Not less doubtful is the matter of the definition of the terminus ad quem of the seventy שׁבעים, and of the chronological reckoning of the whole period. As for the terminus ad quem, a sharply defined factum must form the conclusion of the sixty-ninth week; for at this point the public appearance of Christ, His being anointed with the Holy Ghost, is named as the end of the prophecy. If this factum occurred, according to Luk 3:1, in the year of Rome 782, the twentieth year of Artaxerxes - i.e., the year 455 b.c., according to the usual chronology - would be the year 299 A.U.C.; if we add to that sixty-nine weeks = 483 years, then it gives the year 782 A.U.C. In the middle of this last week, beginning with the appearance of the Anointed, occurred His death, while the confirming of the covenant extends through the whole of it. With reference to the death of Christ, the prophecy and its fulfilment closely agree, since that event took place three and a half years after His baptism. But the terminus ad quem of the confirming of the covenant, as one more or less moveable, is capable of no definite chronological determination. It is sufficient to remark, that in the first years after the death of Christ the ἐκλογή of the Old Covenant people was gathered together, and then the message of Christ was brought also to the heathen, so that the prophet might rightly represent the salvation as both subjectively and objectively consummated at the end of the seventy weeks for the covenant people, of whom alone he speaks (Hgst. pp. 163f., 180). Thus also Auberlen, who, however, places the end of the seventy weeks in the factum of the stoning of Stephen, with which the Jews pressed, shook down, and made full to the overflowing the measure of their sins, already filled by the murder of the Messias; so that now the period of grace yet given to them after the work of Christ had come to an end, and the judgment fell upon Israel.