Noted passage:

Some historians at least have noticed what they perceive to be problems with this text in the Gospel of Luke and even as far back as the 17th century.

Problems with the Census:

I: History does not otherwise record a general Imperial census in the time of Augustus. Now you might have noticed Luke doesn’t say anything about the Roman Empire here but he does use the term and according to the late biblical scholar JosephFitzmyer means inhabited Earth and this way of speaking was often used with hyperbole in the official rhetoric of decrees and inscriptions for the Roman Empire itself in other words when Luke says all the world what he means is augustus’s world the Roman Empire the problem is though and as fitzmar himself points out aside from this statement here in Luke and of later Christian and Pagan writers who depend on him there’s no ancient evidence of a universal worldwide registration or census ordered by Caesar Augustus.

II: Joseph would not have been obliged to travel to Bethlehem and Mary would not have been required to accompany him. Mary being required supposedly to register with Joseph but if we read Luke and here it is on the slide it only says that Joseph went to be registered with Mary it doesn’t say that she was required to go by Roman law or anything like that.

Croy goes on to list three other problems with using this piece of evidence as support for Luke’s census. Luke’s claim that everyone went to their “own towns” (vs. 3) creates another historical problem.

Another detail that is problematic historically; there is no other evidence that a Roman census would have required registration at the ancestral home rather than the place of current residence.

Luke’s obvious apologetic motives here for Luke, the Messiah is supposed to be born in Bethlehem even though Jesus was apparently from Nazareth.

III: A Roman census could not have been carried out in Palestine during the time of King Herod. Judea was what’s called a client Kingdom Under Herod the Great. It was aligned with Rome but it hadn’t been annexed as a province at least not yet. A client king is a modern umbrella term for a host of fluid and informal states of indirect Administration.

King and Emperor was fluid informal and based on Mutual Trust client kings were nominally independent and probably not liable to Tribute but required to make ad hoc payments on demand and contribute troops to the Roman army in their own kingdoms their main task was to maintain peace and stability as long as these conditions were met Rome had no reason or inclination to interfere unquote okay so what does that matter well aurer argued that from what we know of client kingdoms it would have been very very unlikely for Augustus to have decreed that a census be done in a client Kingdom as he puts it.

IV: Josephus knows nothing of a Roman census in Palestine during the reign of Herod he refers rather to the census of AD 6 or 7 as something new and unprecedented

V: Josephus mentions a person named Quirinius the same person that Luke mentions and just like Luke, Josephus tells us that Quirinius oversaw a census in Judea but here Josephus doesn’t agree with Luke Josephus places the census and therefore also the governorship of cinius around the year six of the Common Era.

Raymond Brown has kindly provided this table that you can see here on the slide showing what we know of the governors of Syria extending from about 23 BCE to about seven of the Common Era and if we keep in mind that died in about 4 BCE then you can see here in this table that there’s just no room for Quirinius to have been a governor of Syria in the last years of Herod’s reign so this seems to be a problem.

Why Josephus’ dating is correct

Criticism on Rhoads:

Was Jesus Born During a Census? (Prof. Miller)

**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 Qtirinius 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. Qtirinius 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. 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 Q!tirinius’ 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.

Luke could easily have confused these two tumul tuous events, especially from his standpoint nearly a century later.

We know that Q!tirinius 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 Qyirinius, 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 Qyirinius’. 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 Qyirinius took it over and so any census prior to his term as governor would not have been a Roman one. **

• 3. 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 immi grated 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, Qyirinius’ 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.