Quirinius, Caesar, and the Census

Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name's James White, along with Riche Pierre, who, by the way,

I just, you know, everybody around the world knows that when you look up the term humble, one of the definitions provided is the

French, and the French are known around the world for their humility.

And so Rich hasn't really talked about this, but most people don't know this, but Rich was named the 2022 most famous Frenchman of the year by the

Prescott Chamber of Commerce and was given this amazing, and only people in Prescott would do this, this amazing copper cast croissant with a little

French flag in it. It's on his desk. It's great. It's wonderful. And so I just want everybody to know at the end of the year that we have some famous people working around here and that Prescott remains very, very, very proud of Rich.

And I forgot to close this. I'm not even sure I'll be able to now, but there we go. All right. So welcome to the program.

We haven't been in the big studio for quite a while. And I think Rich, I think the only reason that Rich asked me if I wanted to come in here was because he was getting a little concerned that he probably had forgotten how to run all of this stuff because it had been been really long time.

So here we are. We're in the big studio and hopefully we'll have some neat stuff for you today.

I did get a new book in David L.

Puckett. I had a professor named Puckett, but I don't think they're related. I could be wrong.

I don't know. He was professor, is professor of church history at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

So I don't know, he doesn't really look like Dr. Puckett, but he's a different Dr. Puckett. Anyways, Dr.

David L. Puckett, John Calvin's Exegesis of the Old Testament. And I just, it's not a huge tome, but I just happened to pop it open and my eyes fell on two things, interestingly enough.

The exegesis of Luther is also found to be lacking. The speculation of Luther here, as in other places, has no solidity.

This and other comments like it suggest that Calvin may have more reservations about Luther the exegete than Luther the theologian.

He is correct in recognizing that Luther's approach to the Old Testament differs from his own, a truth that also did not go unnoticed by Luther's follower,

Hunius. Luther accepts the idea that a biblical text should be interpreted according to its historical context and is critical of those who allegorize excessively, yet he often seems quite ready to ignore the historical context in his effort to find

Christ in the Old Testament. And then, next paragraph started, Calvin believes that the interpreter must understand the function of the biblical writings in the setting in which they were originally given.

The prophets were speaking first to their contemporaries. The interpreter must take into account the language, culture, and history of Old Testament time.

Calvin is not willing to base Christian doctrine on scripture texts that he deems inconclusive. He dares to adopt interpretations that do not provide the strongest support for Christian dogma.

Now, what's really interesting about that line, when it says he dares to adopt interpretations that do not provide the strongest support for Christian dogma, now, some of you will remember that last month, maybe, just a few weeks, there was a discussion about some of Calvin's students losing faith in the

Trinity, and this was connected to Calvin's very straightforward, consistent directions that he took in his commentaries, and the fact that he did not take common viewpoints from going all the way back to Augustine.

Of course, anyone who reads Augustine today will be left wondering, very often, how

Augustine came to conclusions that he did, and it's of no use to talk about the great tradition here because there was no great tradition that drove

Augustine to his conclusions, and there is no means of defining a great tradition in such a way as to do anything meaningfully as far as exegesis is concerned.

But anyway, it's fascinating to me, aside from the fact that I actually obtained the book—I didn't bring it in here right now—obtained the book that was being referred to, and talked to its author—I'm not getting into that today, but we'll get into it at another point, and talk a little bit about the fact that he didn't find the statements that were being made publicly to be overly helpful and relevant to his position.

But anyway, the point is—and this is not what we're talking about today, so don't tune out—we're going to talk about the

Christmas story today, actually. But I just happened to grab it as this came in, the first time

I've seen it, and I am just once again struck by the fact that the methodology that we use to defend the doctrine of justification, the resurrection, predestination and election, particular redemption, is the methodology that Calvin likewise consistently uses in interpreting

Old Testament texts. And it's just really, really interesting to me that even though Calvin did engage in controversy—they didn't have the same kind of debates back then that we have today—but the fact is that Calvin did—you know what happened when

Servetus sent him his book, and Calvin sent him the

Institutes, and Servetus sent him his copy of the Institutes back with all sorts of nasty stuff written in the margins, and stuff like that.

Calvin recognized that the methodology of defending the

Reformation had to be consistent apologetically. And I've said over and over and over again in the current controversies that my critics should try getting out of the hallowed halls and take their theological ruminations out into the real world, where you're dealing with people who don't start with your presuppositions, and see how it works, because that's what

Calvin was doing. And it's funny that we end up coming to the same conclusions on so many vitally important things.

So yeah, we'll probably have some more to say about John Calvin's Exegesis of the Old Testament, and I was given a book last night.

Kelly brought it home from our—the ladies, man, every year the ladies do this cookie exchange at Apologia, and they bring—I understand how this works, given most families at Apologia have between 5 and 11 children—but you come back with this bin of every kind of Christmas cookie known to mankind.

Not healthy at all, but really super yummy. But she also brought the book that I think

I had in PDF, but hard copy, of Calvin and Classical Philosophy, I think is what the title was.

I think Chris had said he was reading that in our chat channel, if I recall correctly. So we'll have some comments on that as if I find time to get through those things.

We are, real quickly, on a programming note, work continues on the upcoming trip through Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

And so if you can imagine I -10 south route through Houston, we're going to be stopping in Houston.

We're going to be doing minimally a presentation in Houston at the

Lutheran church that we did the debate on Molinism at. And minimally a presentation, hopefully a debate.

The pastor there is a go -getter when it comes to that kind of stuff. That's where the—for those of you who don't remember, that's where the debate,

Leighton Flowers and Pritchett, I think, against Zachariades and the other guy, the two hyper -Calvinists.

Hernandez, yeah. See, the French remember everything.

Especially how many times they lost to England in various wars they ran. But anyway, it's that time of year.

Anyway, same place. I can't give you details right now because we're still working on stuff.

But on the way to Louisiana, where we will be dealing primarily with subject of Roman Catholicism in that area.

And then up from Louisiana to Tennessee, where Jeffrey Rice is.

And then back a more northerly route. And all this is dependent upon weather.

Obviously, it's February. And you can have wonderful weather in February, or you can have really stinky weather in February.

I mean, right now, today's Tuesday. So Thursday night in Lubbock, where I was, had a great time just a few weeks ago.

Thursday night in Lubbock, they're expecting minus 12 degree wind chill.

And that's global warming in Lubbock. And so, yeah.

So think about that northern return route. And if you haven't gotten your church's information in to our roadtrip at aomin .org,

roadtrip one word, roadtrip at aomin .org email address, and you're sort of along those routes, now's the time to get it in and sort of wave the and there's a

KOA right down the road from us. That always helps. Always helps to have a

KOA nearby. No, there isn't. I wish there was a

KOA everywhere. There really isn't. And I mean, there are a lot of them.

And I've got 108 ,000 points stored up at the

KOA. So I need to start burning those things. But yeah, that's going to be right now.

It's looking like almost all of February. It really is. It's looking like a pretty lengthy period of time there.

So, and we'll be having a debate in Tennessee as well. So hopefully two debates on this trip.

And whether they will be live streamed or not, I can't tell you. I think if the one in Houston, I think the

Mulanism debate was live streamed, wasn't it? I think it was. I think it was.

It was, yes. Yes, yes, yes. So anyway, it's just disappearing.

Yes. Microphone turned off. Sorry, I forgot. Yeah. We know.

Okay. Anyway, so that's what's coming up. And then May we're back in Texas again.

It's hard to avoid Texas. And when you're driving east -west, and I've had at least one invitation to go north during the summer and wouldn't mind doing that at all.

That's definitely a direction we haven't gone yet and could maybe tie that in with coming back through Colorado, something along those lines.

That would be sort of neat to get up to the Dakotas, Nebraska area, stuff like that. And that would be something that would be enjoyable to do as long as there's still diesel fuel left to do it and the nation's still functional.

Who knows whether that will be the case. Okay. So it is the 20th of December, which means we are mourning here in Arizona because starting on the 22nd, the days start getting longer again.

And we all know what that means here in Phoenix, Arizona. And so, but it is,

I'm not even going to get into, oh my goodness, the catfights that have been going on on social media.

Christmas falls on Sunday a lot of times. I don't know why this year it was like, bring out the

Howitzers stuff. I'm really not getting it. But anyway, a lot of people are real on that particular subject.

But we're having church. We're just not going to go as long as we normally do.

I mean, hey, if Jeff Durbin does something for less than 30, you know, less than an hour, that's a major, major alteration and change right there.

But anyway, as you have opportunity and maybe if we could, you know, actually, if we had the fan running, it would also help to cover other certain sounds that we can actually hear.

If you know what I mean. The fan may not work. Somebody wishes he had a microphone today.

He's not sure what he'd say back, but he's been thinking of some ideas.

Okay. Okay. All right. All right. You all were watching when the whole thing fell apart.

Yep. Yep. There you go. So anyway, it is that time of year.

And if you have family and friends and you are meeting maybe with unbelievers and things like that, we live in a day, let's just be honest, the beauty of Linus's monologue in a

Charlie Brown Christmas. Okay. That was beautiful.

And yes, there was, by the way, if you've ever taken the time to do some background reading on it, there is a really special moment there when

Linus quotes the biblical phrase, you aware of this? When Linus quotes the biblical phrase, do not be afraid, what does he do?

He drops his blanket. And no one noticed it.

Well, until, I don't know when I first saw that, but realized, yeah, you know, that's his security blanket.

And then as soon as he says, do not fear, he drops his blanket.

And it was special, but that was 1965 -ish,

I think. I think you're about right. Yeah. I remember it my entire life. That's for sure.

That's a part of my youngest memories. And you could quote that in our society.

And not only was it not considered offensive, I'm sure there's something horribly racist about it now, according to very, very sad, unhappy people.

But it carried a weight and an authority that today the citation of Scripture simply doesn't have in our society.

And it doesn't because of a lot of skepticism, unbelief. Movies like the

Zeitgeist movie and Bart Ehrman and all the rest of that stuff is all around us.

So how do you respond to the reality that there is a tremendous amount of skepticism?

Most of us, again, do not study the New Testament documents, especially the

Gospels, in a parallel fashion. Well, that's because the majority of the

New Testament couldn't be studied that way. You can study Matthew, Mark, and Luke that way because they are telling the same story.

So you could put them in columns and when you read them that way, you see where the differences are.

And I remember I spent, I think it was nine years, teaching through the

Synoptic Gospels at PRBC many, many years ago. And when you use a good, solid, synoptic parallel, you're forced to deal with the differences.

And hence, you have to start off explaining and understand, well, explaining or understanding yourself the character and nature of the documents you're looking at.

So you could do a parallel study between Ephesians and Colossians. There are parallel materials there. You can do that, certainly, with the historical works in the

Old Testament. And so there are other places where those types of issues likewise come up.

But there are few areas where the weakness of a lot of our evangelical pulpit is exposed, as in this area when people raise objections based upon differences between Matthew, Mark, and Luke specifically.

You know, sometimes John jumps in there, but the Synoptic Gospels. And when it comes to the

Christmas story, here's what you'll hear, okay? And this is what we need to understand.

If the vast majority of your knowledge of Christian theology, the

Bible, things like that, comes from a solid upbringing in the church, then you can be sometimes taken aback and really surprised at some of the objections that come up outside of the context of the believing church.

So, in other words, within the unbelieving church, there is a lot of that liberalism, where it is assumed the

Bible is contradictory and things like that. And then, of course, just plain old secular, worldly people out there.

And so, when unbelievers, in the consistency of Scripture, when people who do not have

Jesus's view of Scripture, how about let's just use that, when people who do not have Jesus's view of Scripture look at the

Synoptic Gospels and what they say about the birth of Christ, they immediately recognize, well,

Mark didn't bother to tell us. And the predominant theory in scholasticism today is that Mark wrote first.

Matthew and Luke both had Mark, but they didn't have each other. And they edited

Mark and then relied upon a body of oral tradition that may have been in written form, but has never been seen, called

Q, Quella, the source, for Jesus's teachings, primarily.

And then they produced their Gospels based upon the edited version of Mark and what they chose to use out of this

Q source. And that this is how you're supposed to look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Now, I would simply point out, we have no idea what order the Gospels were written in.

It's unlikely, but it's possible John was written first. What is clear,

I do not believe in literary dependence. The vast majority of people who do would say, well, there has to be literary dependence, because there are some sections that are just so very similar that there's no other explanation.

These are the same people who, when you ask them, okay, when do you think

Luke was written? I was listening to a skeptic that actually I'm supposed to be having a dialogue with Thursday night.

And I was listening to a skeptic, and they were putting Matthew and Luke in the 80s, so written long after, probably not written by disciples, and written 50 years after the crucifixion and the resurrection.

And when you ask, why do you put the dating of those

Gospels at that place? The answer is always the same. Well, because it has to be before 80 -70.

It has to be after 80 -70, because you have

Jesus talking about the destruction of Jerusalem, and he couldn't have prophesied that. And of course, the early church used

Jesus's accurate prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem as part of their argument of Jesus's prophethood.

But we live among secularists today, even people who call themselves Christians. And so, they default to the idea that, no, no, that's not possible.

This had to have been written after the events that it actually talked about. That's why, when

Cyrus is mentioned by name in the trial of the false gods in Isaiah, that's why

Isaiah 40 and following has to be Deutero -Isaiah. Not written by Isaiah, but by somebody afterwards, because we know prophecy doesn't exist, despite the fact that Jesus upbraided the disciples for not believing the prophecies about him.

So, you know, that's just what we're facing. So, when we look at Matthew and Luke, we see that they have a very different recording of the birth of Christ.

They emphasize completely different things. And the idea that many people have is that, well, that they can't have had that kind of divergence, because they're using the same sources, and they're trying to tell the same story.

And so, there should be much more similarity between them. Now, the funny thing is, when you find the synoptic

Gospels saying the exact same things, then that's collusion.

And if they say different things, then that's taken as negative evidence as well. So, they can't win for trying.

We recognize that Matthew is writing to a very different audience than Luke is. He has a different style.

He is writing to a primarily Jewish audience. He's emphasizing fulfillment motifs.

He's looking at scriptures that, if we were to, you know, read the

New Testament for the New Testament, were given to the early church by Jesus as he taught the disciples after his resurrection.

But the skeptic says, this is just the early church scouring the Old Testament for anything that could be read as a prophecy, and then you write the history in such a way as to fulfill the prophecy.

That's how the skeptic approaches it. It has to, because there can't be anything supernatural. There can't be any knowledge of future events.

And so, you start with the assumption that the foundational claim of Jesus is false.

So, that's how you start your perspective. With that said, there is a major difference, obviously, between Matthew and Luke.

Luke starts off talking about how he wants to, in an orderly, researched fashion, lay out the truth.

And when you look at Luke, remember, a lot of people look at Luke and forget it's Luke -Acts. And especially if you ask the question, why did

Luke write this rather large body of literature? I think one of the best theories on that,

I mean, aside from what he himself said, so that someone would know the truth of these things, is that this was written as sort of an amicus brief at Paul's trial, so that it might be demonstrated that the accusations that the

Jews were making against Paul simply weren't true, and that this

Christian movement exists because God acted in time.

And if that's the case, then that's very different from what

Matthew's trying to do. And so, most of us know the story at the beginning of Luke chapter 2.

Now, it happened that in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus for a census to be taken of all the inhabited earth.

This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone was going to be registered for the census, each to his own city.

And Joseph also went from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem because he was the house and family of David, in order to register along with Mary, whose betrothed to him was with child.

So, we know the story. We're going to leave Matthew off to the side for right now.

We just don't have time to cover all that. I spent too much time at the beginning on other things. The key issues here, the key topics, are when the census took place, when

Quirinius was governor, and the nature of what the census was.

And if you've done almost any wandering outside the friendly confines of certain places in Facebook, you have undoubtedly run into the atheists and skeptics and agnostics and Muslims and others who will throw all the standard objections at you at this point.

And in fact, what happened was, I took home, and I was going to bring them in here, I apologize, but I took home the first volume of Commentary on Luke by the guy at Dallas.

His name is escaping me. There's too many names running through my head right now. And I had been reading that, and there's an excursus, excursus number two, as I recall, back in the 900s, about 930 pages in, that talks about the issue of the nature of the census and Quirinius and things like that.

And this morning, this is one of the useful things about Twitter, by the way.

This morning, I happened to see a tweet coming out of Tyndale House, not the publisher, but the actual

Tyndale House in England. And basically, it was commending, it wasn't an article, though, it was a chapter by Sabine Huebner on the issue of Quirinius and the census.

And what was fascinating is, the chapter is found in a book with this title,

Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament. Papyri and the

Social World of the New Testament. Now, I don't know about you, but I bet all of you had that one on your

Amazon wish list. I bet everybody is hoping to have a copy of Papyri and the

Social World of the New Testament. But what this illustrates is, some, in my opinion, some of the most helpful apologetic material is not found in well -named, well -read books.

When you think about it, Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament, what are papyri? Well, when the

English ruled over Egypt, they stole a lot of stuff from Egypt, and they, in their digs and in their archaeological work, came across a lot of papyri, which are ancient, written documents.

Now, we talk about the papyri of the New Testament. The earliest scraps we have in the New Testament are written on papyri, of course.

We'll let the audience silence their phones. Oh, there's only one person in the room other than me. Ewing? I have no...

No, no, no, it's Daryl Bach. Sorry, Daryl Bach was who

I was... Oh, Ewing. Yeah, no, that guy. Yeah, Dallas.

Thanks, guys. Very funny. Yeah, it was Algo. Well, we'll let

Algo go. Anyway, what was I talking about? So, these papyri from the

New Testament, they're very important, but what this book is talking about, and there have been a number of books like this, is that the vast majority of the papyri we found didn't have anything to do with the

New Testament at all, but they do give you a lot of insight into the social world of the New Testament that has never been had before.

And I wonder, it does make me wonder, you know, TR -only folks don't like the papyri.

They don't like the earlier manuscripts that were not accessible to Erasmus and to Stephanus and to Beza.

And I wonder, the new scholastics who are into the great tradition and all this kind of stuff, what happens when you get information like the papyri can give us that give us contemporary background to the

New Testament itself and shine such an important light on the New Testament and on early church history?

Because there has been stuff like that. I think of the papyrus that gives us the exact numbers of manuscripts taken from a church in Egypt when it was ransacked during the great persecution of 303 and 313, and how that helps us to understand the nature of the persecution that was going on at that time.

These are things that were, in essence, lost to history and lost to quote -unquote tradition, and yet now have been uncovered and are still being translated even to this day.

It's a large project, and new finds are being found all the time, and traditionalists don't like that.

But this does provide this fascinating insight, and they are contemporary documents to the time periods.

And so this book by Huebner, Papyri and the Social World in the New Testament, there's an entire chapter, chapter three, in those days that decree went out.

Now, Huebner is not trying to defend

Luke, is not trying to say that Luke is inspired or anything like that.

That's not relevant. But what is relevant is here is someone who is an expert on the wide variety of documents that are available from this time period.

And the suggestion that is made, and time's going by quickly, so I can't go into a whole lot of the detail, but the suggestion that is made,

Caesar Augustus, Octavian as he's known as well, one of the greatest leaders in Roman history, reigned for many decades, peaceful period of time, really the pinnacle of Roman power and expansion takes place during this time period.

And he did a number of these censuses that other sources record for us.

But there's no census in the time period that would have to be, well, no census recorded or a decree coming from Caesar Augustus.

Now, we do not have, but people just need to remember. We're talking 2 ,000 years ago. We have major works of history, but they are in no way, shape, or form exhaustive in what they record.

And it's fascinating, I did not know this until reading for today's program, that Tertullian and Justin Martyr, again,

I get to learn something and you get to learn right along with me. Tertullian and Justin Martyr, come to think of it,

I do remember having seen this, but I hadn't put two and two together. They both say to their opposition, their opponent, that they could go to the

Roman archives and verify what was being said about Jesus in the archive.

Now, the Romans recorded a lot of stuff and 99 .9

% of it has been lost to time. Unless it was chiseled in a wall and that wall survived, or unless it was recorded on these fragments of papyrus or put into one of those histories, the vast majority of it has simply disappeared.

That's what happens. And the vast majority of it that has survived has survived in Egypt because that's the only place that has the meteorological context to be able for stuff like that to survive.

It's not going to survive in Italy. Any type of paper substance is going to degrade rather quickly in that moist climate.

Well, it's not like it's all equally moist, but you know what I mean. And so, both

Tertullian and Justin Martyr made direct references to the public archives that were available in their days to substantiate what they were saying about events in Jesus' life, which is fascinating.

Caesar Augustus, there is nothing in the surviving record of a census that would fit in the time period that we need to look at.

Why? As weird as it is to us, part of this is because of the

Julian -Gregorian calendar stuff, which is way too complex for us to get into right now.

But both Matthew and Luke tell us that Jesus is born while Herod the

Great is still alive, and he dies in the spring of what we would call 4

BC. So Jesus is born at the earliest, or at the latest,

I'm sorry, in early 4 BC. That throws all of our stuff off as far as the rest of that goes.

And so, the other objection, aside from that, well, we don't have anything outside the

New Testament that tells us about this census. Secondly, Quirinius, we do know of him from history.

We know of him from Josephus and from a couple of other historical sources that have survived.

But he was governor of Syria around 6 AD, not

BC, but around 6 AD. And he's fairly well known. He's very popular in Rome.

He seemed to be a very efficient individual in running governmental processes in that particular part of the world.

And so, what you'll hear is, okay, there's no census.

Quirinius wasn't governor at the right time. And it's absurd that everybody had to go 50 miles away to register for a census that didn't take place.

So those have been discussed. Like I said, I was reading Bach's commentary this morning when this happened to pop up on Twitter.

And so, I grabbed the chapter from Huebner and read through it. Make a long story short, and it can get rather complicated.

Huebner basically says, well, a couple things. Octavian was really focused on knowing, on being very orderly in how he ran the

Roman Empire. And so, while there were decrees for major censuses, there were also many more local censuses.

The census is not just to find out how many people are in an area. It's for taxes. And censuses could be used as a political weapon.

Right around 8 to 7, what we call

BC, there is a rupture. Herod did something that Rome didn't like.

And Herod only reigned with Rome's support. And so,

Octavian, Caesar Augustus, reigns

Herod in. And it would make perfect sense that one of the best ways to do that would be for him to instruct

Herod to do a census. Because that shows his ultimate control in that particular area.

And it's right around this time period. And remember, a census didn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen overnight in our day.

Once the decree goes out, there would be 18 months, two years, maybe longer, where this process would be going on.

What's also interesting is, Huebner pointed out that the term that's used over here for governor by Luke.

Now, Luke is really good at the utilization of specific titles.

He's been lauded by historians for a long time.

Even as he records Paul's journeys, he will use the specific terminology that we didn't know until recently was used only in that area for a particular political office.

But Luke knew it. Because why? Because he was there. Because he was an eyewitness. And Huebner points out that the participle that is used here is also used of procurators.

Now, what's a procurator? A procurator was someone who had imperial authority to take a census, to be involved in that level of, we would call it bureaucracy, but financial bureaucracy,

I guess you might say. So we know that Quirinius eventually becomes governor of Syria.

But is it really all that outlandish to think that someone who successfully did at the emperor's request a census in an area, which means you get to know that area very well, would years later be made governor of that area?

Isn't that the normal way that things happen? I mean, bad governments make people governors who don't know anything about their area, and that ends up creating all sorts of problems.

But Caesar Augustus was brilliant. And Rome experienced so much peace under his reign.

He's not going to put people in charge who don't know the area. So wouldn't it make sense that Quirinius was procurator of Syria during that first census?

He becomes governor at a later point in time. And that would be in the time period right before 4

BC, which is where Matthew and Luke are basically putting Jesus' birth.

So why would David have to go to his own city? Well, again, Huebner points out and provides from the papyri examples of this.

Now, one of the thoughts across my mind before I read Huebner, one of the thoughts across my mind was this would make sense in Israel if the desire was to, in essence, follow the traditions of the fathers in regards to what tribe you were a part of, to know what each tribe was about.

That had a ring of truth to it to me. What Huebner points out is that we have direct papyri evidence of people who in a, in fact, if I recall correctly, this was in a local census, had to travel to be registered someplace else because they owned property someplace other than where they were living at that particular point in time.

And especially if this caused you to go across boundaries, if it was, if you were, if where you were now living and where your property was were all sort of under the same thing, that'd be different.

But if it's a different, under someone else's authority, you'd have to go and you'd have to register in both places.

We can understand how that would work if you own property in another state. There's a whole different tax stuff you've got to do in that type of context.

So we see how that works today. And so is it possible that there was some connection,

Joseph and his family, there in Bethlehem, which required him to go to that place?

Doesn't mean everybody had to do that, but the reality is he had to.

Now the skeptic just goes, no, this is just because of the prophecy about Bethlehem.

And so that's just all there is to it. So you start with, it's guilty. There can't be prophecy.

And so this is the only way to come up with it. But we're looking at it and going, okay, if you don't start with Luke, you're a bold faced liar and you're making all this stuff up.

Is there a way of understanding this that fits with the historical data? And that historical data continues to increase as more and more of these papyri become available and become part of the record that can be drawn from.

So there's a fascinating reading of, and all it, basically all it requires you to do is to go, okay, the participle that Luke utilizes in verse two is used of procurators who were not governors in external sources.

And therefore, if that's what it's referring to, then the whole issue of Quirinius is dealt with in that fashion.

And it makes sense that if he successfully did a census in that area, that later that would lay the groundwork for him becoming governor, which he did become governor.

So the fascinating thing is we have multiple historical sources, all giving us the same name in the same area.

The whole issue is timing. And those sources don't even try to address the issue of timing that is inherent in the question that we're asking in regards to Luke chapter two.

So given the amazing accuracy of Luke's terminology, you would think that he'd be given the benefit of the doubt.

But of course, the skeptics are not going to give anybody a benefit of the doubt. So we've got that. And then, and I've mentioned this before, but I managed this time to grab the book, yet another book that is on everyone's

Amazon wishlist and will probably be under the tree for so many of you. Roger T.

Beckwith's book, Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian, Biblical, Intertestamental, and Patristic Studies from Brill.

See, once you become a really great scholar, you just, this is 1996, so it's a little bit older.

You don't have to worry about coming up with catchy titles. Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian.

Now, yes, it's the same Roger T. Beckwith that wrote the New Testament canon, the Old Testament canon of the

New Testament church, which we've recommended so many times in regards to the deuterocanonical books, the apocryphal books, etc.,

etc. The fourth chapter in this book from 1996 is titled,

The Date of Christmas and the Courses of the Priests. The Date of Christmas and the

Courses of the Priests. Now, I'm not going to read this to you.

It runs from pages 71 to 92. And so, what this, and there's,

I mean, here's a big old chart over here, and there's another page and a half chart over here, and what are these?

When Jerusalem was destroyed in 1870, the genealogical records, so much of the material that was a part of the definition of the

Jewish people was destroyed. But some things from before that time period have survived that weren't in Jerusalem at that time.

That includes the Courses of the Priests. What does that mean? Well, that has to do with when they would serve in the temple.

Well, how does that help us in regards to the subject of the birth of Christ? Well, think about it for a second while I wet my whistle.

There is another key chronological piece of data provided to us in the

New Testament that will help us to understand when Jesus was born, and that, of course, is

Zechariah, John the Baptist. And what happens in the annunciation to him in regards to the birth of his son, the relationship in the time frames between Jesus' birth and John's birth, we know exactly how long that is.

And, you know, Mary goes, and Elizabeth, and they, you know, the baby leaps in her womb, and we've got all that information.

But we also know that their pregnancies were six months apart, and we know when he served in the temple, and we know what family he was of, so we know what

Course of Priests he was in, and we have the records for the order in which those priests were serving in the at that time.

Now, it's not a simple thing to do. That's why I said I'm just summarizing all this.

But fundamentally, to boil it all down, and I had never seen, this is the only place

I've seen any discussion of it at all, at all, was from Beckwith.

You boil it all down, and given when he would have been serving in the temple, as recorded for us in Scripture, the time frame, it's about a two -week time frame that everything falls into for the birth of Jesus is between December 25th and January 6th.

And if you know the early church, the earliest date in the

West we see is December 25th. In the East, it's still January 6th. Christmas is January 6th in Orthodoxy.

And the date, how many days between? Twelve days, twelve days of Christmas. December 25th to January 6th.

So, you know, all the stuff about, well, they wouldn't have had sheep out, yes, they would have.

Yes, they would have. It's cheaper to have them in the fields than to pay to have grain brought in. There were still sacrifices in the temple, so it could have been lambs for sacrifice.

Make the connection there if you want. But so much of the argumentation that you hear, and that is accepted by Christians, I cannot believe how many

Christians just go, well, this was all about Saturnalia, and they were giving gifts, and so the

Christians sort of hid out giving gifts to each other because the Romans were doing pagan stuff. Look, probably the strongest, one of the strongest realities that we do have from later centuries is that there was a belief that great men died on the day they were conceived.

Now, you and I can both look at that and go, well, because there's no evidence of that in Scripture, obviously.

There is in the great tradition, so we'll let those of you who are into the great tradition deal with that. But the early church came up with the idea that Jesus, the

Annunciation to Mary took place on March 25th, and so nine months later is

December 25th, and that Jesus had died on March 25th.

Now, if you know church history, you know that there was huge controversy in the first centuries about when to celebrate what we call

Easter, Resurrection Sunday. It was called the Quartodeciman Controversy because in the

East, they did that based upon the Jewish calendar, Nisan 14, and the

West, they did it differently, and that caused division and problems and stuff like that.

So how do you know March 25th? You know, that type of thing. But that's probably where, in the

West anyways, the strongest argument eventually came from. For the December 25th date,

I'm not saying we know the date. I'm simply saying that when we buy this, oh, they were just mimicking the pagan stuff.

There's no basis for that. The Christians didn't want to do that. They had no desire to mimic the pagans in that way, and there's no reason to believe they did.

All the stuff about Mithraism, all the stuff that you will find, I actually ran across a quote that I've read before from the

Zeitgeist movie about Mithras. It was 99 .9 % pure lies, pure lies.

I mean, you can't trust almost anything you run into out there. It's a shame, but that's the way it is.

So I personally enjoy thinking through a lot of these things, and hopefully it's been helpful to you also to think through these things and to, once again, you know, when we look at the

Gospels, recognize what their purposes were. Their authors had certain audiences in mind, and obviously

Luke's intentions are vital to the proper interpretation of his words.

You lose that and replace it with some tradition that comes 500 to 1 ,000 years later, and forget about figuring out

Luke. Forget it. Let's not get into that right now.

Let's let the holidays go by before that fires back up again.

So again, just if you want to write them down, Beckwith, Calendar and Chronology, Jewish and Christian.

I don't even know if it's still in print. I don't know. 1996. It's a Brill book. It will not be cheap.

Anything that says Brill at the bottom here will be absurdly expensive. Rich has had to pay for so many of those books for me over the years.

He well knows. And then Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament by Sabine R.

Huebner. H -U -E -B -N -E -R. I don't know.

Wait a minute. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press. Let me see here.

I believe it was, yes, 2019. So it's fairly recent.

2019 is the copyright on Huebner's book. So for those of you that are interested in that kind of stuff, there you go.

I hope that was interesting to all the rest of you. I didn't hear any snoring coming from Rich.

So you're still here. You're still looking a little miffed about the copper croissant.

You got to admit that, can you see just a little copper croissant on your desk? A little French flag? It doesn't matter.

It's obvious to me that after what happened Sunday in the World Cup, you're just a little bit miffed.

France lost in penalty kick. Argentina.

And I was pulling for Argentina because Argentina has a player that I think is just really super classy.

And everyone's saying he's the GOAT now. Lionel Messi. And it went down to penalty.

That was the most exciting finals match in a World Cup ever.

When you go down to penalty kicks, I don't know how to explain that to Americans.

I will say this, though. I think last year's Super Bowl had 104 million people.

You know how many people watched the final of the World Cup? Four billion.

That's over. That's half the population of the planet was watching.

That tells you a little something. Yes, I understand.

I understand. And that's okay. We will let you slide on that. All right.