Lysanias of Abilene

One of the six rulers Luke names to date the beginning of John’s preaching — the most precise chronological sentence in the Gospels, fixing the year by an emperor, a governor, three tetrarchs and two high priests at once. Lysanias is the tetrarch of **Abilene**, a small territory in the Anti-Lebanon north-west of Damascus, and he is named nowhere else in Scripture and nowhere else in this archive’s sources.

**A difficulty worth recording.** Josephus knows a Lysanias of that region who was executed by Mark Antony around 36 BC — some sixty-five years before the date Luke is fixing. If Luke means that man, he is badly wrong; if he means a later ruler of the same dynasty and name, the two are simply different people. Which of those is the case is not something this archive has verified: the question turns on inscriptional evidence from the region that has **not been examined in the course of this work**, and the record says so rather than resolving it on recollection.

What can be said is that the name is dynastic, that petty tetrarchies in the Anti-Lebanon changed hands repeatedly under Roman arrangement, and that Luke’s other five synchronisms in the same verse are all independently attested.