The census narrative, like the massacre of the infants one, is fictional. They are storytelling vehicles for getting Jesus to fulfill messianic prophecies.
Specifically, Micah had clearly prophesized that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. But it was well known that Jesus was from Nazareth in Galilee. Matthew and Luke both invented stories to address this problem, but they were completely different. (In fact the two stories of Jesus’ birth hardly agree at a single point, other than the identity of his parents.) Matthew’s story was that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (he doesn’t mention that this was anywhere other than where you’d expect, his family’s home), the wise men came to see the baby, Herod heard of this and ordered the slaughter of the innocents, from which Joseph and his family fled to Egypt. When they returned after Herod died, they were afraid to return to Bethlehem so they moved to Nazareth. Luke, who apparently hadn’t read Matthew’s version, told the story of the census, which required everyone to return to his ancestral city, and thus explains why Joseph and Mary, who lived in Nazareth, were in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. Asimov addresses the census story bluntly in Asimov’s Guide to the Bible:
–Mark
Yes, but only the short form.
Isaac Asimov isn’t exactly considered a reliable source, even among nontheistic historians.
While the story is garbled, many historians believe is quite possible and even plausible. The odds that a young mother might give birth (perhaps before it was expected) while travelling is hardly impossible. It’s certainly been garbled, but of course the reason they would have been travelling was rather less important to the writers than why. Given that Joseph may have been born in Bethlehem, and possibly owned property in or near there, there need be no great mystery about it.
Indeed, it’s by no means certain that Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth before the birth of Jesus.
The question I was addressing was whether there was a census as described in Luke. I hope we can agree that there was no such census (regardless of ad hominem attacks on Asimov). Likewise, it’s highly unlikely, though not quite as unlikely as the census, that the slaughter of the innocents ever happened. It seems much more plausible that the two writers created these stories out of whole cloth to match the prophesy, than that an actual event was “garbled” into two such disparate stories.
–Mark
There is NO historical account of the slaughter of the innocents. Absolutely none whatsoever.
What do you find ‘unlikely’ about it?
An argument from silence isn’t particularly strong evidence. Plenty of things happened in first century Palestine that Josephus never wrote about.
If you don’t consider Matthew’s Gospel a historical account, then sure.
The basic reasons for finding the Matthew census story unlikely are:
(1) This is a stupid way to do a census. The purpose of the census is for taxation, and you want to know where people will actually pay their taxes, not where their ancestors are from;
(2) The Romans were not stupid;
(3) Whoever wrote Matthew had a strong incentive to make shit up so that the narrative matched the existing prophecies.
What reasons do you have to think the Matthew narrative is reliable?
And by Matthew of course I mean Luke.
Matthew’s Gospel was cobbled together from other sources many decades after the events in question took place. By no means is in an historical account.
No I don’t. Matthew was not a historian and wrote the gospel years after after the events happened, and to convert people to Ch4istianity. Hardly an informative, unbiased source.
Which does make a little bit of difference, since Luke wasn’t into matching prophecies to the same degree Matthew was.
I find an argument based on “the government would never do anything so stupid” to be… dubious.
Did Luke (the gospel writer) just make stuff up to match the prophecies?
Was Luke reporting what he thought was the truth, but which was actually made up by some earlier person?
Was this based on something that actually happened, the nature or details of which had gotten warped and garbled by the time they made it into Luke’s gospel?
Or was the census a real event, though the context in which it made sense is now lost to us?
I don’t know enough to rule out any of these possibilities.
We do have a decent number of records from that era.
We know who was king at approximately what time.
Herod the Great was both Great and vicious.
However, in his defence, this was about the same level of behaviour of much of the ruling class there. Josephus, particularly, loved to list all Herod’s nasty activities. Yet from all the sources of the times, we see NOTHING about a massacre of children other than that one bible passage.
There was a simple census taken, IIRC, by the governor of Syria and the area, somewhere around the time of Jesus birth give or take a decade or two, but it did not involve people wandering all over the landscape. Some think that memories of this were used by the gospel writer to explain the Nazareth vs. Bethlehem issue.
IIRC, Herod the Great ruled all of Judea, but when he died the lands were split up and Herod Antipas his son only ruled the north around Samaria and the Sea of Galilee, not Jerusalem.
The only non-Christian documentation of Jesus was an off-hand mention by Josephus in his history of the Jews. There have been books and books written about how much of those few sentences are authentic Josephus and how much are additions or edits by Christians over the next few centuries to ensure the “political correctness” of the description.
The general consensus is that the bold parts are likely Christian “corrections”. Note the remaining pieces tend to tell a relatively coherent story that a non-believer might relate of a minor sect active in the area.
The preponderance of evidence suggests there was a Jesus, he was born somewhere around where we think he was, about the time we think. The trail he leaves behind in the historical record means there must be something there, even if severely distorted by later ideology.
I suggest reading Zealot by Reza Aslan. He goes over the evidence and suggests:
-Jesus was born in Nazareth; possibly illegitimate. (The gospel passage “is this not Jesus, son of Mary” is an insult - most people were described as son of their father, to single out the mother instead suggests a paternity deficit.)
-Jesus would have worked as a “tekton” which could mean carpenter or day labourer. There’s not a lot of woodwork in a small village, ost likely he walked to one of Tiberias nearby town rebuild projects for day work.
-Jesus got involved in preaching and religious zealotry, most likely following and learning from John the Baptist. Later Christian gospel edits had to downplay John as less important, rather than the master.
-Jesus then wandered Galilee preaching to ever larger crowds until he went to Jerusalem for the big finale.
-Jesus trashes the commercial activity of the temple, scares the hell out of the established order, who have him arrested and executed.
Jesus’ original real message is unclear. Like many before him, he wanted to free the Jews from Roman occupation. he appeared to have some sort of belief that he would cause a Jewish version of “Arab Spring” and the Romans would be driven from the land by a combination of the true believers and divine intervention.
Some small group after his execution huddled in a corner of the Temple trying to convert other Jews with mixed success. Saul/Paul was one of the ones trying to persecute this group until he had a conversion. He then went about making up his own version of Christianity which would appeal to gentiles. The rest of the apostles really didn’t care what he did as long as he didn’t try to interfere with their Jewish followers.
As he became more at odds with them, reading between the lines in Acts of the Apostles, the hostility deepened. He has some very nasty veiled things to say in epistles about interference from Jerusalem. Eventually, Jerusalem is sacked and destroyed and much of what’s left of the Christian followers are the gentiles following Paul’s tortured self-concocted version of Christianity - basically he takes the original Jesus’ teachings about saving Jews from Roman oppressors and sinful temple hierarchy, and has morphed it into a message about saving all men from sin in general.
All in all, there’s enough surviving evidence to suggest yes there was a Jesus, yes the timeline is not too far off - but any more precise detail is guesswork and evidence is muddied by time and biased editing.
There are almost no records at all from that period.
There is one: "When he [emperor Augustus] heard that among the boys in Syria under two years old whom Herod, king of the Jews, had ordered killed, his own son was also killed, he said: it is better to be Herod’s pig, than his son."[18]
Sorta late, but still…
But it’s certainly in line with the sort of stuff Herod pulled. Since it was such a small village, the number of infants was maybe a dozen, which was hardly newsworthy in those days. Herod was well know for this sort of killings and some of them are documented.
There’s one more quote by Josephus, and one which no historian doubts is real:
*Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: *
What makes this good is that the mention of Jesus is offhand and clearly not hagiographic. “…Jesus, who was called Christ,…”
The lines in the Testimonium Flavianum which you quote are almost certainly bogus to some extent. Still, as wiki points out: "The general scholarly view is that while the Testimonium Flavianum is most likely not authentic in its entirety, it originally consisted of an authentic nucleus with a reference to the execution of Jesus by Pilate which was then subject to interpolation.[5][6][7][8][10] James Dunn states that there is “broad consensus” among scholars regarding the nature of an authentic reference to Jesus in the Testimonium and what the passage would look like without the interpolations.
Regarding the historical issues of Matthew and Luke’s nativity accounts, it is interesting that these are also the two that give the genealogy of Jesus. Matthew from Abraham and Luke from Adam (and thence to God).
Both are a mess. Names given elsewhere are omitted. They contradict each other. From David to Jesus, not enough names are given to properly span the time. Etc.
(One thing that always generates a big “sigh”. People have “obvious” explanations for the problems. Yet, you get different “obvious” explanations. If they are so “obvious” then why don’t people agree???)
Plus ascribing Adam as the first human definitely gets you out of universe of history.
Passages side-by-side with those lists just can’t be assumed to have a lot of reliable info.
As to Paul and Jesus’ birth. Like just about any aspect of Jesus’ life, he says little. He does say “born of a woman, born under (or subject to) the Law”. The first no doubt to assure people that Jesus wasn’t created in some special way and the second to counter the illegitimacy issue. Nothing else special is noted. The ordinariness in which he refers to Jesus’ birth strikes me as quite contrary to the nativity stories. And since he was writing earlier than Matthew or Luke, this says a lot by omission.
Note that working backwards from when Jesus began preaching and Luke’s statement that he was “about 30” at that time gives a birth year around 1BC. Significant fudging has to be done to push that back to Herod the Great.
Trying to figure out specific dates in the Gospels requires a lot of guesswork, picking one passage and ignoring another, etc. Not exactly rigorous stuff.
That it would have been an insult is speculation, particularly since the father (“the carpenter”), is mentioned, if not named.
The actual statements, in chronological order, were:
There’s the census in Syria and Judea, but about 6AD
As Wikipedia mentions, Luke contradicts himself and Matthew who both say that Jesus was born in the reign of Herod the Great 4BC or earlier, before Quirnus’ census of 6 or 7AD. Similarly, there’s no mention anywhere of any Roman census requirement to return to ancestral birthplaces although there are other records of censuses at times elsewhere in the empire. Most likely, someone writing over half a century later, in the days before reference material, simply conflated distant memories to serve up a quasi-plausible story why a Nazarean would be born in the City of David.
Also, Augustus’ censuses were only for Roman Citizens: