The old saying is that the only sure things in life are death and taxes. But I might add a third: that around the major Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter, magazines and newspapers will publish various articles explaining why some important point in the New Testament is wrong and you are an idiot for believing such nonsense. The articles almost always cite "evidence" from scientists which proves to be pure speculation or highly suspect given that there is little or no evidence one way or the other that survives.
The most recent article of this type that I came across was at the Daily Mail, entitled "Scientists reveal exactly where Jesus was born - and say it probably WASN'T in Bethlehem." The gist of the article is that the beginning of Luke's nativity story is wrong about Christ being born in Bethlehem, and arguing that he must have been born in Nazareth instead. The reason this is important, as the article explains, is because "[t]he Old Testament prophet Micah predicted that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem of Judea, believed to be the city of King David," so "[i]f Jesus was going to be the Jewish Messiah, then he needed to have been born in Bethlehem."
In the King James Version, Chapter 2 of Luke begins:
1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
5 To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
It should be noted that the KJV is the only version to use "tax" with most other translations using the term census, enrollment, or something similar. The two are not incompatible because the purpose of the census was to enroll people for purposes of collecting a poll tax.
The first issue raised in the article is an assertion that there was no such decree concerning a census. Rather, as the article states:
According to Luke, Mary and Joseph start out in Nazareth but need to go to Bethlehem to be counted in a Roman census.
This, however, is where things start to fall apart for the Bethlehem narrative.
Professor Bond says: 'Luke suggests it [the census] is over the whole Roman world and that people had to go back to their ancestral homes.
'There's no evidence for a whole-empire census at this point, and while ancient people had to go to a local centre to be counted, they didn't have to find an "ancestral home" - whatever that would actually mean.'
Biblical historians have worked hard to try and find what Luke could be referring to but this census just doesn't seem to be a real event.
There was a small census around the time implemented by the Roman legate of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, but this was about a decade after the birth of Jesus and wouldn't have affected the holy family in Galilee.
'It looks as though Luke needs to get the holy family down to Bethlehem, remembers that there was a census at around this time, and brings it into his story,' says Professor Bond.
In searching for some explanation of this issue, I came across this article, "Was Luke wrong about the census?" by David Armitage. As the article explains the issue:
From a historical perspective, though, the census story is widely regarded as highly problematic, because it seems difficult to reconcile with other information about that period, and especially with the account provided by the historian Josephus. Writing towards the end of the first century AD, Josephus describes a census carried out by Quirinius just after Archelaus (a son of Herod the Great) was deposed as ‘ethnarch’ of Judaea by the Romans. The rationale given by Josephus for this census is that at this point (in AD 6) the Romans annexed Judaea, incorporating it into the province of Syria (Antiquities of the Jews 18.1-3). Consequently its status for Roman taxation changed, necessitating registration of property.
The difficulty is that both Matthew and Luke seem to place Jesus’s birth—and hence, for Luke, the census—within the lifetime of Herod the Great, who is most commonly thought to have died around 4 BC. The census of Quirinius, at least as described by Josephus, thus seems to have been about ten years too late.
The article offers several arguments to support the account in Luke. First, the author points out that it was perhaps Josephus who was wrong about his dates, noting:
An important point in favour of taking Luke’s account seriously is the distinct likelihood that he had access to testimony from individuals closely connected to those involved in the relevant events. If Luke was (as is widely believed) the associate of Paul who travelled with him in the period described in the later chapters of Acts, this implies direct acquaintance with at least one member of Jesus’s family: his brother James, a notable leader amongst the believers in Jerusalem—see Acts 21:18. This provides a straightforward route by which Luke could have learned about events associated with the birth of Jesus, even if James’s mother Mary was herself no longer alive when Luke visited Jerusalem with Paul.
Conversely, "the accounts given by Josephus can themselves be problematic historically. For example, as Andrew Steinmann has made clear, the consensus position regarding the chronology of the end of Herod’s reign is far from certain."
The second argument is that perhaps Luke's account has not been translated correctly or is being interpreted incorrectly. Verse 2 "is regularly translated as something like ‘this was the first registration when Quirinius was governing Syria’." That is, "the Greek could mean: ‘this was the registration before Quirinius was governor of Syria.’ This would mean that before the ‘famous’ AD 6 census of Quirinius, another one was carried out by someone else, and that Luke is clarifying for his readers that he is referring to this earlier one." I would note that the NIV translation, in a footnote, indicates that the census spoke on took place before Quirinius was governor. Similarly, "Sabine Huebner (Professor of Ancient History at Basel University) has recently argued that the key term ἡγεμονεύοντος (hēgemoneuontos) [the word translated as "governor" in English] need not necessarily refer to the actual post of governor, but is flexible enough to encompass other roles such as that of a financial procurator—a position which could well be associated with registering property."
Finally, though, the article raises a third theory:
The options described above assume that the traditional reading of the nativity story is correct: that it was because of the census that Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. There is a more radical possibility: that Luke 2:1-5 does actually refer to the AD 6 census as described by Josephus, and that Luke introduces it as part of a brief digression—what we might call a ‘flash-forward’—in which he describes a return visit by Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem some years after Jesus was born there. Mentioning this return visit, which could have involved registration of property that Joseph still owned in Bethlehem (his original hometown), would presumably serve to emphasise the official connection of the family of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ with Bethlehem, the town of David.
This approach works from the assumption that Luke knew that the census of Quirinius happened some years after the end of the reign of Herod the Great—and, crucially, that he thought his readers would also know this. If this was so, naming Quirinius would be a deliberate way of indicating to these ‘knowledgeable’ readers that he was jumping forward in time and introducing events later than the main thread of the story (something that he clearly does elsewhere; see Luke 3:18-20).
According to this reading of the Greek text, Luke 2:6 then resumes the main thread of the narrative, explaining that it was in the very place that Joseph had property to register—his true family hometown—that Jesus was born. Given this interpretation, the text does not conflict at all with Josephus’s account, and moreover can be reconciled much more straightforwardly with Matthew’s (census-free) telling of the story of Jesus’s birth than can the traditional interpretation.
The author links to a piece that goes into this latter theory in more detail.
But Armitage does not cover all the arguments. For instance, there is evidence (via another Roman historian, Tacitus) that Quirinius was twice governor over Syria: sometime between 12 B.C. and 1 A.D., and the later governorship beginning in 6 A.D. Moreover, there were multiple censuses. This article at Bible Study Tools notes:
Caesar Augustus was fond of censuses. It took a lot of taxes to keep the enormous Roman army going, to build roads, and to finance military campaigns to continue conquering the known world. Caesar Augustus was also just generally a luxurious emperor. He recorded in his “Res Gestae Divi Avgvsti” (“The Deeds of Divine Augustus”— quite a fancy name for a diary) that he ordered widespread censuses of Rome at least three times in 28 B.C., 8 B.C., and 14 A.D.
More localized censuses also took place regularly in certain areas of the Roman Empire; Judea faced at least three censuses around the time of the birth of Christ, in 8 B.C., 2 B.C., and 6 A.D.
Thus, there could have been two census during times Quirinius was governor.
Moreover, even if a census was ordered in a particular year, it may have taken some time to implement. Travel and communications were slow and often unreliable. And the political situation was unstable in the region. Thus, as this paper also explains, the Augustine census of 8 B.C. probably did not take place in Herod's kingdom until 5 B.C.
Apparently in Herod's last days his kingdom came more and more under the direction and influence of Augustus. It would not be surprising therefore to find the emperor asking Herod to take a census for him in Judea. Augustus was probably anticipating Herod's death.
As far as the manner in which the census was carried out is concerned,
Herod was naturally eager to avoid giving to the enrollment an entirely foreign and non-national character... . Obviously, the best way to soothe the Jewish sentiment was to give the enrollment a tribal character and to number the tribes of Israel, as had been done by purely national Governments.
Thus Herod avoided the strife and rebellion that attended the census of A.D. 6-7 under Quirinius, which was strictly foreign and was long remembered. Each person being registered had to return to his tribal home, exactly as Joseph went to Bethlehem.
The rule of Herod over the entire kingdom also solves another problem: That Luke was not thinking of the A.D. 6-7 census as the one of Christ's birth is shown by the fact that Joseph and Mary had to leave the territory of Antipas (Galilee) and go to Judea (directly under Roman control in A.D. 6 following the deposition of Archelaus) to be enrolled. This would have taken place only if there were one central authority over Palestine—such as only during the reign of Herod the Great, before April, 4 B.C.
(Footnotes omitted). In short, then, the logical explanation is:
Many censuses were taken in the Roman empire during the time of Augustus, and there is no reason why Herod might not have been asked to take one, especially in light of conditions near the end of his life. Since censuses were carried out locally, local customs were regarded and Palestine was a delicate area.
Quirinius may or may not have been governor of Syria at the birth of Christ in 5 B.C., but this is irrelevant since Luke 2:2 states that the census during which Jesus was born was the first one, before the more well-known one taken by Quirinius in A.D. 6-7. This first one was "in the days of Herod the king."
