Birth narratives of Jesus
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[edit] Introduction
What follows is a discussion of the narratives of the virgin birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It covers the historical problems of the census described in the Gospel of Luke, the attempted responses of Christian apologists to these problems, and a brief discussion of the problems in reconciling the discrepancies between the narratives from the two Gospels.
[edit] Discussion
[edit] The Roman Census
Luke 2:1-4 reads (NIV translation),
- In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.
Historically, it is unlikely that the census in ancient Rome would have required anyone to return to their ancestral homes to register or be counted. Such a requirement would have been a logistical nightmare. The closest thing to what the Gospel of Luke describes would be this edict by Gaius Vibius Maximus, prefect of Egypt, in 104 C.E.:
- The census by household having begun, it is essential that all those who are away from their nomes [that is, their Egyptian administrative districts] be summoned to return to their own hearths so that they may perform the customary business of registration and apply themselves to the cultivation which concerns them.[1]
However, this edict tells people to return to their own homes, not to their ancestral ones. If Joseph were subject to a similar edict, he would have stayed in Nazareth.
There are other problems with this census. Because the Gospel of Matthew describes Herod the Great as still being alive at the time of Jesus' birth, it implies that Jesus was born no later than 4 B.C.E.; but according to Josephus, "the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria" took place in 6 C.E. and sparked a rebellion led by Judas the Galilean. Apologists [2] have attempted to solve this problem by arguing that Quirinius may have had a governorship prior to the one described in Josephus, or that the passage should be translated "This was the census that took place before Quirinius was governor of Syria." (See [3] for some counterarguments.) However, this would lead to a census happening in a Roman client kingdom, which is unlikely. As E.P. Sanders pointed out,
- Rome's client kingdoms may be compared to the countries of Eastern Europe before the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. Countries such as Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia all had their own governments. They passed laws and enforced them. They had to contribute to the Soviet Empire in various ways, but Moscow intervened directly in these countries only very occasionally, when unrest or civil tumult got out of hand or when a brash government felt too independent. That is similar to the way Rome dealt with Palestine. Herod ruled, and, as long as he ruled correctly (in Rome's view), he was left in peace. The conditions of his rule were that he pay tribute, that he defend his borders, that he not allow revolt at home, and that he contribute troops to any military activity Rome wished to carry out in one of the nearby countries.[4]
Herod the Great, and his sons who ruled after him, were independent with regard to domestic matters, such as taxation, so there would be no need for the Romans to conduct a census for tax purposes in their territories. Apologist Glenn Miller wrote "Luke was probably not referring to a taxation census at all--simply a "registration. [5]" Dr. James F. McGrath argues against this, pointing out,
- Reference is occasionally made to a census around the year 3 B.C.E. The fifth century historian Orosius mentions it, and during this period there is also evidence of the swearing of oaths of allegiance to Caesar Augustus and images of him being set up – not surprising, since it was at this time that he came to power. But the census taken was of Roman citizens. The people of vassal kingdoms may have been requested to swear allegiance to Caesar (See Josephus, Antiquities 17.2.4 #42), but even this would have raised objections among the Jews. This enrollment or registration of Roman citizens would not have applied to Joseph of Nazareth, who was not a Roman citizen. Nor was Jesus, since had he inherited this legal status from Joseph, he would not have been crucified, since crucifixion was not a punishment that would be carried out against a Roman citizen [See the discussion in chapter 6 of Martin Hengel’s book Crucifixion, SCM, 1977]. So reference to this empire-wide registration of Roman citizens has no relevance to Jesus, and no link whatsoever to Luke 2:1, which refers to a decree regarding taxation. [The article by Glenn Miller at http://www.christian-thinktank.com/ clouds the issue precisely by focusing attention on this registration of Roman citizens]. Had the reference been to such an enrollment of Roman citizens, then there would be no obvious reason for mentioning Quirinius’ famous tax census in this context! [as Raymond Brown points out in Birth of the Messiah, Doubleday, 1993, p.552]
F. F. Bruce, in his book The New Testament Documents: Are they Reliable?, writes "The holding of an imperial census in a client kingdom (as Judaea was during Herod's reign) is not unparalleled; in the reign of Tiberius a census was imposed on the client kingdom of Antiochus in eastern Asia Minor." In paper versions of this book (as opposed to some versions available online), Bruce indicates that his source is Tacitus' Annals 6.41, which reads
- At this same time the Clitae, a tribe subject to the Cappadocian Archelaus, retreated to the heights of Mount Taurus, because they were compelled in Roman fashion to render an account of their revenue and submit to tribute. There they defended themselves by means of the nature of the country against the king's unwarlike troops, till Marcus Trebellius, whom Vitellius, the governor of Syria, sent as his lieutenant with four thousand legionaries and some picked auxiliaries, surrounded with his lines two hills occupied by the barbarians, the lesser of which was named Cadra, the other Davara. Those who dared to sally out, he reduced to surrender by the sword, the rest by drought.
"In Roman fashion" is the translation of the Latin nostrum in modum, which literally means "in our fashion." Tacitus uses similar phrasing in History 3.47, where he writes, "while they carried their arms and banners in Roman fashion [in nostrum modum], they still retained the indolence and licence of the Greek." Thus, "in Roman fashion" implies here an imitation or similarity to the Roman manner of doing things, not that the Romans themselves were necessarily doing them. Contrary to Jeffery Jay Lowder, there was a census [6]; the Latin of Annals 6.41 even has the word census. However, what appears to have happened is that the census on the Clitae was imposed not by the Romans themselves, but rather by King Archelaus, who decided to use methods similar to the Romans. The presence of Roman troops does not imply that they imposed the census in the first place. Rather, they were used as reinforcements when a client kingdom's forces were insufficient. Vitellius had sent troops to help a client kingdom on another occasion; when King Aretas made war against Herod Antipas and destroyed the latter's army, Vitellius was ordered by Tiberias to make war on Aretas (Antiquities 18.109).
In addition to the unlikelihood of the Lukan account itself, the account in Matthew 1:18-2:123 implies that Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem, fled to escape Herod, and settled in Nazareth, because they were afraid of Judea's new ruler, Archelaus. Luke implies that Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth and temporarily traveled to Bethlehem to comply with Roman edict. To reconcile the two accounts means that Joseph and Mary left Nazareth, went to Bethlehem, and stayed until the Magi came, which, judging from the Gospel of Matthew's account of the Slaughter of the Innocents (2:16-18), was up to about two years later. One has to wonder what motivated Joseph to stay that long, rather than go back home and get back to making a living.
This improbable census is most likely an attempt to reconcile the historical supposition that Jesus came from Galilee with the prophecy in Micah 5:2, which reads "But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days," which was taken to mean that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. This in turn implies a willingness to bend the facts.
[edit] The Slaughter of the Innocents
Matthew 2:16 reads (NIV translation),
- When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.
The description here of an act of royal mass infanticide is reminiscent of the Pharaoh of Egypt's edict to slay all the newborn Israelite boys in Exodus 1:16-22. And, as with that earlier narrative, there is no historical evidence that any such mass-slaughter took place.
Since it is true that Bethlehem was a rather small Judean town at the time, and the goings-on there could easily have slipped below the radar of Roman historians, the silence of the historical record outside the gospel of Matthew is understandable, but still slightly suspicious. The public outcry from the killing of so many baby boys by their king could easily have had political repercussions well beyond Bethlehem's borders. One might have expected political rivals of Herod to make mention, even copious mention, of such an act in order to vilify him, and one might also have expected the Jewish historian Josephus to have heard of this and record it.
