Did the "Carol Service" Census Really Happen?

If you ask an educated atheist to show that the events described in the New Testament didn't really happen, the number one place they pick is the "carol service" census described in Luke 2.

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. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.
Luke 2:1-5, NIV

Bock identifies five problems people cite when it comes to this passage.

1. There was no known empire-wide census under Augustus
2. No Roman census would have required Joseph to go to Bethlehem to register
3. Israel under Herod wasn't officially part of the Roman Empire until Herod died in 4BC
4. Josephus wrote that the first Roman census was under Quirinius in AD6, and that caused a revolt
5. Quirinius wasn't governor of Syria until 10 years after Herod died. Herod died in 4BC, Quirinius became governor of Syria in AD6.

(It's worth noting in passing that pretty much everyone agrees Jesus was born in 5 or 6 BC - the chap who invented the BC/AD dating system guessed a date for Jesus' birth and got it close, but a few years out).

Some Answers...

Here are some answers to those problems, again adapted from Bock...

1) The Romans liked doing censuses because they liked taxing people. We know there was ongoing census activity across the Roman Empire at the time of Herod.

3) We also know that vassal kings (like Herod) did censuses too when Rome told them to. There's even evidence that Jews under Herod were paying Roman taxes (and hence had been censused).

If there was a census for Roman taxation and at Roman command under Herod, it makes sense that...

2 & 4) If Herod did a census (before 4BC), he might have done it Jewish-style rather than Roman-style. A Jewish-style census could well involve going to ancestral towns, especially if Joseph owned land in Bethlehem as he might well do if descended from David. Jewish land ownership was tied to who your ancestors were. A Jewish-style census wouldn't have caused riots like the Roman-style one in AD6 and so is less likely to be mentioned by Josephus, who is the only non-Biblical historian describing Palestine in that period.

It's also clear that the census Luke is talking about isn't the one in AD6. For example, a census after 4BC wouldn't have required Joseph to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem - after 4BC they were in different provinces. Luke also knows about the AD6 census - he mentions it and the rebellion in Acts 5:37.

So what about Quirinius? Luke 2:2 reads "This was the first census that took place whilea Quirinius was governor of Syria." But the NIV has a footnote saying “Or this census took place before...” The word in question is πρωτος (protos) - dictionaries define it as “first, before, greatest”. So it could be talking about the census BEFORE the one where Quirinius was governor of Syria (the one in AD6 which caused all the trouble). We've got the same issue in English with the word "prototype", which is from πρωτος. Was the prototype of the Jaguar XF the first one, or was it something they made before they made the XF?

Literally, the verse reads “this was the first census of Quirinius, governor of Syria.” Qurinius may well have been asked to administer the census by Herod, even though he wasn't governor of Syria yet. In the same way, we might say "President George W Bush was a notorious drunkard as a young man", even though he wasn't president when he was a young man.

In conclusion, it looks like the difficulties with these verses might well cancel out. There isn't enough historical evidence to say "these verses are definitely right", but there isn't enough evidence to say they're definitely wrong either. That's one of the problems with ancient history - we often don't have enough evidence to check whether written accounts are true or not. On the other hand, we do have that evidence to check lots of other things that Luke wrote, and he gets it right time after time, so chances are he's right this time too.

Incidentally, if this is the best the sceptics can do when it comes to attacking the reliability of the New Testament, what does that say about the rest of their arguments?

Dealing with Discrimination

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, a complaint by the Hellenists arose against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution.
Acts 6:1, ESV

How does the early church deal with discrimination? And what can that teach us today?

1. Discrimination is Inevitable

At this stage in Acts, the early church hasn't done much wrong. They are sharing everything they have with each other; they are growing rapidly; they are taking care of the poor. And yet the perception of discrimination arises. Maybe it's because the Hellenists (Greek-speaking Jews, probably from outside Israel) didn't speak the language as well as Hebrews (Hebrew-speaking Jews from inside Israel). Maybe it's because the Hebrews knew people better or were pushier because they were in their home town and the Hellenists were visitors. But whatever the reason, the Hellenists felt that they were being discriminated against. No human system is ever good enough to completely remove the perception of discrimination against someone.

2. The Perception of Discrimination is Itself a Problem

According to various bodies, if someone thinks they are being discriminated against, then they are. I used to think that was stupid, but as time has gone on, I've seen the wisdom of it. It is importance not only that justice is done but that justice is seen to be done.

3. Avoiding Discrimination Really Matters

The apostles convene a full meeting of the whole church to discuss the issue (Acts 6:2).

4. Discrimination Shouldn't Stop Preaching

The apostles recognise that the problem of discrimination has the potential to stop the central work of preaching and prayer, so they choose 7 other people to deal with it. That's not to say that discrimination doesn't matter – of course it does. It can even be a central issue – God includes all sorts of people in his kingdom, and the Jerusalem Council was convened to deal with the question of Jews and Gentiles in the Church. But other things matter too, and we should take care that dealing with discrimination doesn't stop us from doing those things.

5. The Victims of Discrimination Should Be Put In Charge of Righting It

The Seven are an interesting group. The dispute, remember, was between Greek-speaking Jews and Hebrew-speaking Jews. And the group appointed to sort it out were: Stephen (Greek name), Philip (could be Hebrew or Greek), and Prochorus (Greek), and Nicanor (Greek), and Timon (Greek), and Parmenas (Greek), and Nicolaus (Greek – and he wasn't even ethnically Jewish). 6 of them were from the group that felt that they were being wronged. And that's important, because putting them in charge removes the perception of discrimination as well. The Greek-speaking Jews can't complain that they're being discriminated against because they are now the ones in charge of food allocation.

6. The Non-Victims Should Be Protected

Of course, in trying to right any discrimination, there's the possibility of overreaction. And so it's important that the apostles protect against this as well. The Seven are described as “seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom”. They weren't going to mistreat the Hebrew widows to try to get revenge or anything like that.

Application

So which groups in the church feel discriminated against? Women in ministry can feel discriminated against. And those who oppose women in ministry certainly do feel discriminated against.

The Biblical solution then is to put those who feel discriminated against in charge of the protection against discrimination. Legislation for women bishops should therefore be drafted and agreed on by two groups – godly, committed women in ministry and godly, committed people who oppose them.

Quirinius and the Census

I did a talk today on "Has History Disproved Christmas?" The answer, of course, was "No!" But here are a few of my notes about the census problem.

1 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register. 4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.
Luke 2:1-5, NIV 2010

Bock identifies five problems people cite when it comes to this passage.

1. There was no known empire-wide census under Augustus
2. No Roman census would have required Joseph to go to Bethlehem to register
3. Israel under Herod wasn't officially part of the Roman Empire until Herod died in 4BC
4. Josephus wrote that the first Roman census was under Quirinius in AD6, and that caused a revolt
5. Quirinius wasn't governor of Syria until 10 years after Herod died. Herod died in 4BC, Quirinius became governor of Syria in AD6.

Here are some answers to those problems, adapted from Bock...

1) The Romans liked doing censuses because they liked taxing people. We know there was ongoing census activity across the Roman Empire at the time of Herod.

3) We also know that vassal kings (like Herod) did censuses too when Rome told them to. There's even evidence that Jews under Herod were paying Roman taxes (and hence had been censused).

If there was a census for Roman taxation and at Roman command under Herod, it makes sense that...

2 & 4) If Herod did a census (before 4BC), he might have done it Jewish-style rather than Roman-style. A Jewish-style census could well involve going to ancestral towns, especially if Joseph owned land in Bethlehem as he might well do if descended from David. A Jewish-style census wouldn't have caused riots like the Roman-style one in AD6 and so is less likely to be mentioned by Josephus, who is the only non-Biblical historian describing Palestine in that period.

It's also clear that the census Luke is talking about isn't the one in AD6. For example, a census after 4BC wouldn't have required Joseph to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem - after 4BC they were in different provinces. Luke also knows about the AD6 census - he mentions it and the rebellion in Acts 5:37.

So what about Quirinius? Luke 2:2 reads "This was the first census that took place whilea Quirinius was governor of Syria." But the 2010 NIV has a footnote saying “Or this census took place before...”

The word in question is πρωτος - dictionaries define it as “first, before, greatest”. So it could be talking about the census BEFORE the one where Quirinius was governor of Syria (the one in AD6 which caused all the trouble). We've got the same issue in English with the word "prototype", which is from πρωτος. Is the prototype of a new car before that car, or the first one?

Literally, the verse reads “this was the first census of Quirinius, governor of Syria.” Qurinius may well have been asked to administer the census by Herod, even though he wasn't governor of Syria yet. In the same way, we might say "President George W Bush was a notorious drunkard as a young man", even though he wasn't president when he was a young man.

In conclusion, these verses don't seem to provide good reason to doubt the historicity of Luke's account.

Yet More Wordle

Continuing on from my last post, here are some more Wordle images from the text of the ESV translation of the Bible. I'm using the ESV because it's fairly literal - so it gives you a good idea of what the underlying words are in Hebrew and Greek. Although I'd rather use a translation which is gender-neutral when the underlying text is gender-neutral, the ESV is much more readily available in electronic format than the NRSV.

Anyway, here's a Wordle image for the gospels:

And here's Paul's letters:

Here's one for the rest of the New Testament:

Which can be subdivided into the General Letters:

And Revelation:

Here's one for the whole NT:

Answering Richard Dawkins?

Some years ago, there was a group of men called the Jesus Seminar. They didn't believe that what the Bible said was true, and they were trying to work out what Jesus actually said. They did so using a rather strange method. They tried looking at what the Bible said that Jesus said, and getting rid of everything that might have been said by the Judaism of the time or by the early Church. Since Jesus was a Jew of the time, and the early Church came into existence largely as a result of what he said and did, those criteria are going to give an awful lot of false negatives. In addition, they wanted it to be in more than one source, but if the gospels were too similar they didn't count them, which is more bad criteria. Using their criteria, what you get out even a sceptical non-Christian historian would pretty much have to admit that Jesus said. But there are a lot of things that Jesus pretty certainly said that they will miss out. But anyway...

As I remember it, they ended up concluding that there was one thing that Jesus absolutely definitely said, which was so different from anything other people were saying, and it's something that we still ignore pretty spectacularly. It was this: "love your enemies".

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.
Luke 6:32-35, TNIV

All too often, we just don't do it. We love people who are like us or people who are nice to us. If people aren't nice to us, we try to be polite back and sometimes pray for them or something. But we don't really love them.

Let's take a clear example. Richard Dawkins. I lived round the corner from him for three years, and the extent of my love for him was not running him over in my car when he was cycling. That's polite, but not exactly what I'd call really loving.

The way that most Christians respond to Richard Dawkins usually seems to be taking one of the following options:

• Ignoring him and hoping he'll go away
• Finding a Christian who knows a bit about science to do a talk
• Writing a badly thought through response
• Finding someone who really has read Richard Dawkins and engaged with him to do a talk or write a book
• Finding someone to do a public debate with Richard Dawkins
• Praying for Richard Dawkins to become a Christian

I don't think any of those should be our first course of action. Some of them are helpful and useful, and some good books have been written on Dawkins. I think our first course of action should be to love him. I sincerely hope there are Christian organisations and churches and individuals who send him a Christmas hamper or something. Not because they want him to pay attention to them, but because they love him.

The way that things should work (e.g. in 1 Peter 3) is this:

• People attack Christians
• We respond by loving them
• People ask us about what we believe
• We tell them about Jesus

"The Secrets of the Twelve Disciples"

Just watching / watched this program on Channel 4. As with so many of these things, it's got some good and widely acknowledged information (James as leader of the Jerusalem Church, Thomas in India, conflict in the early church over Jews / Gentiles), and tries to say that a lot of it has been suppressed to make it look like a big conspiracy with the Vatican as the evildoers. Sometimes they were, and often they weren't.

There's an interesting mix of scholars and crackpot conspiracy theorists. The stories seems to fall into several main groups:

• focusing on well-acknowledged stuff (Thomas in India) which they find crackpots to deny and then claim that the deniers represent the church establishment
• focusing on well-acknowledged stuff (Peter in Rome) which they find ultra-sceptical people (described as neutral) to deny and then focus only on the most controversial aspects of it (are the bones identified as Peter's bones really his?) and focus on the potential vested interest. There was even an ossuary (bone box) from Jerusalem labelled "Simon son of Jonah" which the guy who found it claimed wasn't Peter, but the presenter claimed had to be. The classic test is the question as to if, in 2000 years people found a tomb labelled "Elizabeth daughter of George" in the wrong place, would they think it was the remains of Queen Elizabeth II?
• really dubious stuff (James in Compostella) that they get church people to defend

The whole thing seemed to strike me as very anti-Catholic. Now I'm not the greatest lover of Roman Catholicism in the world, though I know some good Catholics and the current Pope seems generally excellent, but it seemed to be decidedly nasty. Why the hatred of Catholicism? That's what I'd like to know... (but I could make some good guesses, mostly to do with embryology and authority claims)

Corporate Incorporation and Baptism

These are my thoughts semi-spinning off a seminar held at Wycliffe with the (very intelligent and well-read) Dr Benno van den Torren. It's quite possible I've mangled the arguments beyond recognition – if I've done so it's my fault.

Who makes decisions?

It's very interesting that the credobaptist movement only really got going during the Enlightenment, because it assumes some ideas which don't seem to have existed in the same way before then.

One of them is the notion of individual autonomy. In the modern world, we tend to think that the fundamental decision-making unit of society is the individual person, which incidentally is part of the reason for family breakdown and so on. Interestingly, the Bible teaches individual responsibility a lot, but doesn't teach individual autonomy, though we often read it back in from our culture.

Even in our culture, if we look at what actually happens with decision-making, not all individuals are autonomous. Some married couples or best friends always make decisions as a couple. Some types of disability mean that people depend on others for their decisions. The same could be said of some elderly people, who no longer make decisions for themselves, and some children, who do not yet make decisions for themselves.

In other cultures, it's even stronger. Some tribal cultures, the tribal chief will decide everything that matters. In some cultures, the corporation makes many important decisions. Where there is slavery, often the slaves do not get to make decisions for themselves, which is part of the reason we in the West hate the idea so much, because we value our own autonomy so highly. We even tend to describe relationships where one person does not have as much decision-making ability as we would like as “abusive”, but abusive relationships exist too.

Children are a particularly interesting example. The process of growing up, with all the stresses and strains of that, can usually be described in the (post-)modern West as going from the child having zero autonomy – they don't decide what to wear or where to go or anything to full autonomy.

So even in the West, the situation is a lot more complex than simply being individuals making their own decisions. There are still some corporate decision-making units, and there are lots of shades of grey.

The New Testament

The same was true in the Roman world in which the events in the New Testament take place. Slavery was very much legal, though with a large number of freedmen – ex-slaves. Wives and children were legally property of the husband / father, to the point where Paul could say that the difference between a slave and a son is that the son will one day inherit.

Some slaves do seem to have made their own decisions – Onesimus being a good example, even if he is most famous for running away, but there was wide variation in terms of both the educational level and the degree of autonomy that slaves had. Some were effectively estate managers, others were effectively treated as machines. Likewise with some wives – there are several places where Christian wives of non-Christian husbands are addressed.

What is interesting when we come to consider baptism in the New Testament world is that sometime individuals were baptised (for example the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, who seems to have been a very powerful slave), and sometimes whole corporate units are baptised because the person in charge becomes a Christian.

Examples:

One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. And after she was baptized, and her household as well, she urged us, saying, "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay." And she prevailed upon us.
Acts 16:14-15, ESV

There's no evidence of individual faith there from anyone in the household except Lydia. The household of a trader of purple goods would probably have included quite a few slaves and so on. Were there children? I don't think it matters. There's baptism without any record of individual profession of faith here.

And the jailer called for lights and rushed in, and trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them out and said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" And they said, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds; and he was baptized at once, he and all his family. Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them. And he rejoiced along with his entire household that he had believed in God.
Acts 16:29-34, ESV

Here, the whole household gets to hear, but only the jailer is recorded as believing, and the whole household gets baptised.

In that culture, it would have been very unusual for one of his slaves to refuse to go along with the master's beliefs. Which is why there's quite a bit in the New Testament about the difficult situation where a slave does become a Christian without the master doing so.

Other people who get baptised with their entire households: Crispus in Acts 18:8, Stephanas in 1 Corinthians 1:16. It's interesting that a decent fraction of all the baptisms we have recorded in the New Testament are baptising whole households. And whole households, not just everyone in the household except scullery maid number 3, who doesn't actually seem to have an individual faith.

The point is that baptism in the New Testament isn't just baptising people who believe; it also seems to be baptising anyone who is dependent on the believer for decision-making. They don't wait until the slaves profess individual faith or until they are free and so can believe without compulsion. If there were children in those households, would they have been baptised, or would they have waited? Waited for what? If slaves are being baptised, then children would be too.

The application to infant baptism today is obvious.

Stambaugh & Balch - The New Testament in Its Social Environment

Another book I've read and reviewed on my other blog is Stambaugh & Balch - The New Testament in Its Social Environment. It's basically a look at the social, political, economic and religious situation around the Eastern Med from about 300BC to AD150. Its pretty good at that. But they should have stuck to it and not bothered trying to think about theology.

Stambaugh & Balch - The New Testament in Its Social Environment

Another book on New Testament background...

This basically reads like a non-narrative history textbook, which is probably because it is. It seeks to describe the social, political and economic structures of the Eastern Roman Empire between about 300BC and 100AD, with particular attention to the situation in Palestine.

And they're pretty good at that. Where they get ropey is when they try dealing with the gospels or letters and getting theology or history out of them. They don't seem to be especially good at dealing with subtlety, and would be better sticking with ancient history.

Generally pretty interesting on the historical background front.

Borg & Wright - The Meaning of Jesus

A very interesting book, this one... Marcus Borg (about as liberal as a Christian can get, if not more so) and NT Wright (fairly conservative) discuss who Jesus was/is, who he thought he was, what he did, etc

In general, Borg takes the line that Jesus was a man (but not God) who in some sense after his death became "the Christ of faith", and that most of the gospel accounts are actually metaphors written back into the life of Jesus by the early church. This includes basically most of his teaching, miracles, birth, resurrection, etc. Wright takes a much more normal line - that Jesus was the Messiah, claiming to bring about God's kingdom and the true return from exile, that he was born of a virgin, raised from the dead, etc. He doesn't exactly follow the standard evangelical line, but I'd agree with everything he said, even though sometimes there's more to say as well. But you can't talk exhaustively about Jesus in one non especially large book.

What I found most interesting about the book was the difference in approach taken by Borg and Wright. Borg's liberal position is the one that traditionally is seen as more "scientific", but time and again the only arguments he uses for his position are "I think that..." and "It looks suspect to me...". They're almost all subjective. By contrast, Wright's approach is heavily evidence-based, looking at how first century Jews would have understood what Jesus was doing, examining evidence for how oral tradition works, etc.

It's also interesting looking at Borg's presuppositions - some of them are fairly clear in what he writes. He presupposes, for example, that God doesn't or can't act in the world, as he cannot see any explanation for the Holocaust otherwise. But his argument then hinges upon Jesus as a mystic, who experienced God within the world. If God cannot or does not act in the world, we cannot experience him in the world. Borg's approach is logically inconsistent.

Another example would be Borg's assumption that if something has a metaphorical meaning as well as a literal meaning, it was probably written only because the metaphorical meaning was true, rather than both being true. So, for example, Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey fulfils promises about what God's king would do from hundreds of years before. So Borg seems to argue that the early Christians saw Jesus as God's king, so wrote that he had fulfilled this prophecy (even though he hadn't) as a way of pointing to his identity. Which does rather raise the question, as Wright points out, of how on earth they came to believe that Jesus was God's king if he didn't fulfil the prophecy.

Borg also makes strange assumptions which almost seem designed to reinforce his position. For example, he assumes that if three gospels carry very similar stories, that one of them was written first, that the other two copied the story and made up their extra details, only leaving one source. Which makes me wonder then how anything could ever be attested by more than one source...

In some circles, the controversy over this book was because Wright acknowledges that Borg is a Christian. I don't know Borg; Tom Wright does. I'm glad it's God making the call, not me.

All in all, an interesting read and a good introduction to the whole "historical Jesus" debate. Whether that debate is worth bothering with, except to refute the sceptics, is a different question altogether.

Borg & Wright - The Meaning of Jesus

I've read and written a review of Borg & Wright - The Meaning of Jesus. It's a debate between two prominent scholars who profess to be Christians, one of whom doubts most of the Biblical accounts of Jesus and one of whom thinks they're true. It's pretty interesting - I've said a lot more in the full review.

Gerd Theissen - The Shadow of the Galilean

A quick mention that I've reviewed Gerd Theissen - The Shadow of the Galilean on my other blog. It's a pretty readable introduction to the socio-political situation in Israel at the time of Jesus and to liberal "historical" criticism of Jesus' life and ministry.