How plausible is Augustus' initiation of a census in Israel around the time of Jesus' birth?

It's often claimed that the Romans wouldn't have enacted a census in a client kingdom, which Israel was at the time of Jesus' birth. See Glenn Miller's argument to the contrary here and here. And Augustus wouldn't have to be directly responsible for the census in order for Luke's account to be accurate. Indirect involvement would be sufficient. If Herod implemented a census in an effort to please Augustus and conform Israel to Roman culture, as Herod did in other contexts, that would be enough to justify Luke's comments. The process of taking a census of the empire was initiated by Augustus. Whether that led to a census in Israel in a more direct or more indirect manner is a secondary issue, and the accuracy of Luke's account doesn't depend on it.

Another common objection is the alleged silence of sources other than Luke on the existence of a census in Israel at the time of Jesus' birth. I've addressed that subject before, such as in a post a couple of years ago. But here are some other points that can be made about both of the objections under consideration:

Peter Williams Responding To Tom Holland On Some Christmas Issues

Peter Williams recently appeared on Glen Scrivener's podcast to respond to another podcast on which Tom Holland discussed Jesus' childhood. I added some comments of my own on the page for Glen's podcast. But YouTube often doesn't put up posts that you submit or will put a post up, then remove it. Here's something I posted that went up initially, but seems to have disappeared since then:

Access To Jesus' Census Record

There's a chapter on the census of Luke 2 in a book published a few years ago by Sabine Huebner, a historian at the University of Basel in Switzerland (Papyri And The Social World Of The New Testament [New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019]). She makes some points others have made about the plausibility of Luke's account (that the author of the gospel would have had a lot of knowledge of Roman censuses, including from firsthand experience; that there's precedent for a Roman census occurring in a client kingdom; etc.). She concludes:

The Accuracy And Significance Of Acts 5:36-37

Lydia McGrew just produced a good video on the subject. I agree with her view of the Theudas issue, which is what the video is focused on, but she only briefly discusses the importance of Luke's comments on a census in verse 37. I've written some posts on the significance of that verse for how we interpret the census account in Luke 2. Here's a collection of links to some of my Facebook posts on the Luke 2 census, one of which addresses Acts 5:37. Those posts provide brief overviews of the issues involved. For a lengthier discussion of the relationship between Acts 5:37 and Luke 2, see here.

Understanding And Arguing For Luke's Census Account

I've written a few posts this week on Facebook about the historicity of Luke's census:

Does Luke Claim That Quirinius Was Governor When Jesus Was Born?

How Acts 5:37 Suggests That Luke Was Aware That The Census Of 6 A.D. Was Different Than The Census At The Time Of Jesus' Birth

Internal Evidence For Luke's Account

An Israeli Newspaper Misrepresents The Events Surrounding Jesus' Birth

Over the last few days, I've been writing responses to media stories on Christmas issues. (See the comments section of the thread as well, since I've posted additional material there.) I want to start a new thread for another article that was just published.

Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, has an article by Elon Gilad about the date of Jesus' birth. He writes:

The only record of the life and ministry of Jesus are the four Canonical Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Modern historians take these narratives with a grain of salt when examining historical Jesus, as the authors of these works were clearly more interested in theology than history; they were written quite a bit after the fact; and they contradict one another, themselves and other historic documents in both matters big and small.

Correction Of My Response To Annette Merz

I want to correct something I was wrong about in my latest response to Merz. I've come to the conclusion that I misunderstood her argument about which Herod Jesus was born under. Instead of questioning which Herod Matthew is referring to, Merz seems to be questioning which Herod a possible pre-Matthean source was referring to, a source she thinks may have been behind both Matthew and Luke. I apologize for the error. I've revised the post. The section on Luke's census remains the same, but I've rewritten the section on which Herod Jesus was born under. If anybody wants to see my original text, which is now removed from the post, I've added it to the comments section of the thread.

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 8)

(Previous parts in the series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7.)

There's a section in Merz's chapter about the date of Jesus' birth. She suggests that an early tradition may have placed his birth under a Herod other than Herod the Great. And she argues against the historicity of Luke's census account. I'll begin with her claims about which Herod Jesus was born under.

After saying that there are "serious doubts" about placing Jesus' birth at the time of Herod the Great (478), Merz tells us that Matthew wanted to parallel Jesus to Moses by having a figure like the Pharaoh of Exodus 1-2 in Jesus' childhood. Therefore, Matthew may have had unhistorical, typological motives for placing Jesus' birth at the time of Herod the Great. I've addressed that argument in a previous response to Merz. See my quotation of Mark Smith and my response to that quotation about halfway through the post here.

Merz then writes:

From a historical point of view, the slaughter of the innocents most certainly must be regarded as a legend mirroring Pharaoh's order to kill the sons of Israel (Ex 1-2) and echoing Herod's infamous cruelty towards his own family and subjects. (479)

Stephen Carlson's Christmas Material

Stephen Carlson has written a lot of good material on Christmas issues in recent years. I've often cited a 2010 article he published that addresses how we should interpret Luke 2:7 and some issues related to the passage (whether Joseph and Mary were married yet in Luke 2:5, whether Joseph was from Nazareth, etc.).

He's also proposed a new rendering of Luke 2:2 that hasn't gotten much attention yet, but has been endorsed or taken seriously by some scholars who have commented on it. See here. And see here for a discussion of Carlson's response to Richard Carrier on the subject several years ago. I don't know enough about Greek to render much of a judgment of Carlson's proposed translation, but it seems more promising than other translations that are often suggested.

More than a decade ago, Carlson published an article on a passage in Clement of Alexandria that has some relevance to the infancy narratives. See my discussion of the subject here.

Carlson has also published an article on Matthew 1:17 and how Matthew arrived at his count of three groups of fourteen generations.

The lowdown on the census of Quirinius

The material on the Quirinius census should change forever the way this topic is dealt with by scholars. The problem is well known: Luke presumably made a mistake when he stated that Quirinius (Cyrenius) was governor of Judea when a census was taken that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem. However, it is “known” from Josephus that Quirinius did not come to Judea until A.D. 6. The approach of FATP is once again to start by examining the text. Luke does not strictly say that Quirinius was governor; the verb used means that he had governmental authority, not necessarily that he was the official governor of the province. After establishing the proper understanding of the text, Roman records are cited that are consistent with an empire-wide census taking place in 3 B.C. More significantly, Josephus gives contradictory information regarding Quirinius. He dates the coming of Quirinius to Judea just after the exile of Archelaus (A.D. 6) in Antiquities 18.1,2 (18.1.1) and 18.26 (18.2.1), but these passages also say that one of the acts after his coming was to depose the high priest Joazar from office. Joazar was installed by Herod the Great a few weeks before his (Herod’s) death in response to the golden eagle crisis, because Joazar cooperated with authorities in the matter of a census, and with Herod regarding his handling of the golden eagle incident. This made Joazar extremely unpopular with the people, and after the death of Herod they demanded that Joazar be removed from the high priesthood. This was done within a few months of Herod’s death, which means that Joazar, Quirinius, and the census are all associated together in the time shortly before the death of Herod and the time immediately thereafter, contradicting the A.D. 6 date for the coming of Quirinius to Judea. The internal contradictions of Josephus in these matters were pointed out years ago by Zahn, Lodder and other scholars, but new insights that help in unraveling the contradictory accounts of Josephus have been given by Dr. Steinmann’s colleague John Rhoads. FATP devotes 11 pages to sorting out the correct order of events and explaining why Josephus made the mistakes that he did in dating Quirinius and the census. These pages may require several readings to understand all the issues, but once this is done it is clear that the preponderance of evidence favors the enrollment associated with Quirinius to have been in 3 B.C., and perhaps continuing into early 2 B.C. 

http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2012/07/12/Book-Review-From-Abraham-to-Paul-A-Biblical-Chronology-Part-II.aspx#Article

Skeptical Embellishments About Christmas

A few days ago, I wrote a response to an article by Valarie Tarico about the events surrounding Jesus' birth. Let's take a look at a recent exchange in the comments section of Tarico's thread. A poster there, archaeopteryx1, wrote:

A Professor's Misleading Christmas Quiz

Leonard Hitchcock, professor emeritus at Idaho State University, recently posted a quiz consisting of misleading questions about the infancy narratives. It's a good illustration of how ignorant many skeptics are about matters surrounding Jesus' birth and how inaccurately they often frame the issues.

Luke's Census Didn't Involve Ancestry

It's often claimed that Luke 2:4 is referring to a requirement that all participants in the census be enrolled in a place of their ancestry. Sometimes it's even claimed that the ancestry had to be traced back about a thousand years, since that's the approximate amount of time separating David and Joseph. And critics often argue that such a requirement in a census is implausible, especially if the ancestry had to be traced back something like a thousand years. Why would the Romans require such a thing? How many people would be able to trace their ancestry back so far? Why don't we have any record of other censuses being conducted that way? And so on. Thus, Luke's account probably is unhistorical.

But it's doubtful that Luke was saying that the census had such an ancestry requirement. Here's why:

Quirinius and the gunfight at O.K. Corral

I'm going to make a few observations about the census of Quirinius (Lk 2:1-2). 

i) Richard Carrier thinks Luke contradicts Josephus. And he uses Josephus as his standard of comparison:

Josephus writes:

In the tenth year of Archelaus's government the leading men in Judaea and Samaria could not endure his cruelty and tyranny and accused him before Caesar...and when Caesar heard this, he went into a rage...and sent Archelaus into exile...to Vienna, and took away his property.[3.3]

So roughly ten years separate the death of Herod and the arrival of Quirinius. When was the census held in Judaea? Josephus says quite unequivocally that:

Quirinius made an account of Archelaus' property and finished conducting the census, which happened in the thirty-seventh year after Caesar's defeat of Antony at Actium. [3.4]

http://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/quirinius.html

ii) It's revealing to compare his confidence in Josephus with what Carrier says elsewhere:

Your doubts become stronger when you can't question the witnesses; when you don't even know who they are; when you don't have the story from them but from someone else entirely; when there is an agenda, something the storyteller is attempting to persuade you of; when the witnesses or reporters are a bit kooky or disturbingly overzealous. John Loftus, ed. The Christian Delusion (Promethus 2010), 292. 

Why doesn't Carrier apply his skeptical criteria to Josephus? Carrier can't very well question the ancient witnesses. He doesn't even know who they are. Moreover, Josephus is getting his information from someone else. And Josephus had an agenda. 

iii) By conventional reckoning, the census of Quirinius took place about 40 years before Josephus was born. In the nature of the case, Josephus had no firsthand knowledge of the event. He relies on whatever his sources were. And his sources may rely on other sources. 

iv)This also raises questions concerning how much ancient historians could know about relative chronology. Let's take a comparison. Consider the gunfight at O.K. Corral. Contemporary newspapers tell us that happened on October 26, 1881. But that's because newspapers were using the Gregorian calendar. When, however, we attempt to date the census of Quirinius, we don't have that kind of direct calendrical correlation. We have to reconstruct the date, as best we can.

Suppose our sources for the gunfight didn't give a date. Suppose they said it took place before W.W.I. Although that tells me the gunfight was earlier than W.W.I., it doesn't tell me how much earlier. It doesn't tell me if it happened before or after the Civil War. 

Likewise, suppose our sources said it happened when Chester Arthur was president. But unless I know when Chester Arthur was president, that doesn't give me a date, or a year. Indeed, it doesn't even give me a relative chronology. For, unless I know the historical order of US presidents, knowing that the gunfight took place when Chester Arthur was president doesn't tell me if that happened before or after Ulysses Grant was president. 

That's the thing about relative chronology: to know a little, you need to know a lot. To know that one event was earlier or later than another event, especially how much earlier or later, you have to know about the intervening events. If there are significant gaps in the record, you can't say how much earlier or later. You have a bare sequence, but the duration of the intervals is indeterminate. 

v) The census of Qurinius and the gunfight at O.K. Corral have something else in common. These events became more famous with the passage of time. They didn't start out that way. There were ever so many shootouts in the Old West. In our own time, the gunfight at O.K. Corral is famous because Hollywood made it famous. And because Hollywood made it famous, historians go back and write about it. So you have a dialectical process. It was sufficiently well-known that Hollywood directors made movies about it. That, in turn, makes it more famous, which attracts additional historical investigation. 

Likewise, Luke made the census of Quirinius a famous event. It wasn't that famous to begin with. As a result, our surviving records don't say that much about the career of Quirinius. He was just one among many barely-remembered Roman officials. More famous in death than in life. Immortalized by one verse in the Bible.   

Josephus Misdated the Census of Quirinius

http://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/54/54-1/JETS_54-1_65-87_Rhoads.pdf

Richard Bauckham On The Historicity Of Luke's Census And Luke 2:22-24

Here's a lecture Richard Bauckham recently delivered, concerning the historicity of Luke's infancy account. In addition to addressing issues of general reliability, he briefly discusses the census passage and, in more depth, Luke 2:22-24. He argues against the conclusions of scholars like Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitzmyer, who have taken a more negative view of the historicity of Luke's material. Here are some of Bauckham's concluding comments:

Luke, it turns out, knew the requirements of Torah a good deal better than his modern critics….

We do not know whether Joseph and Mary would have followed what the authors of the Mishna describe as the Shammaite interpretation of this law. As is often the case, we do not know which was the most prevalent interpretation of this law at this time or which was adopted by the Temple authorities. Luke deserves the benefit of the doubt.

I conclude that there is nothing historically implausible in this narrative. That does not prove that it is historical, but it does remove one objection, of which some scholars have made most, to the hypothesis that traditions from the family of Jesus form the core of Luke’s infancy narrative.

Read the notes at the end of his presentation as well.

Is Luke's Census Historical?

Some points to keep in mind regarding Luke's census, in light of what Paul Tobin has recently argued on the subject:

- The passage in Luke's gospel is brief and open to multiple reasonable interpretations at some points. See, for example, the possibilities discussed in Darrell Bock's Luke, Volume 1, 1:1-9:50 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1994), pp. 199-206, 903-909. If a critic is going to choose to criticize the passage, he should take its brief and sometimes vague nature into account before issuing his criticism. If the passage is truly open to multiple interpretations, then the critic shouldn't object if Luke's defenders appeal to that fact.

- Christians aren't the only ones who disagree over the meaning of the passage. As I recently documented, two atheist contributors to The Christian Delusion (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2010), Paul Tobin and Richard Carrier, have contradicted each other on a series of issues relevant to the passage.

- People usually tell the truth. Even a liar has to tell the truth most of the time in order to seem believable when he lies. We don't assume that somebody is mistaken as our default position. That general principle is applicable to Luke.

- Luke had access to early Christian traditions formed at a time when the church was under the leadership of people who were close to Jesus and/or close to the events of His childhood (Jesus' brothers, Peter, etc.). Such sources continued to be available for many years (1 Corinthians 9:5, Galatians 1:19, 2:9-10). At a minimum, Luke had met one member of Jesus' immediate family (Acts 21:18).

- Luke's general historical reliability has to be taken into account. See here, for example.

- An indirect line of evidence for the census is the evidence we have for the Divine inspiration of scripture. See the many relevant posts on that subject in this blog's archives.

- The critics' claim isn't that ancient sources directly deny the historicity of Luke's census (or a traditional Christian understanding of the census). Rather, the claim is that the census (or a traditional understanding of it) is indirectly denied by sources who aren't discussing Luke's account. For example, Josephus wasn't responding to Luke when he wrote on subjects like Quirinius and the census of 6 A.D. The alleged inconsistencies between Josephus and Luke are indirect in that sense.

- As I argued in a series of posts in 2007, Luke's account doesn't seem to have been disputed by the ancient Christian and non-Christian sources who were directly addressing it. Rather, the account is widely affirmed, by a large diversity of sources. There was a lack of controversy about it. In contrast, many other claims of the early Christians, including other elements of the infancy narratives, were questioned or denied. To get a better idea of the significance of this evidence, see especially the first two posts and the last one in my census series linked above.

- What we have, then, are alleged indirect denials of Luke's account by some ancient sources accompanied by widespread affirmation of the account among those directly addressing it. The issue is how we best make sense of that combined data.

- It should be noted that critics of Luke often ignore or say little about the ancient affirmations of Luke's account. While Evangelicals and others defending Luke often discuss the sources cited by critics (Josephus, Tacitus, etc.), and sometimes do so in significant depth, critics have much less to say about the ancient sources supporting Luke. That sort of disparity often arises in discussions concerning early Christianity. What should we conclude when one side of a dispute tends to discuss more of the evidence than the other side does?

- Notice that an Evangelical (or another type of defender of Luke's account in some cases) has multiple reasons for trusting what Luke wrote. It's not as though an Evangelical must assume Biblical inerrancy without any concern for evidence, then assume Luke's reliability as a result. Rather, Evangelicals have argued for their conclusion that the Bible is inerrant, and there are other lines of evidence for Luke's account independent of inerrancy.

- In the opening post of my census series linked above, I mention some recent defenses of Luke. Sources like those raise many arguments that Tobin doesn't address. As I've documented, some of Tobin's arguments are so simplistic that even his fellow contributor to The Christian Delusion and fellow atheist, Richard Carrier, disagrees with him and thinks the issues are more nuanced.

- We should discard the notion that either side of this dispute has an easy solution. A defender of Luke could argue that one or more of the sources who allegedly contradicted Luke were mistaken. Or it could be argued that all of the sources should be harmonized. I think that's the majority position among Luke's defenders, and it's the position I take. Both approaches involve some difficulty. But so do the positions that are critical of Luke. I've discussed some of those difficulties in my series on the census linked above. This is a question that has no easy answer. It would help if critics of Luke's account would make more of an effort to notice and acknowledge the difficulties involved in their own positions. Defenders of Luke are sometimes unrealistic about their own difficulties, but that problem is worse on the other side of the dispute.

- Pointing out that one aspect of a position is unlikely when considered in isolation isn't enough. We're all trying to explain multiple lines of evidence. Something that's unlikely when considered by itself might be a crucial aspect of a theory that's more likely than its alternatives overall. It's not as though Luke's critics are giving the most likely explanation of the patristic data or the most likely explanation of the evidence we have from early heretical and non-Christian responses to Luke's account, for example. Rather, critics want us to focus on sources like Josephus while they say little or nothing about other sources that are problematic for their position.

- Somebody could conclude that Luke was partially wrong about the census without thinking he was entirely wrong. Even if somebody thinks the passage is as mistaken as Tobin considers it, he wouldn't have to draw the same implications from that conclusion that Tobin does. Many scholars have considered Luke's account erroneous to some extent without concluding that the implications suggested by Tobin follow. There's a large gray area between an inerrantist's view of Luke's passage and Tobin's view.

Recall how much emphasis Tobin placed on the alleged non-historicity of the census:

"With the links now completely severed between the nativity and world history, we can now see the rest of the nativity accounts for what they really are...Removed from the anchors of history provided by Herod and Quirinius, the nativity accounts drift into the realm of myths and legends." (in John Loftus, ed., The Christian Delusion [Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2010], p. 163)

He was wrong to think that the infancy narratives only have those two anchors. And he's failed to demonstrate that either of those two anchors has been removed.

Update On 12/14/17: Here's some more material I've written arguing for the historicity of the census account.