Around about Christmas time one is likely to hear that, in the judgment of many New Testament scholars, there are historical errors in the story of the first Christmas as told in the Gospels. Of particular interest for this website, elements of the story cannot be reconciled with the history as given by Flavius Josephus. Most evidently, regarding the Gospel of Luke, there are problems with the journey to Bethlehem that led Jesus to be born in a manger.

These problems raised my curiosity about the Jews who were one of the target audiences of the Gospel of Luke. How would Jewish readers of the late first century have reacted to the historically inaccurate story? And how could Luke make these rather clear mistakes in the first place? I’d like to discuss this by taking a more comprehensive view of Josephus than is usually done in examining the Christmas story.

The Problem of the Journey to Bethlehem

The basic problem is this. Luke begins his history in the time of “Herod, king of Judea” (Luke 1:5). Joseph and Mary travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to register for the Roman tax assessment:

“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 their own town to register.”

Luke 2:1–3 (NIV translation)

The problem is that the census did not take place until ten years after Herod’s death. Herod died in 4 BCE, and the census of Quirinius took place in 6 CE. Both of these pieces of information come from Josephus, who in turn drew on prior historians of the region. If Jesus was born during the reign of Herod (as Matthew 2:1 also has it) his expectant parents could not have traveled to Bethlehem during the census of Quirinius. 

There are many discussions of this issue. The classic work is Raymond E. Brown’s The Birth of the Messiah. While there are efforts made to preserve the accuracy of the Gospels (such as the “two censuses” theory), Brown explains why so many New Testament scholars find these arguments unconvincing (Brown, pp. 412 ff and Appendix VII).

But I wish to look at the Luke’s use of the census from a perspective other than its historicity. Luke’s nativity story is thoroughly Jewish in its setting, as if he intended it to be read by Jews. This would have been an audience in the latter part of the first century, when Luke’s work is generally thought to have been completed (the combined Luke-Acts covers events up to 60 CE). What meaning could Luke have expected the census to have for any Jewish readers of that time? 

The Importance of Quirinius’s Census in Jewish History

The Roman census Judea of 6 CE may seem like a bureaucratic detail that would not be long remembered. But Josephus draws a straight line between the census and the disastrous Judean revolt against Rome of 66–70 CE. The revolt was the culmination of a long process of losing the Jewish state. A reasonably informed Jewish person at the end of the first century would know the outline of that history. (We know most of it only through Josephus, who appears to have drawn on the works of Herod’s biographer, Nicolaus of Damascus.) 

The independent Jewish kingdom that had been established after the revolt of Judah Maccabee lasted for about a century before it fell under Roman domination. In 37 BCE, Herod was installed as a client king of the Roman Empire. Under Herod’s reign, Judeans enjoyed self-rule and were free to practice their religion, bolstered by Herod’s massive enlargement of the Temple complex in Jerusalem.

When Herod died, Emperor Augustus divided the country among Herod’s children. The northern and eastern portions were split off, and the rich central portion containing Jerusalem was given to Herod’s eldest son Archelaus. But Archelaus was a failure, and after ten years Augustus banished him and reduced his territory to a Roman province annexed to Syria.

It was this loss of sovereignty that created the necessity of the census. Augustus sent an eminent Roman, the senator and former consul Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, to govern Syria. As Josephus writes:

“Quirinius also visited Judea, which had been annexed to Syria, in order to make an assessment of the property of the Jews and to liquidate the estate of Archelaus.” 

Ant. 18.2 (Loeb translation); similar in War 2.117, Ant. 17.355 and 18.26.

Archealus’s lands had brought to him 600 talents in taxes annually—a huge sum—which would now be collected directly by Rome. But this census did not cover Galilee—and so no one in Nazareth would have needed to register. (For more on this annexation, see Steve Mason, Brill Josephus Project, War 2.117 n. 718).

It was resistance to this census that Josephus directly and repeatedly blames for the revolt that ultimately destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple. “Although the Jews were at first shocked to hear of the registration of property, they gradually condescended,” he writes, and many declared the value of their property. But a certain man from Galilee named Judas “threw himself into the cause of rebellion, declaring that the assessment carried with it a status amounting to slavery, and appealed to the nation to make a bid for independence” (Ant. 18.4; War 2.118). He “induced multitudes of Jews to refuse to enroll themselves” (War 7.252­). On these partisans, Josephus comments:

“They have a passion for liberty that is almost unconquerable, since they are convinced that God alone is their ruler and master.”

Ant. 18.23

So began the resistance against Rome. It simmered through the decades until exploding into war in the year 66. Josephus calls this extremist party “the Sicarii” in his first book, the Jewish War, “knife men”, equivalent to “terrorist”, and expresses his anger in a lengthy diatribe (War 7.252­–259). In his later work, the Jewish Antiquities, he calls Judas’s movement the “Fourth Philosophy”—in opposition to the three main schools of Jewish thought, the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes—and again blasts the extremists with a rage-filled denunciation: “They sowed the seed from which sprang strife between factions and the slaughter of fellow citizens.” Their actions produced butchery, famine, and the storming of cities, “until at last the very temple of God was ravaged by the enemy’s fire through this revolt.” (Ant. 18.4–10)

Luke himself makes reference to Judas the Galilean, not in the nativity story but in a speech by the prominent Torah scholar Rabbi Gamaliel set in the 30’s:

“Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered.” 

Acts 5:37

But Luke’s reference conflicts with the account by Josephus, who says neither that Judas was killed nor that his followers was scattered—in fact, Josephus is clear that their numbers grew over time. Moreover, Judas had descendants that pursued the resistance. Two of his sons, James and Simon, were crucified by the governor Tiberius Alexander around 46 CE (Ant 20.102). As the revolt began in the year 66, another son (or perhaps grandson), Menahem, broke into the armory at Masada and, with his newly armed men, proceeded to Jerusalem where he sought made himself the leader of the revolution (War 2.433). But when Menahem presented himself as the new king, rivals killed him. Menahem’s followers fled to Masada, including Eleazar son of Yair, another descendant of Judas’s (according to War 7.253).

This was the famous Eleazar that held out until Masada was the last fortress standing against the Romans after the country had been subdued; rather than surrender to the Romans, Eleazar reminded his people that “long ago we determined neither to serve the Romans nor anyone else except God, for He alone is man’s true and righteous Lord.” As they preferred death to slavery, “Let us die as free men.” It is this philosophy of Judas’s, derived during the time of Quirinius’s census, that drove the defenders of Masada to commit suicide rather than be captured (War 7.433–448).

In modern times, this tale of Masada is the most well-known story of the revolt, but there is little recognition it has its origins in the census cited by Luke.

How Would First-Century Jews Have Understood Luke?

Whenever Josephus mentions Quirinius, he mentions Judas the Galilean and vice versa. This essential aspect of the war against Rome would thus seem to have been remembered by Jewish readers of Luke even at the end of the first century. Even if they did not know all the details, Luke’s mere mention of a Roman census—the first census, as Luke emphasizes—would have immediately alerted these readers that he is dealing with the time when the freedom of Judea has been taken away and the country placed under Roman rule: the source of conflict that led to the Jewish Revolt. 

What would these Jewish readers make of the fact that Luke chooses to mention this trigger event of the resistance, the census of Quirinius, in his story of the birth of Jesus? 

First, would they detect the problem with Luke’s dating of the census? Luke has skipped over the ten years between the reign of Herod and the assessment by Quirinius. But there is a reason his readers as well as Luke could have been confused about the timing. It was a period of great unrest, and as it happened, there were two men named Judas that raised revolts. Near the end of Herod’s life, the earlier Judas, son of Seriphaeus, had ignited a protest against a golden eagle Herod had placed over the gates of the Jerusalem Temple; but Judas and his followers were executed. Reaction to these killings led to an extremely violent insurrection. Yet this was ten years before the census of Quirinius and the tax protest of Judas the Galilean. (War 1.648 ff; Ant. 17.149 ff.)

Luke could have made the equation of the two Judas’s. In fact, the Judas he describes in Acts 5, as mentioned above, conforms more to the earlier Judas than the later one, suggesting Luke did make this identification. Then the revolts of the golden eagle and against Quirinius may have been thought to be one protest, which would mean to Luke that the census did in fact occur just after Herod’s death. (Brown cites an explanation by R. Syme along these lines and considers it highly plausible; Brown, p. 555. The possibility that Luke made inaccurate use of Josephus, especially in pairing Judas with Theudas, is discussed by Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, pp. 205–213.) 

If Luke’s Jewish readers decided to look past, or simply missed, such problems, how would they have reacted to Luke’s mention of the pivotal census?

The obvious point is that Jesus and the resistance against Rome are born at the same moment. There are clear signs—such as the hymn to bringing down rulers in Luke 1:52—Luke means him to be the ultimate, even divine, expression of the revolutionaries’ goal to establish a nation, as Judas the Galilean would have it, where “only God is their ruler”, or, in New Testament terms, a “kingdom of God”. But on the other hand, the parents are shown complying with the census – they aren’t one of Judas the Galilean’s tax resisters. (When later Jesus is asked the critical question, “to trap him”, of whether he supports the anti-tax resistance, he acquiesces to the paying of the tax without overtly relinquishing the philosophy that God is the true ruler (Luke 20:25).) Is Jesus then meant to be a rival of the extremist movement?

In either case, Luke’s Jewish readers, after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70, knew that neither Jesus nor the resistance had accomplished the goal of a free state. What then, they would wonder, is Luke’s point with starting with the emotionally and politically charged census? They would have to read beyond Chapter 2 in order to try to solve that mystery. And that, no doubt, is just what Luke intended.

Bibliography

Brown, Raymond E. The Birth of the Messiah. (Doubleday, 1993)

Mason, Steve. Josephus and the New Testament. (Hendrickson, 1992)

Mason, Steve. The Jewish War. Vol. 1B of Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary. Edited by Steve Mason (Brill, 2008). Open access at the Project on Ancient Cultural Engagement.