The sixth episode of the first season of the Retelling the Bible Podcast was posted on November 15, 2017. You can listen to the episode and subscribe to the podcast by following one of these links or by searching for the podcast on your favourite platform:

SHOW NOTES

This episode is based on Luke 2:1-6 in the New Testament of the Bible. (Click the references to read the original story). Any direct biblical quotations in the episode are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Here are a few of my thoughts on the episode.

Historical issues with the journey described by Luke

The description of a journey made by Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem is very brief in the Gospel of Luke. Any such journey is entirely lacking in the only other nativity story in the Bible, in the Gospel of Matthew. But even though the account is very brief, it certainly does raise a number of historical questions.

The Romans didn’t do censuses like that

The usual interpretation of this passage is that Luke is saying that, at the time of the birth of Jesus, the Roman Empire under the direction of Emperor Augustus, held a registration or census of the entire Empire all at once. This is historically untenable. The Romans certainly did like to take censuses. They wanted to know how many people there were so that they could tax them and take other things from them like military service. But Augustus certainly wouldn’t have had the resources or have been willing to spend the money to count all the empire’s vast territories at once. If he had done so, there would certainly be some record or even monument to such a monumental undertaking, but there is absolutely no evidence that at this time or at any other time the Romans ever carried out a universal census.

The other thing that this account seems to assume is that the Romans decided to count people, not where they lived, but instead where their ancestors had lived. This also was not the Roman practice. In fact, it would be a rather foolish way to take a census. If you are going to count the people, you want to count them where they live, specifically so that you can go back and find them again and tax them. To this very day, census takers generally go to great pains to ensure that people are counted in their actual place of residence.

So the way that Luke describes the census does not make very much historical sense but I do believe that there is a way to understand these verses that could make at least better historical sense.

A standing decree

Though the Romans never decided to count everyone in the Empire all at once, they certainly did keep good census records of all their territories. It would make sense, therefore, that the emperor would have something like a standing order, a decree, that required that every area of the empire have up-to-date census records. Perhaps this is the decree or practice that Luke is referring to.

The region of Judea was not technically a part of the Roman Empire in the years leading up to the birth of Jesus. During the time of King Herod the Great and some of his heirs, the entire region was considered to be a separate kingdom. Yes, the region was still under Roman control and still owed tribute to Rome, but it was not technically part of the empire. Therefore, Judea would not have been under the decree of Caesar Augustus and would not have been required to have a Roman census. Any taxation would have been the job of King Herod.

That all changed, however, about ten years after the death of King Herod. In the year 6 CE, the Romans removed Herod the Great’s son, Archaelus, from ruling over Judea. They were apparently very disappointed with the job that he was doing. Rather than naming another king, the Romans took direct control and incorporated Judea into their Province of Syria.

At that moment, Judea officially became part of the Roman Empire and, as such, would have fallen under the decree of the Emperor. Therefore a census would have to be taken at that point, and indeed it was. The ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, reports that when Judea was incorporated as part of the Province of Syria, a census was carried out under the direction of the governor of Syria, a man named Quirinius. This, to me, sounds suspiciously like the census that Luke describes in his gospel: a first census carried out when Quirinius was Governor of Syria. So I cannot help but think that this is, perhaps, what Luke is talking about.

Of course, there is one big problem with that theory. The first census that was carried out by Quirinius did not happen until that transfer of jurisdiction and that did not happen until the year 6 CE. This stands in direct contradiction to what the Gospel of Matthew says about the birth of Jesus because Matthew insists that Jesus was born before the death of King Herod the Great. Herod had died about a decade before that in the year 4 BCE. How we should deal with that contradiction in birth dates is too big of a question to deal with in these brief show notes, but I do deal with that question at length in my book, Caesar’s Census, God’s Jubilee. Here I will just say that, in these episodes of the podcast, I am simply trying to read Luke’s gospel and what it says according to the most obvious historical interpretation without worrying about any contradictions with other accounts of the birth of Jesus.

But what about the question of where the people are registering?

The other problem with this account that I have stated above is that it refers to a census practice that does not make any sense and doesn’t fit with common Roman practice: requiring people to return to their ancestral homes in order to be registered. To answer this problem I would simply state that Luke’s Gospel doesn’t actually say that the Romans required the people to return to their ancestral homes. It only states that they did so without saying why.

My suggestion is that, if we cannot find any reason for this in Roman law and practice, we need to look for it someplace else. The place where Luke would have looked, and where he would have expected his readers to look, for an explanation of this strange response to the census is the Old Testament.

There is only one Old Testament law that requires people to return to their ancestral homes. This is the law of Jubilee which is outlined in The Book of Leviticus 25:8-28. The Jubilee law involved the following:

A Shofar, or Ram’s Horn, was to be sounded throughout the land. (v. 9)

Every Israelite male was to return to his ancestral lands (v. 10)

All debts were to be released (actually this a provision of the Sabbath year, but it was presumably also to be a feature of Jubilee as it was also a Sabbath year.)

All people reduced to slavery because of their debts were to be released (actually this a provision of the Sabbath year, but it was presumably also to be a feature of Jubilee as it was also a Sabbath year.)

All land that had been forfeited because of debts was to be returned to their original owners (v. 28)

There has been much discussion down through the years about this Jubilee law and whether it was practical or ever actually carried out. I spend a great deal of time in my book, Caesar’s Census, God’s Jubilee, exploring those questions. But ultimately, the real question is not whether the Jubilee was actually ever practiced, it is whether or not the idea of it influenced the hopes and the dreams of people who had suffered great losses because of their debts. The question is whether or not, in the early first century, people hoped for a Jubilee despite the fact that they practically thought that it could happen.

My suggestion is that a hope for Jubilee among the people was strong enough that it could have motivated a mass migration of people that was conveniently timed to disrupt the Roman census of Judea. My new understanding of the story is that the gospel writer is using the Old Testament idea of Jubilee as part of his explanation for how Mary and Joseph came to be in Bethlehem at that all-important moment when Jesus came to be born.

I do not know what might have happened historically speaking, of course. In this episode, I am merely trying to bring out the themes that I believe the gospel writer is drawing from the Old Testament and using intentionally in his account.

Will all of this in mind, this is now how I tend to interpret this passage in Luke’s Gospel:

And it came to pass in those days, that Caesar Augustus had a standing policy that all parts of the Roman Empire should have proper tax records. When Judea was first incorporated into the Roman Empire (which happened in 6 CE while Quirinius was governor of Syria) the first census was therefore taken in Judea. But the people, provoked by Judas the Galilean (see Acts 5:37), rebelled. They called for a Jubilee which meant that all the people went to their own towns to be registered instead of remaining where they were. They did this to foil the Romans plans to create good tax rolls, but also because they sincerely believed that God wanted a Jubilee. Joseph, also in obedience to the call to Jubilee, went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, who also obeyed God’s call and to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.

Media and acknowledgments

“AhDah” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

“Long Road Ahead” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Many thanks to Gabrielle McAndless for playing the role of Mary in this episode. The text of this episode has also been published in my book, “Caesars Census, God’s Jubilee.” The book is an examination of the entire Nativity Story as told in the Gospel of Luke and as contrasted with the rather different Nativity Story that is told in the Gospel of Matthew. The book is available in paperback through Amazon and the e-book is available in many places where e-books are sold. See the links below: Amazon.ca link

Amazon.com link

Kobo link

Smashwords link And, finally, here is a video version of this story from an old Nativity pageant: