mens_sana

Perhaps you didn't notice that provision for registration in the city was made for those who had moved to the city. If Joseph and Mary had relocated to Nazareth, they would have registered in Sepphoris or perhaps with the administrative scribe who covered the rural Nazareth area, not in Bethlehem. A general rule for collecting taxes was to get the taxes, not make it more difficult for the taxpayer to report them.

Diogenes the Cynic

If they lived in Nazareth, the census wouldn't have applied to them at all. Galilee was outside of Quirinius' juridiction.

Vox Veritas

None of the above is true; however, in any case what source supports this idea?

spin

The census of Quirinius was caused by the absorption of Judea into the imperial province of Syria. Galilee was under the administration of Herod Antipas.


spin

Amaleq13

I believe the primary source denying your denial of the truth is Josephus.

Gamera

I think the passage is ambiguous, which is why we can discuss it as being an issue. I think that ambiguity itself is telling, since if Luke was just being fictive you wouldn't expect his language to bear an ambiguity that arguably refers to an historical event, the Augustan census, that in fact did take place around Jesus's birth.

I think proti ordinarily means before, but again this is not a clear passage and scholars with better facility with NT Greek have suggested readings that use proti to refer to that most notable of all censuses, the Augustan census. This makes sense to me for the reasons I have noted: Luke sounds like he knows what he's talking about, but it sounds garbled, which suggest to me that someting happened in Judea during the Augustan census which didn't get recorded elsewhere (I mean it was a client state) and required Joseph to go to Bethlehem for whatever reason. Again, if Luke was just in a fictive mood why would he come up with such an ornate explanation unless he was drawing from some tradition he knew about but we do not. He could have just said Joe and Mary were visiting relatives at the time. The sheer oddness of it argues for some grounding in tradition, if not historical fact.

Now, I sense you're asking me, does it matter if Luke got it wrong and honestly confused the two censuses. The answer from my standpoint is no. I really don't give a tinker's damn where Jesus was born since that's part of the gospel narrative, but not the gospel message per se. Christianity is based on the gospel message, not the gospel narrative.

Gamera

But that strengthens my position, not those who claim that Luke was a fabulist who didn't purport to be writing history.

For those sophisticated enough to read Luke, it would be clear whether he was purporting to write history versus some fictive religious hagiography.

So that puts the burden on those who claim Luke was utterly and completely misinterpreted by is readers, who then went on to propogate a view of Luke as history.

This has to be the biggest goof up in literary history, and so that requires extraordinary proof. I am unaware of any parallel, except, as I noted Bunyan's bad attempts at irony, but then Bunyan didn't change western history. He just got himself thrown in jail.

Gamera

We know a great deal about literacy in the Roman Empire, but opinons differ. I think it's fair to say that it was in a state of limited literacy, much like the late medaeval period in Europe. However the consensus seems to be, the more the issue is studied, the more prevalent literacy appears to have been. It should also be noted that Jews (at least Jewish men) probably had a higher than average rate of literacy in the ancient world due to their obligation to read the Torah. So Luke probably had a significant audience of Christianized Jews and literate Greeks and Romans.

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1992/03.03.07.html

http://www.basarchive.org/sample/bsw...=4&ArticleID=4

Vorkosigan

That's an interesting question, and the set of choices you've given us doesn't capture the actual situation. The earliest Gospel is Mark and Mark contains no markers of dates inserted by the author. The writer could care less about dates. He's read Josephus War and knows some of the history, but that is secondary to him. He's producing story and nothing more.

Luke comes along and writes a fake history using the conventions of Hellenistic Romance. Everything that happens to Paul in Acts is a convention of the historical romances -- shipwrecks, being warned by God in a dream, meeting with powerful individuals from history, miraculous escapes, trials, etc. Luke is deliberately writing Faux History, in both his Gospel and in Acts. It looks like history if you don't know the conventions of fiction, because the historical romances derived their narrative techniques and convention from history. Luke was not writing fiction and not writing history -- he was writing fake history using techniques from both fiction and historical writing.

It might have been clear enough to some, but we don't hear about them. They were the brainy ones who laughed and paid no attention because they'd heard it all before in a dozen books. They left no negative mark on history because the new religion was a joke to them. Not until Lucian and Celsus in the latter half of the second century was the new religion the subject of attacks from people with brains. No, this new text was read out to the illiterate and the uneducated, who had no idea it wasn't true.

Even in our day and age, people still write letters to Sherlock Holmes asking him to solve cases, and they make the pilgrimmage to Jack Dawson's grave in Canada even though that Jack Dawson had nothing to do with the fictional one in Cameron's Titanic. How then can you possibly imagine that ancients would be so smart as to distinguish, or to want to distinguish, between fiction and history so clearly.

JoeWallack

JW:
Confirm this Statement please. Is the above what you think or did you mean to say prwth ordinarily means "first". (JW thinking this embroilment first became misleading of the Serious Richbius)



Joseph