By Water & Blood

Panarion 51, Chapter 16: Chronology from baptism to the first sign

First, when he was baptized according to the Egyptians on Athyr the twelfth—as we said—six days before the Ides of November; that is, sixty days before the full day of the Epiphanies, which is the day of his birth according to the flesh,

as the testimony of the Gospel according to Luke has it, that “Jesus was beginning to be about thirty years old, being the son, as was supposed, of Joseph.” For in truth he was twenty-nine years and ten months when he came to the baptism—thirty years, but not complete; therefore it says “beginning to be about thirty years old”—thereafter he was driven out into the wilderness.

From here, then, the forty days of the temptation appear in sequence, and the two of the temptation toward Galilee—that is, into Nazareth and about its borders—and one day when he came to John,

when John said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” and the next day when “again John was standing, and two of his disciples, and looking at Jesus walking he says, ‘Behold, the Christ, the Lamb of God.’” Then it says, “The two disciples heard him and followed Jesus.”

And this was the eighteenth day after the temptation, as we said before, but the first from John when those around Andrew followed Jesus and stayed with him that day (it was about the tenth hour), when Andrew also, finding his own brother Simon, brought him to Jesus.

Then the Gospel says, “On the following day he wanted to go out into Galilee, and he finds Philip, and the Lord says to him, ‘Follow me.’” And this was the nineteenth day after the temptation, as the sequence of the Gospel has it—the calling of Philip and of Nathanael.

And thereafter on the third day, it says, there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, after the two days already mentioned from John. When, then, the twenty days are added to the forty of the temptation, two months are completed, which joined to the ten months complete a year—that is, the fullness of thirty years from the Lord’s birth—

and Christ is found to have done the first sign of the change of water into wine at the end of the thirtieth year, as you may grasp if you attend carefully to the sequences of the Gospels.

Thereafter from this first sign he both works the other signs and teaches the preaching, the marvelous and ineffable loving-kindness of his Gospel wonder-working being shown to all human beings—as I have often been compelled to say because of the ignorance of the deceived who contradict what has been set out in sequence.