Gamera

Not at all. If Luke is just making stuff up, you would expect him to make up something more plausible, like Joseph went to visit relatives. The ornateness of the explanation highly suggests an actual event, however garbled, involving some official requirement. Why would Luke make up an implausible event to get Joseph to Bethlehem if he didn't think it was true? He could just as well think up a plausible one, if he is, as you're suggesting, lying.

There is a structure to lying that I, as an attorney, know pretty well. Somebody's who writing a purportedly historical document, purportedly supported by witnesses, has little incentive to come up with implausible explanations of events that he could easily explain with a plausible fabrication.

Amaleq13

Since we know that Christians since the 2nd century have been willing to accept this nonsense as "plausible", your argument has no merit. Reading the story with faith-colored glasses makes it easy to overlook or explain away anything that a rational consideration would call into question.

Gamera

Presumably the 2nd century audience would be in an even better position to determine the plausibility of a Augustan style census in Judea. So again, why make it up? Just say Joe and Mary where visiting their neices.

You now seem to be saying that not only was Luke a liar, but a bad liar, but it took 2000 years to find that out, because you were smarter than his Greek audience, who know a thing or two about lying (and as the son of a Greek, I can say that). A more skeptical people you will not find.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Gamera,

There are a couple of issues here. First, there is no good evidence of anyone knowing the writings of Luke before the 3rd century. So we may place the writing of that gospel from 75-206 CE. It is hard to know what people during this time period knew about events in Judea or the Roman world in 6 BCE or 6 CE.

The author apparently is trying to bring Augustus Caesar into the story to show that Christians are good Romans. He wants to tell us that the birth of Jesus in Nazareth was a direct result of Jesus' father following Caesar's orders.

The author makes a similar point of expressing Christian-Roman patriatism in the passion section:

1: Then the whole company of them arose, and brought him before Pilate.
2: And they began to accuse him, saying, "We found this man perverting our nation, and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ a king."

Here, the author is trying to blame the Jews for the idea that Jesus is not in favor of paying taxes to Caesar. Obviously, he wants his audience to believe the opposite: that Jesus was in favor of paying taxes to Caesar.

In any case, the author is not concerned with people believing there was worldwide census ordered by Augustus Caesar, he simply wants to bring Augustus Caesar into the tale.

The writer who had airplanes shoot King Kong off the empire state building didn't really care if his audience believed it really happened or not. He was concerned with showing the brute superiority of modern technology over primitive nature. Likewise Luke was making a political point about the relationship of Christianity to the Emperior, and he was not concerned about history.

To read Luke's concerns as the concerns of a person interested in history is to fundamentally misunderstand the text. At no point does he show the least concern for history or give the least indication that he is writing history.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Diogenes the Cynic

Given his class as a Galilean peasant, definitely not. Citizenship was a special and elevated status within the empire. It wasn't just extended for no reason to the most marginal classes of the most remote client kingdoms. John Crossan said in Historical Jesus that the artisan class (of which Joseph would have been a member if he was a carpenter) was a fringe class below even that of a peasant. There is no theoretical way that I can conceive of in which Joseph could have been a Roman citizen. The only ways to become a citizen were by being born to a Roman father, by service in the army or to the state or by paying large sums of money. Do any of those options sound very plausible for Joseph?

Furthermore (and this is the kicker) if Joseph had been a Roman citizen then JESUS would have been a Roman citizen, and under Roman law Roman citizens could not be crucified. So there you go. Roman citizenship for Joseph just is not anything close to a genuine possibility. Augustus' census of 8 BCE was only meant to count Roman citizens. It's unlikely that it would have extended into Palestine at all, but even if it had, it would not have applied to Joseph, and it certainly would not have required him to return to his ancestral home (and just out of curiosity, how were the Romans supposed to verify whether any of those ancestral homes were genuine? Did they have some kind of record of where every peasant's ancestors lived 1000 ago?)
It's not really that curious at all. Luke needed a way to get Jesus' parents to Bethlehem so that Jesus could be born in the same town as David. The evidence from Mark and from John suggests that there was already a tradition (authentic or not) that Jesus was from Galilee. After casting around for a likely device, Luke found the Quirinius census (probably in Josephus) and decided that was the reason the Josephs were in Bethlehem.

As for plausibility -- have you read the freaking thing? If Luke's audience could swallow man-gods, virgin births, resurrections and all the other miracles, then objecting to a little thing like the Bethelem trip would have been straining at gnats.

spin

I don't thin anyone is interested in your appeal to authority. Your claims of what exists are irrelevant. Either you provide your argument here or you are emptyhanded, saying nothing.

There is nothing ambiguous about the grammar in the sentence. There is no way to eke out wriggle room for another meaning. All you need do is show that prwth can reasonably be transcribed as what you insist on, "proti". You've been told that "i" is a transcription of a iota. There is a standardized transcription system for ancient Greek used in all scholarly internet mailing lists and forums. The final letter as has been pointed out is an eta. Continuing to use wrong forms just shows that you are not being scholarly in your approach.

In no sense. You are being wilfully lacking in knowledge.

Utter rubbish. The census that Luke has the Joseph family unaccountably returning from Galilee to Judea for was a taxation census. This was not possible before 6 CE, when the Romans took administrative control of Judea.

This is your conclusion driven logic. We know where you want to arrive but have no way of getting there.

The writer doesn't show that he is aware of all the history necessary.

The verse we are looking it is not ambiguous in the sense that you want it to be. Quirinius's Syrian governorship is the time reference given in the verse. The Syrian governors from Varus's first governorship through to Quirinius are well-known. There is no opportunity for Quirinius having a prior governorship.

At the same time the vast effort to deny the obvious, ie that the Quirinius census of 6 CE is the one we have and positing another is purely tendentious, is overlooked because it is not history that the deniers are interested in.

If you have a recorded census performed by a person who was certainly in the position to carry out that census, why look for another one apparently undocumented one, attempting to insert the earlier census in a period which doesn't allow the sort of insertion that you are trying to make, ie not allowed by the historical context, I must assume that you are not interested in history.

We are not invesigating modern Greek. There are too many differences to bring in the confusion it would imply. You are just pleading that you don't know anything about the subject, but hey, what the hell, modern Greek isn't ancient Greek, but itt's close enough for you.

Here we go beyond the translation as it is often necessary. That's what is expected if you want to talk.

If you are unable to argue a case, don't cite others' efforts. You would not be in the position of understanding them.

Tendentiousness doesn't equate to "genuine". And you show your apparent (to me) ignorance by insisting on "proti".

People may have their opinions. What good is that when we, by necessity, are looking at the source materials and working with them. If you don't have the credentials to participate in the horserace, you don't run. This is neither a maiden nor a novice race.


spin

Amaleq13

There is no reason to suspect that any Christian reading the story would have any motivation whatsoever to critically examine any claim made within the story. The fact that Christians to this very day are willing to accept it despite having the blatant idiocy pointed out to them clearly supports my point.

The passage appears to serve two purposes: 1) Create the appearance of fulfilling what he considered to be an important messianic requirement and 2) create a connection to a known historical event.

You left out the crucial adjective of "Christian" in describing his audience and, with regard to their own faith, a more credulous people you will not find. That was, after all, the expressed opinion of the very earliest Christian's Roman critics.

RUmike

I think another purpose was that it made Joseph look like a good, law-abiding Roman citizen (although we know Galileans were not). This is an important theme to Luke.

Amaleq13

Interesting observation. A subtle differentiation being made between Joseph (and by extension, Jesus) and the "typical" Galilean?

Doug Shaver

Can you offer any reason for presuming that 2nd-century Christians were more adept at critical thinking than 21st-century Christians are?

Given any story about the past, it is a false dichotomy to say that the author either told the truth or was lying. Error is also a possibility, and so is fiction.

If I were accusing Luke of lying, I would be claiming not only that what he wrote was untrue, but also that (a) he knew it was untrue and (b) intended to deceive his readers into thinking it was true. If he believed the story, then he did not know it was untrue and so was not lying. If he was writing fiction and expected his readers to know it was fiction, then he intended no deceit and so was not lying.