its self-administration, but not its non-dependence on the Roman vassal-prince; such protectorates assumed shapes so various that these arrangements might well be compatible with each other. The continuance of the Nabataean rule is attested partly by the circumstance that the ethnarch of king Aretas in Damascus wished to have the Apostle Paul arrested, as the latter writes in the 2d Epistle to the Corinthians, xi. 32, partly by the recently-established fact (see following note) that the rule of the Nabataeans to the north-east of Damascus was still continuing under Trajan.—Those who start, on the other hand, from the view that, if Aretas ruled in Damascus, the city could not be Roman, have attempted in various ways to fix the chronology of that event in the life of Paul. They have thought of the complication between Aretas and the Roman government in the last years of Tiberius; but from the course which this took it is not probable that it brought about a permanent change in the state of possession of Aretas. Melchior de Vogué (Mélanges d’arch. orientale, app. p. 33) has pointed out that between Tiberius and Nero—more precisely, between the years 33 and 62 (Saulcy, Num. de la terre sainte, p. 36)—there are no imperial coins of Damascus, and has placed the rule of the Nabataeans there in this interval, on the assumption that the emperor Gaius showed his favour to the Arabian as to so many others of the vassal-princes, and invested him with Damascus. But such interruptions of coinage are of frequent occurrence, and require no such profound explanation. The attempt to find a chronological basis for the history of Paul’s life in the sway of the Nabataean king at Damascus, and generally to define the time of Paul’s abode in this city, must probably be abandoned. If we may so far trust the representation—in any case considerably shifted—of the event in Acts ix., Paul went to Damascus before his conversion, in order to continue there the persecution of the Christians in which Stephen had perished, and then, when on his conversion he took part on the contrary in Damascus for the Christians, the Jews there resolved to put him to death, in which case it must therefore be presupposed that the officials of Aretas, like Pilate, allowed free course to the persecution of heretics by the Jews. Moreover, it follows from the trustworthy statements of the Epistle to the Galatians, that the conversion took place at Damascus (for the ὑπέστρεψα shows this), and Paul went from thence to Arabia; further, that he came three years after his conversion for the first time, and seventeen years after it for the second time, to Jerusalem, in accordance with which the apocryphal accounts of the Book of Acts as to his Jerusalem-journeys are to be corrected (Zeller, Apostelgesch. p. 216). But we cannot determine exactly either the time of the death of Stephen, much less the time intervening between this and the flight of the converted Paul from Damascus, or the interval between his second journey to Jerusalem and the composition of the Galatian letter, or the year of that composition itself.