In the Fifteenth Year of Tiberius

He has stood by that sacked corn on a Thursday for a long time and he is not usually short of a word.

The man who said it is not a bad man. He is a good hand and he came to his mother's funeral and stood at the back in a suit that did not fit and left before the food.

And he said it while he was loading, the way people say things while their hands are busy: that as far as he could tell somebody cooked the whole thing up somewhere in the Middle Ages, monks probably, and it got out of hand.

He was not being cruel. He was saying what he thought, which is more than most.

And the man by the sacked corn went blank.

Not angry. Blank. He knew, the way you know the weather, that it was wrong. He has held this since he was nineteen years old and he has read more than anybody in that yard would guess.

And he could not produce one single fact. Not one date, not one name, nothing he could put down on that tailgate.

He said something about how he did not think that was right, and the other man said fair enough, and they talked about the price of wire.

He has been at it ever since. Not brooding. Working at it the way he works at anything: quietly, in the truck, in the evenings, wondering what exactly a man is supposed to have in his pocket for a moment like that, and whether the fact that he had nothing means something about him.

Luke opens his account by naming a year

Let me put the blank where it belongs before anything else, because it has been quietly read as a failure for months.

Going blank is what happens to a man whose knowledge is in his bones rather than in his mouth. You did not lack conviction in that yard. You lacked a sentence, and those are different things, and one of them is fixable in about four minutes.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: what you hold does not begin where he thinks it begins, and there is one page you can carry that settles the date question. That is not my kind reading of a Thursday, it is what stands written at the opening of Luke's third chapter, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that page was in the yard with you.

Read how the man starts. It is the least devotional opening in the book and that is the point.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.Luke 3:1-2

Six rulers. A regnal year. Two high priests, by name.

Nobody writes like that who is making something up in a monastery a thousand years later. That is how a man writes who expects to be checked, and who is placing his account inside a public record that other people already have.

And every one of those names is a real person who turns up outside these pages. Pilate governed. Tiberius reigned. Caiaphas was high priest. That is not a matter of faith, it is a matter of ordinary history, and it is the sort of thing a man can look up in an afternoon.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a course of study: you were holding something that is dated and located, because the written word opens its own account by fixing it to six named rulers and a year, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the record reads like a record.

Now the honest part, because this house does not overclaim and you would spot it if it did.

That opening proves the writer meant to be taken as writing history. It does not prove the history is right. A man can name six rulers correctly and still be wrong about what happened in front of them, and if the man at the feed store said that back to you, he would have a point and you should say so.

What it does do is close the Middle Ages entirely. Whatever else is arguable, that is not, and it is not arguable in a way that requires anybody to take your word for it.