Much has been said about Luke's excellence as an historian. Luke did indeed emulate the models of historical narrative which were current in his day. But to claim that Luke is a consummate historian by modern standards--as many evangelicals do--is a position which cannot be maintained. In a letter to me, F. F. Bruce concedes that conservative apologists have been too eager to declare Luke's inerrancy. So eager was W. M. Ramsey to prove Luke correct about the enrollment in Bethlehem that he, according to Bruce, "unwisely damaged his well-founded reputation as a very considerable scholar." In his Anchor Bible commentary Catholic scholar J. A. Fitzmyer lists other historical mistakes in Luke's writing and offers the most definitive argument against Ramsey's claims about the famous Christmas census.
There is no record of Caesar Augustus' decree that "all the world should be enrolled" (Lk. 2:1). The Romans kept extremely detailed records of such events. Not only is Luke's census not in these records, it goes against all that we know of Roman economic history. Roman documents show that taxation was done by the various governors at the provincial level. As we shall see later, the property tax was collected on site by travelling assessors, thus making unnecessary Joseph's journey away from what little property he must have owned. Gleason Archer quotes a census expert who claims, without documentation, that "every five years the Romans enumerated citizens and their property to determine their liabilities. This practice was extended to include the entire Roman Empire in 5 B.C.E."1 This goes against the fourteen-year cycle which Archer himself uses to argue that Quirinius was pulled from his busy duties in Asia Minor to do a Syrian census in 7 B.C.E., fourteen years earlier than the one recorded in Josephus and Acts 5:37.
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We can now understand why Jesus never mentions his birth in Bethlehem; and that, except for the birth stories, Jesus is always connected with Nazareth. The writer of John apparently does not know of Jesus' alleged birth in Bethlehem. Nathanael does not know it (7:46) and no one answers the challenge of the crowd when they say "Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the scriptures said that the Christ...comes from Bethlehem?..." (7:42). In Evidence That Demands a Verdict evangelical Josh McDowell challenges skeptics to assess the evidence for the Christian faith. McDowell uses the mistranslated Vatican inscription and ascribes it to Quirinius without good scholarly reasons. He even cites the Egyptian papyrus above, but astonishingly enough implies that it required people to return to their ancestral homes.9 Concerning the birth stories of Jesus, the evidence demands this verdict: most of the details are legendary and Jesus was in all probability born in the Galilean town of Nazareth.
