The Virgin Birth 4: That Pesky Census

When we start to talk about objections to the birth stories about Jesus in the Gospels, the supposed problem of the census mentioned in Luke 2:1-2 has pride of place. Luke seems to be saying that Jesus was born at the time of a census ordered by Caesar Augustus for the whole world, and that this "first" census has something to do with a Roman governor named Quirinius. But the only census of Judea that we know about under Quirinius as governor was much too late--in A.D. 6. What's up with that?  The literature on the census is vast, and I can't begin to cover it all. But in this episode I show that it's extremely improbable that Luke is actually saying that Jesus was born that much later. We can tell from other verses in Luke that he knows quite well that Jesus was born in the time of Herod the Great. I respond to several skeptical objections that are fundamentally misguided and lay out several plausible explanations of Luke's reference to the "first" census and to Quirinius.   Here's another point I didn't mention in the podcast: What needs to be probable is that one *or* the other of these is true--what probability theorists call the disjunction. So I am not merely saying that if something is possible it's probable. I'm saying that each of these is reasonably plausible in itself and therefore that it's quite probable that one or the other of them is true, meaning that Luke is accurate here. This is an important point to keep in mind.   It's also extremely *improbable* for other reasons that Luke was just making up the claim that a census occurred at the time of Jesus' birth or was saying that Jesus was born in what we would call A.D. 6.  

Here is the accompanying blog post for some more information:  https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2020/12/some-more-notes-on-census-in-luke.html  Here is the article by John Thorley that I mention in the video:  https://www.jstor.org/stable/642500?seq=1  Here is my recent debate on the Nativity with atheist Jonathan Pearce:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PloRcUHBMU  

Originally uploaded to YouTube Dec 20 2020