Omar N.

Only Luke reports that Jesus was born during a Roman census. As Luke describes it, the census had three features. - 1. Its purpose was to count everyone in the Roman Empire (2:1). - 2. It took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria (2:2) and during the reign of King Herod: John is born in the days of Herod (1 :5) and Mary's pregnancy is linked to Elizabeth's (1 :36, 43). - 3. It required people to travel to the cities of their ancestors to be counted (2:3-5). Luke's information about the census is confused and mistaken on all three points. Let's take them up one at a time. - 1. There is no evidence of any empire-wide census under Augustus and no evidence that Romans ever tried to count everyone in their empire in one census. - 2. Quirinius began governing Syria in 6 CE. He oversaw one (and only one) census, which included Judea (where Bethlehem is located) but not Galilee (where Nazareth is located), since Galilee was not in his jurisdiction. - 3. This census took place in 6 or 7 CE, ten years after the death of Herod the Great, in whose reign Luke situates the births of John and Jesus (1 :5). Luke refers to this census again in Acts 5:37, where he correctly associates it with a rebellion led by Judas the Galilean. However, Luke mistakenly places this 6 CE census and rebellion after another uprising led by someone named Theudas, which actually occurred around 45 CE. Remember, he is writing at least ninety years after Jesus' birth. A mistake of ten years or so is easy enough to make from that far away. But there may be a specific reason for his mistake. Both the death of Herod in 4 BCE (which Matthew places shortly after the birth of Jesus) and Quirinius' census ten years later sparked Jewish uprisings. Both uprisings provoked Roman military responses, the first involving widespread death and destruction in Galilee, the second ending in the imposition of direct Roman rule and taxation in Judea. We know that Quirinius was not in Syria before 6 CE, and there is no evidence that he conducted more than one census. The "first census" does not mean the first of two under Quirinius, but the first Roman census in the area. Other defenders of Luke's historical accuracy point out that the Greek word for "first" can sometimes mean "prior," which would make 2:2 refer to a census prior to Quirinius'. That meaning, however, violates the Greek grammar of 2:2. Besides that, it does not fit Luke's context, in which the census is a Roman one, ordered by the emperor (2:1). But Judea was not under direct Roman rule until Quirinius took it over and so any census prior to his term as governor would not have been a Roman one. - There is no evidence that any Roman census required people to travel to their ancestral cities to be counted. Romans counted people where they lived because that is where they were taxed. People in small villages might be sent to a nearby town that served as an administrative center (rather like a rural county seat), but that is not what Luke envisions. The process described by Luke would create major disruptions in farming and business, the very activities that generated Roman taxes. It would miss those who had immigrated from distant lands or who did not know exactly where their ancestors had lived. Besides, many ancestral towns had been destroyed in the centuries of warfare and not rebuilt. Where would people with roots in those vanished places go? Finally, Quirinius' census was for Judea and did not include Galilee, so it makes little sense for Joseph to travel from Galilee to be counted in a jurisdiction where he did not reside. Luke relied on faulty information or he invented the census to create a setting for his narrative. In either case, there is no historical basis for Luke's explanation of how Jesus happened to be born in Bethlehem.

...for, and in conversation with real networks of tradition. Read works from scholars such as Keener, Blomberg, etc.

As per usual, Curzon makes claims far stronger than most critical scholars would make once the evidence and the genre of the sources are examined seriously.🧵