The Date of the Nativity in Luke (5th ed.

,
2006)
Richard Carrier
It is beyond reasonable dispute that Luke dates the birth of Jesus to 6 A.D. It is
equally indisputable that Matthew dates the birth of Jesus to 6 B.C. (or some year
before 4 B.C.). This becomes an irreconcilable contradiction after an examination of
all the relevant facts.
The following essay surveys all the evidence both to this effect and against all known
attempts to reconcile these authors. It was originally written in 1999 and was revised in
2000 to make it more readable and complete, and to take into account new claims and
scholarship; two more revisions of the text were made in 2001, and another in 2006, in
conjunction with a much shorter summary being built by the editors of the new Errancy
Wiki. Each section of this essay begins with a summary of conclusions in bold type,
followed by a sometimes lengthy discussion of the evidence leading to those conclusions.
As a result, it is not necessary to read the whole essay if you are looking for quick answers,
or only want to read about a particular argument. It is my intention to make this essay
absolutely comprehensive. If you are aware of any arguments or evidence bearing on this
topic that are not addressed here, please Send Feedback and I will do the necessary research
and expand this essay accordingly.
I. The Basic Problem
Luke
The Date of John the Baptist's Ministry
Luke's Description of the Census

Matthew
Josephus
II. Was Quirinius Twice Governor?
The Lapis Tiburtinus
The Lapis Venetus
The Antioch Stones
The Date of Quirinius' Duumvirate in Pisidian Antioch

Vardaman's Magic "Coin"

III. Was There a Census in Judaea Before 6 A.D.?
Did Luke Mean "Before" Quirinius?
Was Apamea a Free City?
How Often Was the Census Held?

Was Quirinius a Special Legate in B.C. Syria?

Was Quirinius Sharing Command with a Previous Governor?
Was "Quirinius" a Mistake for Someone Else?
Can it be a Mere Type-o?

Was it a Census Conducted by Herod the Great?

Was Herod Alive in 2 B.C.?
Conclusion

I. The Basic Problem

The Gospel of Luke claims (2.1-2) that Jesus was born during a census that we know
from the historian Josephus took place after Herod the Great died, and after his
successor, Archelaus, was deposed. But Matthew claims (2.1-3) that Jesus was born
when Herod the Great was still alive--possibly two years before he died (2:7-16). Other
elements of their stories also contradict each other. Since Josephus precisely dates the
census to 6 A.D. and Herod's death to 4 B.C., and the sequence is indisputable, Luke
and Matthew contradict each other.
Luke
Luke 2.1-2 says that "It happened in those days that a decree was issued by Caesar
Augustus that a census be taken of all that was inhabited. This census first came to pass
when Quirinius was governing Syria."[1.1] During this census, which we know occurred in
6 A.D. (see below), Jesus is born (2.3-7). Then, eight days later, he is circumcised (2:21),
and after the 40th day (2:22; cf. Leviticus 12:2-4) he is publicly presented at the temple in
Jerusalem (2.21-38), where two different people publicly proclaim him the messiah (Simon
and Anna: 2:25-38), one of whom even continues telling everyone about him in the temple
afterward. Then his family returns to Galilee (2.39-40), where Jesus grows up, and his
family returns to Jerusalem every year thereafter (2.41) for twelve straight years (2:42).
It is often claimed that Luke has John the Baptist and Jesus born around the same time, but,
first, this is not necessarily true and, second, this still would not entail a corroboration of
Matthew. The second point is more forceful than the first: namely, that Luke is referring to
Herod Archelaus, not Herod the Great, and I think this most likely (see 1.1.3 below).
Though I think Luke is certainly only referring to Archelaus, the other possibility deserves
further discussion. Three months before John is born, Gabriel announces to Mary only that
she will conceive (1:31, 36), not that she already has. In fact, Luke never says when Mary
conceives. Instead, John appears to have already passed most of his childhood by the time
Jesus is born (1:80). Given Jewish law at the time (Mishnah, Abot 5.21), which held that a
man becomes subject to religious duties on his thirteenth birthday (which would be John's
"day of public appearance to Israel"; we see that day for Jesus in 2:42ff.) and other parallels
between Jesus and John (cf. 1:80 and 2:40), it would be reasonable to assume that Luke has

in mind that John was nearly twelve when Jesus was born (since "in those days" from vv.
2:1 picks up the "day" of the previous vv. 1:80).[1.1.2] This would easily rescue Luke from
charges of chronological error, since he reports that John's birth was foretold in a vision "in
the days of Herod king of Judaea" (1.5), and if John was born around then, it would be an
error to have Jesus born around the same time if Herod the Great were meant, since he was
long dead by the time the census occurs. Of course, this is moot, since this Herod the King
may well be Herod Archelaus, not Herod the Great, so if Luke did mean John was born
only six months before Jesus, then Luke clearly meant Archelaus, who in that case would
have been deposed between the two births, explaining why the census suddenly became an
issue exactly then.[1.1.3] Still, we are not told how much time intervened between the
annunciation and John's birth (1.22-24), but if we interpret Luke as describing a twelveyear interval, it is notable that he places the birth of John in exactly the same year that
Matthew seems to place the birth of Jesus (6 B.C.).
There are two peripheral matters regarding Luke that require brief digression for those who
are concerned about them. The first is the date of John the Baptist's ministry, and the second
consists of the alleged "errors" of Luke in his description of the census. Each will be
addressed here in a separate box, which can be skipped if desired since they aren't essential
to the issue of when Jesus was born.

The Date of John the Baptist's Ministry

Luke gives us another precise date when he sets the beginning of John's ministry to 28
A.D. (3.1), and this has caused some confusion, though for no good reason. Luke later
says that when Jesus began his own ministry he was "about thirty years old" (3.23),
and it is often supposed that this was the same year that John began his ministry. That
would make Jesus born around 2 B.C. and maybe as early as 4 B.C. This is so
attractive to those who want to reconcile Luke and Matthew that its implausibility is
overlooked. Such an interpretation does not solve the many problems created by Luke
2:2 anyway--for it essentially trades a contradiction between Luke and Matthew for a
contradiction within Luke. It is more likely that Luke had in mind the passing of some
years between the two inaugurations, than that he got major public facts wrong. And
since Luke clearly doesn't know when Jesus began his ministry, he cannot have
thought his precise date for the ministry of John also applied to Jesus. For Luke knows
the precise year of Jesus's birth, but can't say exactly how old he was when he began
his ministry, yet he knows the precise year that John began his ministry. It follows that
Luke would only have said "about thirty" if Jesus didn't begin his ministry in the same
year as John.
It also seems unlikely that Jesus would start his ministry in the same year as John:
surely John was preaching some years before, preparing the way. It is hard to imagine
how he could otherwise have won such widespread and lasting repute (even Josephus
sings his praises in Antiquities of the Jews 18.116-19). And we are told Jesus began his
own ministry only after John was arrested: Mark 1:14; Matthew 4:12; Luke 3:20
(Luke 3:21-2 refers back in time, while John contradicts all the others by having Jesus
start preaching before John is imprisoned). Josephus allows that this may have
happened after 32 or even as late as 35 A.D. Moreover, all the descriptions of John's
ministry imply an extended period, and since we are not told how long John
ministered before he baptized Jesus, we cannot assume it happened in the same year.
Certainly, Luke 3:21 does not entail a single event of mass baptism (the other
narratives of John's ministry also indicate otherwise), but most likely refers to the
whole period of the ministry, especially considering the liberal use of the imperfect
tense throughout this part of the narrative (3.7, 3.10, 3.14, 3.18), which describes
continuous action, and not a single event (Matthew's narrative does this also, cf. 3.113).
Of course, Luke could always have his chronology wrong, but I believe in the
principle of interpretive charity: since he clearly allows an interval of some years, it is
unnecessary to assume Luke contradicts himself by dating Jesus' birth first to 6 A.D.
and then to several years previous. It is more reasonable to read Luke as dating the
beginning of Jesus' ministry between 33 and 36 A.D. (the last years of Pontius Pilate's
tenure), which dovetails nicely with Josephus' report that John could have been killed
around then. This also fits the narrative of John the Baptist in Josephus, who reports
that a military victory against Herod between 35 and 36 A.D.[1.1.4] was at the time
hailed as God's revenge for executing John, and since people would be calling up the
most recent crime of Herod as the cause of his military defeat, John's execution must
not have been long before this, certainly some years after 28 A.D.
In Ancient Literacy (1989, p. 269) William Harris observes that it was common in
inscriptions to round someone's age off to the nearest multiple of 5, and even then this
often indicated an illiterate lack of any real knowledge of one's age to begin with. So

32.5, although, from ignorance of the actual year the ministry started, Luke could be in
error by an even wider margin. But if Jesus was born during the census of 6 A.D. he
would pass the middle of his 27th year in 33 A.D., which agrees with most attempts at
dating his ministry. So if Luke only knew the ministry began at some uncertain time in
or near 33 A.D. he would be warranted in saying Jesus was "about" thirty at the time.
On the other hand, if Jesus began his ministry shortly after John's death, and John was
killed within a year of the military defeat that was thought to have avenged his
execution (which is a more reasonable conjecture than any greater span of time
between the war and John's death), then Jesus would have begun his ministry in 34 or
35 A.D. at the age of 28 or 29.

Luke's Description of the Census

Some have pounced on Luke's description of the census as being inauthentic and
therefore false. There are two problems with such an argument: first, an author who
knew Jesus was born during a particular census could still err in describing that
census, so such errors would not discredit the entire account.[1.1.5] Second, Luke's
errors are not that grievous to begin with.
The first "mistake" lies in claiming that the census was of "all that was inhabited,"
when we know in fact that it was only of Syria and Judaea (and there was no such
thing as a universal census at all until many decades after Jesus died, see below). A.N.
Sherwin-White has suggested that the fact that there was never in that period a single
census of the whole Roman Empire actually confirms rather than refutes the reliability
of Luke, since it would betray Luke's or his source's (imperfect) acquaintance with
imperial decrees: for it was the standard of the day to preface specific decrees with the
general idea behind them, and thus Luke (or his source) could have mistaken a preface
for the decree itself, a mistake that one imagines could only be made by someone who
had at least glanced at an actual census decree.[1.2] But such an error could simply
reflect a common belief among many Jews, due to the usual course of erroneous
transmission of popular news, or could have been made, for all we know, by someone
a hundred times removed from Luke's immediate source, based on entirely different
censuses.
Another possible source of such an error could be the assumption that the first
universal census, conducted by Vespasian and Titus in 74 A.D. (which would be fresh
in everyone's memory for the remainder of that century), was "typical" when in fact it
was not. However, the mistake could also have arisen from Luke himself, for an
entirely different reason: by reading Josephus and not realizing that he meant only
Judaea. For Luke appears to have drawn on Josephus, and frequently made mistakes
when he did so (see my essay Luke and Josephus). On the other hand, there might be
no mistake at all: the phrase is pasan tn oikoumenn, "all of the inhabited," where the
adjective "inhabited" implies some noun in the feminine, such as "land" or "region,"
but usually referring to "the whole world." However, this idiom was used not only to
refer to the whole Roman Empire, but to regions like "the whole Greek world," and
thus may have been meant here as simply the whole Jewish world, or, even more
likely, to the whole of Syria (which then included Judaea)--for "Syria" is also a
feminine noun.
Another reasonable possibility is that Augustus did issue a decree that all provinces be
assessed, but without ordering that it all happen at once. The second paragraph of the
Arabic Gospel of the Infancy expands Luke 2:2 by saying "in the 309th year of the Era
of Alexander, Augustus put forth an edict." The Era of Alexander began in 336/335
B.C., so the 309th year would be 28/27 B.C., exactly the time when provincial
censuses begin (though not in all provinces: see How Often Was the Census Held?
below). Luke could not have meant Jesus was born in 28 or 27 B.C. (for all the reasons
given throughout this survey below, and because this early date doesn't work in
Matthew's narrative, either). But if Luke meant an Augustan decree issued in 28 B.C.
first applied to Judaea when Quirinius was in office, then Luke 2:2 becomes
completely intelligible: this is the first Augustan census of Judaea--in other words, the
first time the Augustan decree affected Judaea, which happened to be when Quirinius
was governing Syria (a chronological marker no author would use unless Quirinius

The second "mistake" lies in supposing that people would be called back to ancestral
towns to be counted, rather than be counted in the actual towns they were in. This
charge has been formulated a dozen ways, but none of them really carry much force.
Though Jesus' family appears to have resided outside Judaea in Nazareth, there could
easily be any number of reasons why an ancestral connection with Bethlehem would
require them to journey there for a census of Judaea (so much as a tiny plot of
ancestral land would be enough, and Judaic law made it unusually difficult to get rid
such properties),
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authors must be correct, then Matthew is far more likely the one who has it wrong.
Matthew
Matthew 2.1 begins by reporting that "after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in days
of Herod the king" [2.1] the magi reported to Herod that a King of the Jews had been born,
stirring Herod and "all Jerusalem" to be troubled (2.3). Herod then seeks to kill the baby by
killing all the children in Bethlehem and surrounding areas who would have been born
around the right time, i.e. two years earlier (cf. 2.7, 2.16). This would constitute the murder
of 10% of the population of that territory [2.2], possibly several hundred children. This is
an unimaginable atrocity which probably never happened. A clear and reprehensible crime,
it would have almost certainly started a war, and at least been mentioned among the many
evil deeds of Herod catalogued by Josephus. Moreover, the myth of the evil tyrant trying to
keep his reign by seeking to kill one or more babies (often as a result of an oracle of an
usurper's birth), but being thwarted somehow, was a common legendary motif in the period,
from Oedipus and Cypselos of Corinth, to Krishna, Moses, Sargon, Cyrus, even Romulus
and Remus, just to name the most famous examples. The author of Matthew also gives us
some internal evidence that this is mythical: for if so public an event had really occurred
(2:3, 2:4, 2:16), it is curious that no one remembers it later (13:54-56), not even Herod's
own son and heir (14:1-2). And Matthew is more prone than any other New Testament
author to contrive the fantastical--his account of the crucifixion strains credulity, with its
rock-splitting earthquakes and hordes of undead descending on the city (27:51-3), and his
account of the empty tomb is as fabulous as legends can get (28:2-5).[2.3] Nevertheless, if
we believe Matthew at least has the date right, if not the real events, he is placing the birth
of Jesus around 6 B.C., since Jesus was supposedly about two years old when Herod was
still alive, and though we do not know how much time passed between this supposed "mass
murder" and Herod's death, the narrative implies that it was not long. We might also
imagine Herod to have been playing it safe, and thus the date might be 5 or even (though
rather unlikely) 4 B.C., or some time could have passed before his death, and thus the date
implied could be many years before 6, though the coincidence of Luke's effectively dating

the birth of John to 6 B.C. may hint at a possible source of confusion (if there is any true
story at all being preserved in these accounts, which is not very likely).
This discrepancy is not the only one. Matthew contradicts Luke (above) on other points of
detail. Luke describes Jesus being presented in the temple to repeated public
pronouncements of his status, which would not have escaped Herod's supposedly
murderous eye (or memory). Matthew, in contrast, has Herod only finding out roughly two
years later, from foreigners. The family of Jesus, according to Matthew, flees to Egypt and
stays there until Herod's death (2.15, 2.21-23). In fact they stayed away from Jerusalem, not
only for as many as two intervening years or more, but for the entire ten-year reign of
Herod's successor Archelaus (2.22) as well. This flatly contradicts Luke's claim that they
stayed in Nazareth the whole time, from the very beginning, and went to Jerusalem every
year without fail. The two accounts thus contradict each other in the most fundamental
way: if Matthew is right, Luke's account fails to make any plausible sense at all, and vice
versa. For the one story entails that Jerusalem was dangerous for the child Jesus, while the
other entails that it could not have been. One story has the family start in Nazareth, then
journey to Bethlehem and back again, while the other story has the family start in
Bethlehem, then flee to Egypt, then find a new home in Nazareth only to avoid the wrath of
Archelaus. Other details could be reconciled, but it is strange the authors themselves did not
do this. For example, one mentions a visit by magi but not shepherds, the other shepherds
but not magi. But these can be reconciled only by supposing that each author by some
queer chance failed to mention the other's similar detail, though one wonders how they
could know so much and so little at the same time. But the other details are inescapably at
odds. They are telling different stories.
Josephus
Josephus writes that when Archelaus, the successor of Herod the Great, was exiled:
Archelaus's country was assigned to Syria for purposes of paying tribute, and Quirinius, a
man of highest rank, was sent by Caesar to take a census of things in Syria and to make an
account of Archelaus's estate. [3.1]
And:
Quirinius was a man of the Senate, who had held other offices, and after going through
them all achieved the highest rank. He had a great reputation for other reasons, too. He
arrived in Syria with some others, for he was sent by Caesar as a governor, and to be an
assessor of their worth. Coponius, who held the rank of knight, was sent along with him to
take total command over the Jews. And Quirinius also went to Judaea, since it became part
of Syria, to take a census of their worth and to make an account of the possessions of
Archelaus. [3.2]
The primary function of a census in antiquity was to assess not merely property, but the
total manpower for the purpose of direct taxation, and that is why it was routine to conduct
a census upon assuming control of a province, and obviously why Josephus describes it in
just such terms. What is clear here is that Quirinius did not take control of Judaea until after

the removal of Archelaus, and Archelaus followed Herod the Great (even Matthew 2.22
confirms this). This entails that some years necessarily had to follow between the death of
Herod the Great and the arrival of Quirinius, so on this evidence there is a clear
contradiction between the Gospels: Luke places the birth after the death of Herod, Matthew
before.
How great is the discrepancy? Josephus writes:
In the tenth year of Archelaus's government the leading men in Judaea and Samaria could
not endure his cruelty and tyranny and accused him before Caesar...and when Caesar heard
this, he went into a rage...and sent Archelaus into exile...to Vienna, and took away his
property.[3.3]
So roughly ten years separate the death of Herod and the arrival of Quirinius. When was the
census held in Judaea? Josephus says quite unequivocally that:
Quirinius made an account of Archelaus' property and finished conducting the census,
which happened in the thirty-seventh year after Caesar's defeat of Antony at Actium. [3.4]
The victory at Actium is universally agreed to have happened in 31 B.C. The evidence for
this is truly insurmountable, confirmed in countless histories, and inscriptions, papyri and
other physical evidence. So the census occurred in 6 A.D., which is the 37th year
(beginning with 31 B.C., since the ancients reckoned inclusively). This is independently
confirmed by Cassius Dio and corroborated by Roman coins.[3.5] It also fits what we know
about Quirinius from an inscription (the Lapis Venetus). It is also notable that Josephus
attributes the rebellion of Judas the Galilean to this census,[3.6] a detail which Acts 5:37
confirms.[3.7] This then puts the death of Herod at 4 B.C. reckoning from the ten years of
the reign of Archelaus, and fittingly, in his account of Herod's reign, Josephus places his
death in that very year. But even if we could fudge the year of Herod's death,[3.8] we
cannot escape the fact that some years must separate his death and the census, since we
have to account for the reign of Archelaus in between, so a historical contradiction between
Matthew and Luke persists.

II. Was Quirinius Twice Governor?

Some have tried to reconcile Matthew and Luke by inventing a second governorship
of Quirinius, placing it in the reign of Herod the Great. However, we have no evidence
at all that Quirinius served as governor of Syria twice, much less that he did so when
Herod was king of Judaea. Moreover, no one ever governed the same province twice in
the whole of Roman history, making the very proposal implausible. Three inscriptions
and a coin have been used to imply otherwise, but none of these items contain any of
the information claimed by those who want Quirinius to have been twice governor,
and they offer no support to the theory. We also know who was governing Syria
between 12 and 3 B.C. and therefore Quirinius could not have been governor then (or

before, since he was not qualified before the year 12). Also, in section 3 it will be
shown that there was never any such thing as a dual governorship, nor could there
have been, given the nature of Roman political and social organization, and even if
Quirinius had been governor or co-governor of Syria at an earlier date, no census
could have been conducted in Judaea while Herod or his successor Archelaus were
alive.
Some Christian apologists, following extremely outdated scholarship, have tried to argue
(or have even stated as if it were a fact) that Quirinius was actually governor of Syria on
two different occasions--the first time, conveniently, while Herod was alive. Therefore, this
argument goes, the census Luke is talking about happened in the days of Herod the Great.
Unfortunately, this fails to solve the other contradictions between Luke's and Matthew's
accounts. It is also both groundless and implausible. Nevertheless, every single piece of
evidence we have about Quirinius has been twisted into "evidence" of a second or earlier
governorship of Syria, and evidence has even been invented wholesale--once by an
innocent mistake, and once by pseudoscientific insanity. This "evidence" consists of three
inscriptions and one coin, which I will examine in detail.
But first I will mention the several preliminary reasons why this "theory" is absurd. First,
we know that Quintilius Varus, not Sulpicius Quirinius, was governor of Syria from 6 B.C.
to beyond Herod's death in 3 B.C. (and possibly longer), and before him Sentius Saturninus
held the post from 9 B.C. to 6 B.C., and he took the post immediately after Marcus Titius,
who probably held the post since 12 B.C. (since three years was the average length of a
governorship).[4.1] There is no room here in which to fit Quirinius. And since we know he
first attained the consulship in 12 B.C.,[4.1.5] and only ex-consuls held the governorship of
Syria in the time of Augustus, he could not have governed before that year. This means one
would have to propose that Jesus was born between 12 and 10 B.C. even for this theory to
be remotely possible, but that still would be ad hoc, involving a truly maverick position
regarding the chronology of Jesus, presuming an unusually short tenure for Titius,
inventing a spot for Quirinius nowhere attested, and still not solving the problem of the
census (below). Second, we do not even have any evidence that anyone ever served as
governor of the same consular province twice in the whole of Roman history, so it would
have been extremely unusual and quite remarkable--so much so that it would be odd that no
one mentions it, not even Josephus, or Tacitus who gives us the obituary of Quirinius in
Annals 3.48, a prime place to mention such a peculiar accomplishment. It is certainly
unheard of.[4.2] Now for the reputed evidence to the contrary.
The Lapis Tiburtinus
Some have tried to appeal to a headless (and thus nameless) inscription as proving that
Quirinius held the governorship of Syria twice, but the inscription neither says that, nor can
it belong to Quirinius. The inscription in question is a fragment of a funeral stone
discovered in Tivoli (near Rome) in 1764, and is now displayed (complete with an
inventive reconstruction of the missing parts) in the Vatican Museum.[5.1] We know only
that it was set up after the death of Augustus in 14 A.D., since it refers to him as "divine."
The actual content of the inscription is as follows:

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

...KING BROUGHT INTO THE POWER OF...
AUGUSTUS AND THE ROMAN PEOPLE AND SENATE...
FOR THIS HONORED WITH TWO VICTORY CELEBRATIONS...
FOR THE SAME THING THE TRIUMPHAL DECORATION...
OBTAINED THE PROCONSULATE OF THE PROVINCE OF ASIA...
AGAIN OF THE DEIFIED AUGUSTUS SYRIA AND PH[OENICIA]...
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

The most obvious problem with this piece of "evidence" is that it doesn't even mention
Quirinius! No one knows who this is. Numerous possible candidates have been proposed
and debated, but the notion that it could be Quirinius was only supported by the wishful
thinking of a few 18th and 19th century scholars (esp. Sanclemente, Mommsen, and
Ramsay). But it is unlikely to be his. We know of no second defeat of a king in the career of
Quirinius, though Tacitus writes his obituary in Annals 3.48, where surely such a double
honor would have been mentioned, especially since a "victory celebration" was a big deal-involving several festal days of public thanksgiving at the command of the emperor. We
also have no evidence that Quirinius governed Asia. Though that isn't improbable, we do
know of another man, Lucius Calpurnius Piso, who did govern Asia and who defeated the
kings of Thrace twice, and received at least one "victory celebration" for doing so, as well
as the Triumphal Decoration, and who may also have governed Syria.[5.2] Though it
cannot be proved that this is Piso's epitaph, it is clear that it would sooner belong to him
than Quirinius. Thus, to ignore him and choose Quirinius would go against probability. Yet
even if we lacked such a candidate as Piso, to declare this an epitaph of Quirinius is still
pure speculation.
Even more importantly, this inscription does not really say that the governorship of Syria
was held twice, only that a second legateship was held, and that the second post happened
to be in Syria.[5.3] From what remains of the stone, it seems fairly obvious that the first
post was the proconsulate of Asia. This means that even if this is the career of Quirinius, all
it proves is that he was once the governor of Syria.
The Lapis Venetus
Another inscription, actually mentioning Quirinius, often called the "Aemilius Secundus"
(after the name of the man whose epitaph it is), is quite shamelessly abused by numerous
people attempting to reconcile Matthew and Luke. The funeral stone of Aemilius Secundus
was acquired in Beirut by merchants from Venice sometime before 1674, and it may have
been set up there originally.[6.1] It records, among other things, that Secundus was a
decorated officer serving under Publius Sulpicius Quirinius when the latter was governor of

Syria, some time during the reign of Augustus, and when in this command Secundus helped
conduct a census--taking care of assessing a Syrian city (Apamea)--and took out a bandit
fortress in the Lebanese mountains. This confirms only that Quirinius was governor of and
conducted a census in Syria. That really does no more than confirm that Quirinius
conducted a census in 6 A.D. as governor of Syria. But since no date is given, nor any
datable details at all, apologists have tried to invent dates that suit them, and then claimed
this epitaph as a bogus source of "confirmation." The inscription, found broken in two but
reassembled, reads as follows (small letters in the sketch represent missing or damaged
letters):
QUINTUS AEMILIUS (SON OF
QUINTUS)
SECUNDUS OF THE PALATINE TRIBE,
IN
THE SERVICE OF THE DIVINE
AUGUSTUS, UNDER
PUBLIUS SULPICIUS QUIRINIUS THE
LEGATE
OF CAESAR IN SYRIA, WAS
DECORATED
WITH [THESE] HONORS: PREFECT
OF A COHORT FROM THE FIRST
AUGUST LEGION;
PREFECT OF THE SECOND FLEET;
ALSO
CONDUCTED A CENSUS BY ORDER OF
QUIRINIUS
IN THE APAMENE COMMUNITY OF
117,000 CITIZENS;
ALSO, WHEN HE WAS SENT BY
QUIRINIUS AGAINST
THE ITURAEANS ON MOUNT
LEBANON
HE CAPTURED THEIR CITADEL; AND
BEFORE
HE WAS IN THE ARMY AS OFFICER IN
CHARGE OF WORKS,
HE WAS DELEGATED BY THE TWO
CONSULS TO RUN
THE TREASURY; AND WHEN HE WAS
LIVING IN A COLONY
HE SERVED AS QUAESTOR, AEDILE
TWICE, DUUMVIR TWICE,
AND PONTIFEX.
QUINTUS AEMILIUS SECUNDUS, SON
OF QUINTUS,
OF THE PALATINE TRIBE, HAVING
PASSED ON,
AND AEMILIA CHIA, [HIS]
FREEDWOMAN,
HAVE BEEN LAID TO REST HERE.
THIS MONUMENT NO LONGER
BELONGS TO [HIS] HEIRS.

As one can see, the inscription does not say and gives no clues when the census occurred.
The latest scholar to examine the issue, Fergus Millar, has good reason to think that this
was actually the very same census of 6 A.D.,[6.2] and this is the most logical conclusion:
Josephus says that Quirinius was conducting a census in Syria at the time Judaea was
annexed, and the Apamea that this inscription refers to (see below) was part of the Roman
province of Syria. Nevertheless, I will give one typical example of how apologists abuse
this evidence, and how the story gets distorted in transmission by careless authors.
David Allen Rivera reports:
Dr. Jerry Vardaman, an archaeologist at the Cobb Institute of Archaeology, at the
Mississippi State University, deciphered a stone tablet known as the "Amelius Secundus,"
which had been discovered in Beirut, Lebanon, over 300 years ago, and is now at the
Venice Museum. Written in 10 BC, Vardaman says it refers to a census ordered by
Quirinius, the governor of Syria, which took place before that, and seemed to be the one
referred to by Luke.
Rivera's source for this information is an undated article in the The Patriot-News
(Harrisburg, PA) written by John Goodrich and entitled " 'Comet Sunday' to Draw Attention
to Heavens." It does not say where Vardaman argues any of this, but I subsequently traced
the claim to its source (see below). Of course, it is called the Aemilius Secundus, not
Amelius Secundus, but this error is Rivera's. Everything else Rivera says is entirely correct,
except for the date. We do not in fact know the date of its composition, much less that it
was 10 B.C., and this is actually unlikely given all the probabilities surrounding Quirinius
examined in this essay. It should also be apparent from an examination of the microletters
fiasco (see below) that Vardaman's scholarship is not to be trusted, yet Rivera repeats his
claims as if they were matters of established fact. The moral of the story is that readers
should be very wary of "facts" touted in defense of Biblical inerrancy.
The Antioch Stones
The only other real material evidence mentioning Quirinius to date is a pair of stones found
in two different Muslim villages outside Pisidian Antioch in 1912 and 1913. The stones had
been removed from wherever they originally lay and then were reused as wallstones. Both
are commemorative inscriptions, originally parts of the bases of statues of a certain Gaius
Caristanius Sergius (possibly later named Julius Caesianus Fronto, unless these are the
names of two different men). Both stones happen to mention as one of his offices the
deputy management of a duumvirate held by Quirinius. Once again, the first inscription
mentions no date and itself can only be dated by conjecture to sometime between 11 and 1
B.C. The second inscription offers no clues at all, though it was most likely set up after the
first, since it mentions additional posts, apparently gained in the interim. Though even
earlier dates are remotely possible, later dates are much less likely. Only a sketch exists of
one of them, but a photo survives of the other.[7.1] They read as follows:

GAIUS CARISTA[NIUS...]
SON OF GAIUS, SERGIUS FRONTO
CAESIANUS JUL[IUS...]
OFFICER IN CHARGE OF WORKS,
PONTIFEX,
PRIEST, PREFECT OF
PUBLIUS SULPICIUS QUIRINIUS THE
DUUMVIR,
PREFECT OF MARCUS SERVILIUS.
BY THIS MAN, THE FIRST OF ALL
[WITH A]
PUBLIC DECREE OF THE
DECEMVIRATE COUNCIL, THE
STATUE
WAS SET UP.

BY GAIUS CARISTANIUS ...

FRONTO CAESIANUS
JULIUS, OFFICER IN CHARGE OF
WORKS, COMMANDING OFFICER
OF THE TWELFTH LIGHTNING
LEGION, PREFECT OF THE
BOSPORAN COHORT,
PONTIFEX, PREFECT OF PUBLIUS
SULPICIUS QUIRINIUS THE
DUUMVIR,
PREFECT OF MARCUS SERVILIUS,
PREFECT...

The only item here that allows any guess at the date the first statue was erected is the fact
that it mentions that this was the first man to set up a statue by public decree (in other
words, the city legislature voted to pay for it). Since this presumably would not be long
after the city was founded (no more than five or ten years), if we can figure out when
Pisidian Antioch was established, we will have some idea of when it was set up, though
nothing like an exact date. This is not the most famous Antioch (in Syria), founded in 300
B.C. and one of the largest cities in the world at the turn of the era, but "Antioch near
Pisidia," possibly as old but refounded sometime after 25 B.C. under the new name
"Colonia Caesareia" (Caesarean Colony), for Roman veterans, definitely in the reign of
Augustus, but we actually don't know for sure when. Only after this date would
"decemvirs" be issuing public decrees, since these were the officials comprising the city
council under a Roman colonial charter. When all things are considered, we can speculate
Quirinius' duumvirate was held between 6 and 1 B.C. (see box below).
But even with other dates, the inscription offers no proof of a second governorship of Syria.
First, there is no particular connection between being governor and being the Duumvir of a

city. The one does not entail or even imply the other. Second, this city is well outside of the
Roman province of Syria, on the border between Lycia-Pamphylia and Galatia (near
modern day Egridir lake in Turkey). Indeed, it is even Northwest of Cilicia, on the other
side of the Taurus Mountains. This makes any connection between this office and a
governorship of Syria impossible. No one would range so far from his province or have any
major connection with a city so thoroughly separated from his area of control.
Even so, this has not stopped some Christians from telling tall tales about what these
inscriptions prove. For example, one Christian periodical reports to its readers, as if it were
a simple fact:
Luke had stated that Quirinius was the Governor of Syria at the time of Jesus' birth,
however secular records showed that Saturninus was the governor at that time. An
inscription was later found in Antioch which showed that Quirinius indeed was governor of
Syria at the time.[7.2]
This short statement doesn't even address the possibility that, if Matthew's date is correct,
either Saturninus or Varus could have been governor at the time (as mentioned above). But
what it really gets wrong is the claim that the Antioch inscription proves Quirinius "was
governor of Syria at the time." Every single thing in italics here is false. As we've seen, the
stones (and there are two, not one) only report that Quirinius was a Duumvir, not a
governor, and not in Syria, but well outside that province. And they give hardly any reliable
clues as to the date. Only pure speculation can set the date between 9 and 4 B.C., and what
little argument could be advanced for a date between 6 and 1 B.C. actually goes to prove
that Quirinius was fighting a war in Galatia at the time (see box below) and that refutes the
possibility that he was governing Syria (see below), so there is in the end no evidence in
these stones regarding any Syrian governorship of any date.
Yet essentially the same claim regarding these stones, with the addition of a false
appearance of precision ("Quirinius was indeed governor of Syria in 7 BC as well"), is
made by Doug Raymer in his 1999 online essay "The Accuracy of the Bible." I have traced
this particular claim to its source, since it also appears in Kirk R. MacGregor's online essay
"Is the New Testament Historically Accurate?" MacGregor at least tells us where he heard
this: he cites page 160 of John Elder's book Prophets, Idols, and Diggers: Scientific Proof
of Bible History (New York: Bobbs Merrill Co., 1960). Elder's credibility is certainly in
question. He reports that the Antioch stone (he, too, only seems aware of one) says that
Quirinius was Prefect as well as Duumvir. Obviously, Elder never actually read the stones,
for they are about the Prefecture of Caristanius, not Quirinius. He also asserts as if it were a
fact that the stone "records his election to the post of honorary duumvir...in recognition of
his victory over the Homanadenses" yet I have placed in italics precisely what the stones do
not say. Scholars only propose these as possible interpretations, yet Elder seems blithely
unaware of the difference. Furthermore, Elder thinks this inscription "proves that Quirinius
was in the area as a commander" but he does not seem to understand that it places him well
outside the province of Syria, where no governor of that province would have been. Thus,
when Elder asserts, again without any qualification, that the date of the inscription "can be
fixed as somewhere between 10 and 7 B.C." we know he is not to be trusted. He claims that
the names on the inscription set that date, yet does not explain how. In fact, the names fix

no date at all (see box below). It is clear that Elder did not actually read or study the
inscription himself--he must be relying on some other scholar, yet he cites no one.
The moral of this story is: always be suspicious of an unsourced "fact" that goes against the
common consensus. From an online archive I came across a likely source for Elder's
claims: the hopelessly outdated early 20th century work of G. L. Cheesman.[7.3] Cheesman
dates the Duumvirate on the conjunction of two speculations: that the Dummvirate
coincided in some way with Quirinius' war against the Homanadenses--a likely possibility,
but hardly a known fact--and that the war happened between 10 and 7 B.C.--a very unlikely
possibility in light of more recent archaeological evidence (see box below), but at any rate
nothing like a known fact. This teaches us another lesson: in the arguments of Christian
apologists, the speculations and inferences of other scholars suddenly and inexplicably
become definite facts. For example, on Franke J. Zollman's online "Dustface Chart" of
"Biblical Characters Whose Existence has been Confirmed from Archaeological or Secular
Historical Sources" he declares matter-of-factly: "Inscription found in Antioch of Pisidia
names Quirinius as legatus." The position of Legatus (a title that implied, but did not entail,
being the governor of a consular province) is nowhere mentioned or implied in the Antioch
stones.
Arguing for the date of these inscriptions as between 6 and 2 B.C. is a long and tedious task
and is included next only for those who want to explore the issue in depth. Others can skip
it.

The Date of Quirinius' Duumvirate in Pisidian Antioch

G. L. Cheesman, whose own work is already almost a century obsolete, cites the
speculations of other scholars that this Antioch was established either when the
province of Galatia was created in 25 B.C. or when Augustus visited the region in 19
B.C., but this is pure guesswork, based on no actual evidence.[7.91] The only physical
evidence is an inscription that ensures the colony existed as early as 11 B.C.[7.92]
This inscription also implies that very date for its founding, which would also make
the most sense of the following data.
The most reasonable circumstances in which Quirinius would hold a Duumvirate in
Pisidian Antioch is as commander of the forces we know he led against the
Homanadenses, bandits who plagued the large lake regions in south-central Galatia,
very near Pisidian Antioch. We know of no other occasion when Quirinius would be in
such a remote area. Certainly, no governor of Syria would have any cause to range so
far from his province--especially with a massive mountain range in the way. Besides
being illogical and impractical, such a move would also illegally violate the province
of the governor of Galatia. Instead, such a war would be the responsibility of the
governor of Galatia, hence during the war Quirinius was most likely governing
Galatia, not Syria. Either way, the Duumvirate at Antioch could have been awarded to
Quirinius in an emergency--like during a war nearby--or as an honor--something likely
to be awarded after a great favor, like leading the local veterans in a successful war
against a nearby bandit king.
The most likely date for this war, however, is 6-3 B.C. (see next). Therefore, if
Caristanius' statue was erected during or shortly after that war, then the city of Antioch
could not have been founded more than five or ten years previously (as explained in
the main text above), and 11 B.C. fits perfectly in that range. This fit argues for a date
of 6-1 B.C. for Quirinius' post of Duumvir. In fact, since we know Quirinius was sent
to Armenia to be the caretaker of the Imperial hopeful Gaius around the turn of the era,
this would be an ideal circumstance in which he would need a deputy ("prefect")
conducting his office of Duumvir in Antioch (if that is what the inscription means), in
which case the post could date to 2 B.C. or later. Unfortunately, the other man named
does not much help to establish the date. We know the Marcus Servilius to whom
Caristanius was also a deputy was consul in 3 A.D. (Quirinius was consul in 12 B.C.)
and was a close friend of Quirinius, having helped him out in a major trial in 20 A.D.,
as Tacitus reports (Annals 3.22). His late consulship shows that Servilius was probably
much younger than Quirinius and thus held the Duumvirate later, as the stones imply,
but this is inconclusive as to the date of either Duumvirate.
Everything rests, then, on the date of the Homanadensian war. Of course, this already
requires the unproven albeit reasonable assumption that the Duumvirate was held
during or shortly after that war. But allowing that assumption, the most likely date for
the war is after the period of 12-7 B.C. that Cheesman suggests. Three facts work
together to set the most probable date of 6-3 B.C., and thus set the likely date of the
Duumvirate to 6-1 B.C., coinciding with all previous suggestions above:
Cassius Dio is renowned for mentioning numerous minor wars that are otherwise
unattested, yet he fails to note this one. However, due to missing pages from a key
manuscript, we lack Dio's account of the years 6-2 B.C. Since we expect Dio to
mention wars such as this, it is likely he did, and that would put the war in those

 Varus is noted as having three legions at his disposal in Syria in 4 B.C., yet the usual
complement was four, and at least around 2 B.C. it appears that another legion was
absent from its usual post in Egypt. There is no known military operation that would
explain these missing legions, making the Homanadensian War a likely candidate. The
war was likely to have taken several years and more than one legion, since Quirinius
won by surrounding the entire region and starving the bandits out of their mountain
fortresses.[7.94]
Vardaman's Magic "Coin"
A Roman road around the region, the Via Sabaste, was completed in 6 B.C., as stated
its Dr.
milestones
recoveredaninarchaeologist
recent years. at
The
the road
it in a at
Theonlate
Jerry Vardaman,
thecourse
Cobb of
Institute
of takes
Archaeology
hemicircle
rightUniversity,
around theclaimed
outsideto
ofhave
the very
region under
attack by
the covering
Mississippi
State
discovered
microscopic
letters
Homanadenses,
at
the
same
time
linking
almost
every
key
military
colony
that would
ancient coins and inscriptions conveying all sorts of strange data that he then uses
matterhave
been
associated
with
the
war
(including
the
Asian
Apamea,
Antioch,
and
of-factly to assert the wildest chronology I have ever heard for Jesus. He claims these
Caesarea), and
connecting
to available
routesPilate
in three
directions
alongJudaea
the open
"microletters"
confirm
that Jesus
was bornsupply
in 12 B.C.,
actually
governed
plains.
This
perfectly
matches
the
circumstances
of
the
war
and
the
manner
in
between 15 and 26 A.D., Jesus was crucified in 21 and Paul was converted on thewhich
road to
Quirinius
it This
(above).
Since this
was
wonever
by investment
Damascus
infought
25 A.D.
is certainly
theparticular
strangest war
claim
I have
personallymore
than open in
conflict,
andfield
supply
lines and
accesshistory.
to the region
from the
colonies had
encountered
the entire
of ancient
Roman
His evidence
is key
so incredibly
to bethat
set up
the war began,
the draw
construction
of this road
thegone
first insane.
thing
bizarre
thebefore
only conclusion
one can
after examining
it iswould
that hebehas
begun
by
Quirinius
and
would
likely
have
occupied
his
men
for
the
first
year
or
two
of
Certainly, his "evidence" is unaccepted by any other scholar to my knowledge. It has never
anypresented
actual conflict.[7.95]
been
in any peer reviewed venue,[8.1] and was totally unknown to members of
the America Numismatic Society until I brought it to their attention, and several experts
Theconcurred
above observations
converge
to strongly
suggest a date for the war of around 6-3
there
with me that
it was patently
ridiculous.
B.C. The most likely date of the Duumvirate of Quirinius would be in or very shortly
after that war.
the factare
that
a deputy
was
exercising
office implies
Nevertheless,
his Finally,
"conclusions"
cited
without
a single
sign the
of skepticism
by Biblical
Quirinius
had
already
left
Galatia
or
hadn't
time
to
attend
to
the
office
himself,
which on
apologist John McRay, who says "Jerry Vardaman has discovered the
name
of Quirinius
fits
the
periods
both
during
or
after
the
war.
a coin in micrographic letters, placing him as proconsul of Syria and Cilicia from 11 B.C.
until after the death of Herod."[8.2] This actual claim has never been published in any form,
but I will address a related published claim by Vardaman, for which some background is
necessary. I will devote considerable space to this since, as far as I know, I am the only one
who has taken the trouble to debunk this obscure and bizarre claim.
What Vardaman means by "micrographic letters" (he usually calls them "microletters") are
tiny letters so small that they cannot be seen or made without a magnifying glass and could
only have been written with some sort of special diamond-tipped inscribers. He finds
enormous amounts of this writing on various coins supporting numerous theses of his.
Vardaman claims that he and Oxford scholar Nikos Kokkinos discovered microletters on
coins in 1984 at the British Museum, but Kokkinos has not published anything on the
matter. Nevertheless, Vardaman tells us that some coins "are literally covered with
microletters...through the Hellenistic and Roman periods"[8.3] and that "whatever their
original purpose(s), the use of microletters was spread over so many civilizations for so
many centuries that their presence cannot be denied or ignored."[8.4] Such fanatical
assertions for an extremely radical and controversial theory that only he advocates, and that
has not been proven to the satisfaction of anyone else in the academic community, gives the
impression of a serious loss of objectivity. Supporting this conclusion is the fact that he
cites one authority in support of his thesis that does not in fact support him, yet he does not
qualify this citation for his readers but acts as if this makes his theory mainstream.[8.5]
Apart from the fact that it is totally unattested as a practice in any ancient source and none
of the relevant tools have been recovered or ever heard of as existing in ancient times, and
it has never been subjected to a professional peer review much less accepted by any expert
but Vardaman himself, there are several other reasons to regard this as insanity. First, it is

extremely rare to find any specimen of ancient coin that is not heavily worn from use and
the passage of literally thousands of years, in which time the loss of surface from oxidation
is inevitable and significant. Even if such microscopic lettering were added to these coins
as Vardaman says, hardly any of it could have survived or remained legible, yet Vardaman
has no trouble finding hundreds of perfectly legible words on every coin he examines.
Second, to prove his thesis, Vardaman would at the very least be expected to publish
enlarged photographs of the reputed microscopic etchings. Yet he has never done this.
Instead, all he offers are his own drawings. Both of these facts are extremely suspicious to
say the least. Finally, the sorts of things Vardaman finds are profoundly absurd, and rank
right up there with Erich von Dniken's Chariots of the Gods.
Here is a typical example:

Notice that this is merely a drawing, not a photograph, and that he gives no indication of
scale.[8.6] He never even properly identifies the coin type, and though he quotes the British
Museum catalogue regarding it, he gives no catalogue number or citation, so I was
originally unable to hunt down a photograph of it or to estimate its size. But even if among
the largest of coins it would not be more than an inch in diameter. Most coins were much
smaller. Yet his drawing (left) has a diameter of 4.75" for a scale of at least 5:1 or more, and
his blow-up (right) is a little over three-times that, for at least 15:1. That means that his
letters, drawn at around a quarter inch in size, represent marks on the original coin smaller
than 1/50th an inch, less than half a millimeter.[8.6.5] It would be nearly impossible to have
made these marks, much less hundreds of them, and on numerous coins, at minting or

afterward (indeed, even the number of men and hours this would require would be vast
beyond reckoning), and it would be entirely impossible for them to have survived the wear
of time. Yet Vardaman sees them clear as day.
But this is merely the beginning of the madness. Vardaman's quotation of the coin catalogue
establishes this as minted by the city of Damascus in the reign of Tiberius, and the coin
itself says "LHKT DAMASKWN" or "328th [year] of the Damascenes," referring to its reestablishment as a Greek city by the first Seleucus, in the last years of the 4th century B.C.
However, coins minted in Eastern Greek cities did not use Latin letters or words, they used
Greek--one can see even from his drawing that the real letters on this coin are Greek,
spelling Greek words--yet almost all of Vardaman's "microletters" for some strange reason
appear in Latin. Second, and most humorously, all the Latin letters for "J" appear, as
Vardaman reproduces them, as modern J's, yet that letter was not even invented until the
Middle Ages! If his J's were genuine, they should be the letter I. This alone makes it clear
his claims are bogus.
But in case there is any doubt: Vardaman claims to find in these tiny letters the clear
statement that the coin was minted in the first year of king Aretas IV in 16 A.D. But
Damascus was not a part of the kingdom of Aretas until after the death of Tiberius in 37
A.D. when it was briefly granted to him by Caligula, so Vardaman uses the microletters as
evidence that refutes the accepted history. Yet it is a plain contradiction for the minters to
boldly date this coin according to their independent Seleucid heritage, and then
microscopically reverse that fact and date it by the reign of a recent king. Yet Vardaman
doesn't stop there. The microletters tell him all sorts of new facts about the ancient world,
like that the full name of the king was Gaius Julius Aretas, and so on. But even more
bizarre still:
The most important references on this coin are to "Jesus of Nazareth." He is mentioned
frequently, often in titles and phrases found in the New Testament, for example, "Jesus,
King of the Jews," "King," "the Righteous One," and "Messiah." Reference to the first year
of his "reign" is repeated often...for example, "Year one of Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee
[sic]." [8.7]
The absurdity of all this, officially and microscopically inscribed on every coin by the royal
mint of the King of the Nabataeans in 16 A.D., stands without need of comment.
Vardaman also "sees" microscopic letters on inscriptions, even though stone, by its
roughness and its exposure to weathering, would be even less likely to preserve such
markings, even if they had ever been made. Indeed, stones of the day were not polished,
making it literally impossible for microscopic letters to be inscribed on them in any visible
way. Yet he finds these tiny letters on the very Lapis Venetus inscription (above) showing
"that the text dates to 10 B.C., that the fortress Secundus took on Mount Lebanon was
Baitokiki, and that the colony mentioned was Beirut."[8.8] All but the last point would be a
valuable addition to our historical knowledge, yet he has never published any papers on
these claims. More bizarre still, despite several pages of confused text in his later work on
how he arrives at this date, he never even says how he gets the date from the microletters.
He merely asserts it over and over again,[8.9] and then appends an unnumbered page with

some rough remarks about how his microletters date every office of Secundus by the years
from the founding of the Beirut colony in 15 B.C. One could write volumes on the
weirdness he finds in his microletters (like the name of the Jewish rebel Theudas on the
Lapis Venetus, calling him the king of the Scythians![8.95]). But I think it is clear enough
that this is all nonsense on stilts.
Now for the punch line. There is no Quirinius coin. McRay's reference is to an unpublished
paper that no doubt comes up with more complete nonsense about Quirinius in the reading
of random scratches on some coin or other, twisted into letters by what must be a chronic
mental illness. But Vardaman hasn't even published this claim. Instead, almost a decade
later, when he did present a lecture on the matter, his paper on the date of Quirinius, though
over 20 pages in length, never mentions this coin that apparently McRay was told about.
Instead, a date of 12 B.C. is arrived at using nonexistent microletters on an inscription. So
we can dismiss this claim of Vardaman's and McRay's without hesitation.

III. Was There a Roman Census in Judaea Before

Quirinius?
Even if Quirinius had been governor a previous time, conveniently during the reign of
Herod the Great, and conducted a census, that census could not have included Judaea,
for Judaea was not under direct Roman control at that time, and not being directly
taxed. There is no example of, or rationale for, a census of an independent kingdom
ever being conducted in Roman history. Therefore, the census Luke describes could
only have been taken after the death of Herod, when Judaea was annexed to the
Roman province of Syria, just as Josephus describes. All attempts to argue otherwise
have no merit: Luke did not mean a census before Quirinius, could not have imagined
Quirinius holding some other position besides governor, and could not have mistook
him for someone else.
Whether conducted by Quirinius or anyone else, there could not have been a census in
Judaea before 6 A.D., since the province had not entered direct Roman control before then.
But since Quirinius is the first Roman governor to take control of Judaea, we expect a
census to occur at that time. This was the nature of Roman imperialism. The whole point of
a client kingdom, as Judaea was in the time of Herod the Great and Archelaus, was that the
kingdom retain its independence while paying a set and agreed annual tribute. Rome held
many rights by treaty, such as the ability to confirm or veto kings, but formal interference
ended there. Many territories received this special status for cooperating with Rome in
important wars, or when Rome did not want to trouble itself with running the province
directly, and typically these client states surrounded and protected the borders of the
Empire, providing a kind of buffer zone against invasions.[9.1]
To conduct a census in contravention of such an alliance would have been a notable event
indeed, mentioned in many other places as the peculiar event it would have been--and that's
even if it didn't start an outright war, as almost happened when the Romans finally did

conduct a census in Judaea in 6 A.D.[9.2] Why, after all, would Rome want a census of a
territory it was not taxing directly? Not only was such a thing never done at any time in the
history of Rome, it would have served no practical purpose. According to A.N. SherwinWhite, Horst Braunert's study of the subject "disproves conclusively the notion of a Roman
census before the creation of the province" while also demonstrating that a census was "a
necessary consequence of the establishment of direct provincial government."[9.3] And as
we saw above, Josephus confirms a census at the beginning of Quirinius' reign, just when
we would expect it.[9.35]
Not only is a census before the annexation of a Judaean province against all probability and
sense, it lacks all evidence of any kind. It is a purely groundless and ad hoc conjecture.
Nevertheless, some attempts to "create" evidence for it remain and I will address them here.
Did Luke Mean "Before" Quirinius?
Some have tried to argue that the Greek of Luke actually might mean a census "before" the
reign of Quirinius rather than the "first" census in his reign. As to this, even Sherwin-White
remarks that he has "no space to bother with the more fantastic theories...such as that of W.
Heichelheim's (and others') suggestion (Roman Syria, 161) that prt in Luke iii.2 means
proteron, [which] could only be accepted if supported by a parallel in Luke himself."[10.1]
He would no doubt have elaborated if he thought it worthwhile to refute such a "fantastic"
conjecture. For in fact this argument is completely disallowed by the rules of Greek
grammar. First of all, the basic meaning is clear and unambiguous, so there is no reason
even to look for another meaning. The passage says haut apograph prt egeneto
hgemoneuontos ts Syrias Kyrniou, or with interlinear translation, haut(this)
apograph(census) prt[the] (first) egeneto(happened to be) hgemoneuontos[while]
(governing) ts Syrias(Syria) Kyrniou[was] (Quirinius). The correct word order, in
English, is "this happened to be the first census while Quirinius was governing Syria." This
is very straightforward, and all translations render it in such a manner.
It does not matter if Luke meant that he knew of a second census under Quirinius, since we
have already shown that if there were one it would have occurred some time after 6 A.D.
Nevertheless, the passage implies nothing about a second census under Quirinius. We have
no reason to believe Quirinius served as governor again, or long enough to conduct another
census, and the Greek does not require such a reading. The use of the genitive absolute (see
below) means one can legitimately put a comma between the main clause and the Quirinius
clause (since an absolute construction is by definition grammatically independent): thus,
this was the first census ever, which just happened to occur when Quirinius was governor.
The fact that Luke refers to the census from the start as the outcome of a decree of
Augustus clearly supports this reading: this was the first Augustan census in Judaea since
the decree. Another observation is made by Klaus Rosen, who compares Luke's passage
with an actual census return from Roman Arabia in 127 A.D. and finds that he gets the
order of key features of such a document correct: first the name of the Caesar (Augustus),
then the year since the province's creation (first), and then the name of the provincial
governor (Quirinius). Luke even uses the same word as the census return does for
"governed" (hgemoneuein), and the real census return also states this in the genitive
absolute exactly as Luke does.[10.2] This would seem an unlikely coincidence, making it

reasonable that Luke is dating the census the way he knows censuses are dated. Luke's
passage lacks a lot of other typical features of a census return (e.g. the year of the emperor),
but brevity can account for that, and while Rosen assumes Luke's prt refers to a year,
since every province begins with a census and extant census returns indicate the year in that
way, we needn't assume that's what Luke is doing, though he may have his inspiration from
it. In Luke's context, what he intends to convey is that this is the first Augustan census of
Judaea (as opposed to later ones) and that this happened under Quirinius.
But even if one wanted to render it differently, the basic rules of Greek ensure that there is
simply no way this can mean "before" Quirinius in this construction. What is usually
argued is that prt can sometimes mean "before," even though it is actually the superlative
of "before" (proteros), just as "most" is the superlative of "more." Of course, if "before"
were really meant, Luke would have used the correct adjective (such as proter or prin), as
Sherwin-White implies, since we have no precedent in Luke for such a use. Instead, Luke
uses prin (Luke 2:26, 22:61; Acts 2:20, 7:2, 25:16), so he would surely have used the same
idiom here, had that been his intended meaning. But there is a deeper issue involved. The
word prt can only be rendered as "before" in English when "first" would have the same
meaning--in other words, the context must require such a meaning. For in reality the word
never really means "before" in Greek. It always means "first," but sometimes in English
(just as in Greek) the words "first" and "before" are interchangeable, when "before" means
the same thing as "first." For example, "in the first books" can mean the same thing as "in
the previous books" (Aristotle, Physics 263.a.11; so also Acts 1:1). Likewise, "the earth
came first in relation to the sea" can mean the same thing as "the earth came before the sea"
(Heraclitus 31).[10.3]
Nevertheless, what is usually offered in support of a "reinterpretation" of the word is the
fact that when prtos can be rendered "before" it is followed by a noun in the genitive (the
genitive of comparison), and in this passage the entire clause hgemoneuontos ts Syrias
Kyrniou is in the genitive. But this does not work grammatically. The word
hgemoneuontos is not a noun, but a present participle (e.g. "jogging," "saying," "filing,"
hence "ruling") in the genitive case with a subject (Kyrniou) also in the genitive.
Whenever we see that we know that it is a construction called a "genitive absolute," and
thus it doesn't make sense to regard it as a genitive connected to the "census" clause. In
fact, that is ruled out immediately by the fact that the verb (egeneto) stands between the
census clause and the ruling clause--in order for the ruling clause to be in comparison with
the census clause, it would have to immediately follow or precede the adjective "first," but
since it doesn't, and the entire clause is separated from the rest of the sentence, it can only
be an absolute construction. A genitive absolute does have many possible renderings, e.g. it
can mean "while" or "although" or "after" or "because" or "since," but none allow the
desired reinterpretation here.[10.4]
John 1:15 and 1:30 are a case in point: the context is clearly established by the point of
contrast being made, "he who comes after me [opis mou] is ahead of me [emprosthen
mou] because he was before me [prt mou]." Again, the meaning is "because he was first
[in relation] to me," especially since the subject is Jesus, who was just described as the first
of all creation (1:1-14). So here we have an example of when prtos means "before," yet all
the grammatical requirements are met for such a meaning, which are not met in Luke 2:2:

the genitive here is not a participle with subject, but a lone pronoun (thus in the genitive of
comparison); the genitive follows immediately after the adjective; and the earlier
prepositions (opis and emprosthen) establish the required context. Since this is clearly not
the same construction as appears in Luke 2:2, it provides no analogy.[10.5] And this is in
John. Luke never uses prtos as "before" in such a chronological sense.
As a genitive absolute, further separated from prt by a verb, the Quirinius clause cannot
have any grammatical connection with prt. It therefore cannot mean "before" in this
context. Nor does it make any sense to "retranslate" the phrase as "this census happened to
be most important when Quirinius was governing Syria."[10.6] That requires a context in
order for the word "first" to be read as modifying an actual or implied adjective of
"importance," but no such adjective is present or implied. Instead, the narrative clearly
intends to explain why Joseph is going to Bethlehem. A digression away from that point
would require an explanation, simply to make the digression intelligible. Since Luke gives
no such explanation, he cannot have intended this to be a digression, much less one so
obscurely worded. Luke can only have meant this to be the reason for Joseph's journey, and
that's how every ancient reader would have read it. Therefore, "this [Augustan] census first
happened [in Judaea] when Quirinius was governing Syria" is the only contextually
plausible reading of Luke's Greek. Any other interpretation convicts Luke of being a
talentless and unintelligible author.
Besides making no sense grammatically, neither of these alternatives fits the fact that no
census before Quirinius would have affected Joseph or Bethlehem, as shall be demonstrated
below. Therefore, Luke cannot have meant "before" (either directly or indirectly) unless he
was fabricating the whole story.

Was Apamea a Free City?

Ronald Marchant (in "The Census of Quirinius") proposed that the "census of an
Apamenian state" mentioned in the Lapis Venetus (above) proves that independent states
could be subject to a census.[11.1] But Marchant has his facts wrong. The state in question
was not free at the time of the census, but Roman. The city is not precisely named, and we
know of four cities named Apamea that were under Roman influence before the 2nd
century A.D., but none were free after 12 B.C., and only two were large enough to have the
numbers of citizens stated in the inscription. Of these two, the more famous Apamea on the
Orontes is the only one in Syria, and it lost its freedom before the 20's B.C. for having sided
with Pompey against Caesar (even though it did so under compulsion, having been captured
by Pompey in 64 B.C.). The other, Apamea Celaenae (in Asia Minor), lost its freedom
sometime in the 2nd century B.C.[11.2] I can only guess that Marchant mistook a reference
to "free inhabitants" as a reference to a free state, but such a mistake would betray a
profound ignorance of the basic vocabulary of Roman history. Equally so if Marchant
thinks that Apamean coins indicate the city was free, for a great many cities subject to
Rome were granted the right to mint their own coins. Likewise, Paul Barnett points to a
census revolt that was put down by legions in Cappadocia in 36 A.D. (Tacitus, Annals
6.41), but Cappadocia had already been annexed as a Roman province in 17 A.D. (Annals

2.42, 2.56). So this was a tribal revolt against an ordinary Roman census, not a census
conducted outside or independently of Rome.
How Often Was the Census Held?
This is not much of an argument really, but it is a claim that really needs correction since it
is so frequently stated, betraying the ignorance of those who state it. Kirk R. MacGregor
says in Is the New Testament Historically Accurate? that:
Archaeological discoveries show that the Romans had a regular enrollment of taxpayers
and also held censuses every 14 years. This procedure was supposedly begun under
Augustus and the first took place in either 23-22 B.C. or in 9-8 B.C. The latter would be the
one to which Luke refers.
This essentially paraphrases John Elder (above). John McRay has made a similar claim,
stating that "the sequence of known dates for the censuses clearly demonstrates that one
was taken in the empire every fourteen years."[12.1] These two men and many other
apologists use this claim as part of their argument that a census of Judaea could
theoretically have happened in 8 B.C., fourteen years prior to the census in 6 A.D., perhaps
in the very governorship of Saturninus as Tertullian allegedly claimed (below), or in the
supposed "earlier" governorship of Quirinius.
Of course, everything covered above already makes this irrelevant with respect to Judaea,
and thus of no help in reconciling Luke with Matthew, so there really is no need to debunk
it. But it is such a glaring error that it must be corrected. First, all these claims take for
granted the reality of an "empire-wide registration" (based on what Luke appears to say, cf.
box above), but there never was such a thing until the massive enrollment made by
Vespasian and Titus in 74 A.D.[12.15] Thus, since censuses were scattered and never
uniform, no "cycle" could ever have been a uniform reality. We know of only two provinces
which, owing to their peaceful nature and unusually well-organized infrastructure, were
regularly assessed: Sicily and Egypt. But their cycles weren't the same. The constitutional
census cycle for counting Roman citizens was actually five years, not fourteen, and this was
actually maintained in Sicily in rare conjunction with a regular census of non-citizens in
that province. This was only due to the fact that it had been placed under a special tax
system by the kings that ruled the island before the Roman conquest, which the Romans
simply continued.[12.2] But regular civil war and the unwieldy size of the empire in the 1st
century B.C. resulted in this cycle being disrupted elsewhere. Even after the civil wars were
ended, Augustus was only able to complete three of the general censuses in his long reign,
which were only of Roman citizens, not provincial inhabitants. These were taken in 28
B.C., 8 B.C., and 14 A.D.[12.3] This flatly refutes any possibility of a fourteen year cycle
for these censuses. One comes twenty years after another, then twenty two years after that.
They were supposed to have been completed every five years, so if Augustus couldn't even
accomplish that, it is wholly implausible that he was more successful among his non-citizen
populations.
As far as provincial censuses go, we have our second best information from Gaul. Censuses
under Augustus were performed there in 27 B.C., 12 B.C., and 14 A.D. (this last was

completed only two years later due to local unrest). None of these fits a fourteen-year cycle.
Other provinces also fit no pattern. For instance, we also know that a census was taken in
Cyrenaica (North Africa) in 6 B.C.[12.4] Our best information comes from Egypt, since
from that province alone we actually have countless papyrus census returns. Egyptian
administration was unique, for like that of Sicily, it was simply the system employed by its
previous ruler (Queen Cleopatra), which the Romans found convenient to continue. In
Egypt there was a fourteen-year cycle, but this was the direct consequence of a particular
capitation tax unique to Egypt in which everyone paid an annual tax after reaching the age
of fourteen. This tax may have existed in Syria, but alongside a different capitation tax on
women that began at age 12 (Ulpian, cf. Justinian's Digest 50.15.3), which would have
entailed a 12-year census cycle, or less, if any. But we are unsure when these taxes began,
whether they ever applied to Judaea, or whether Syria was as well-organized as Egypt in
the first place. No matter how you look at it, a fourteen-year cycle would not apply to any
census in which Quirinius was involved. That a census in 6 A.D. matches the Egyptian
cycle could be a coincidence, or the result of a special reorganization of all the Eastern
administrations in that year, but this does not entail the cycle was observed in Syria or
Judaea either before or after that year.[12.5] It could have been, or any other cycle, or no
consistent cycle at all.

Was Quirinius a Special Legate in B.C. Syria?

Another proposal is that hgemoneuontos ts Syrias might mean simply "holding a
command in Syria" and since Quirinius is known to have fought a war in Asia Minor
between 6 B.C. and 1 B.C. (see above), perhaps Luke means to refer to the time when
Quirinius was fighting this war, and not actually "legate of Syria." This doesn't actually
solve any of the problems already discussed so far--no census of Judaea could have been
held before 6 A.D. But the argument is not even reasonable to begin with. First, it makes
no sense to date an event in Judaea by referring to a special command in a war in Asia.
Why not simply name the actual legate in Syria? There is no reason to pass over the most
obvious man and name another who has absolutely nothing to do with Judaea, much less a
census there.
Second, just because Quirinius was probably assigned a Syrian legion to fight bandits on
the mountain border between Galatia and Cilicia, it does not follow that he had any kind of
command in Syria.[13.1] To the contrary, he was in the province of Galatia, not Syria, and
by special command of Augustus. It only makes sense that he was appointed legate of
Galatia for this war, for otherwise the actual legate of Galatia would have been fighting it.
A Syrian legate would have no business fighting a war in someone else's province,
especially in a territory that would leave him cut off from his own province by a large
mountain range: for the Homanadenses were active in the mountain-lake valley in Galatia,
boxed in by the mountains of Pisidia, Lycaonia, and Isauria--the valley surrounding Egridir
lake, Turkey, on a modern map. Every expert familiar with the facts agrees that "only an
army coming from the north could subjugate mountain tribes" in that region, in other words
an army led from the province of Galatia, not Syria.[13.2] So it would be quite nonsensical
of Luke to refer to Quirinius' command and probable governorship in the province of

Galatia as "holding a command in Syria," all the more so since "being a ruler of Syria" is
what the phrase actually means anyway (since "Syria" appears in the genitive, not dative
case).

Was Quirinius Sharing Command with a Previous Governor?

To get around the problem that all the governors of Syria between 12 and 3 B.C. are already
known, some have tried to argue that Quirinius was actually holding a dual governorship
with one of those other known governors. This is truly a desperate ad hoc argument, for
there was never any such thing as a dual governorship under the Roman Empire, and it
would be very strange if there were.[14.1] It also does not solve the problem of the census-for even if Luke was referring to an earlier date, there could not have been a census of
Judaea then, as shown above. Nevertheless, it is argued that Roman provincial commands
were ambiguous and thus could be held by multiple persons at the same time, though this is
argued with no evidence whatsoever, and it is flatly contradicted by the evidence we do
have.
I have seen only two examples offered as evidence to the contrary, but they do not make the
case. The first comes from Josephus, where the casual remark "there was a hearing before
Saturninus and Volumnius, who were in charge of Syria"[14.2] is taken to imply that there
were two governors in Syria at the same time. But when we read Josephus' account of
another hearing within a year or two of that one, we are given more specific information: it
was held before "Saturninus and the senior colleagues of Pedanius, among whom was
Volumnius the procurator."[14.3] The procuratorship was a post held by men of the
equestrian class (sometimes even ex-slaves), who were ineligible for the position of
governor, and always of inferior rank to the governor (the relationship is similar to that
between Quirinius and Coponius, as described by Josephus above). So Volumnius was not
and could not have been a governor of Syria, much less co-governor. The second "example"
makes essentially the same error.[14.4]
Could Luke mean that Quirinius was prefect of Syria under a superior official? Besides the
fact that it is illogical to name the second in command rather than the actual governor,
Quirinius had been a Senator of consular rank since 12 B.C. and thus could never have been
a prefect, who had to be of equestrian rank (see Two Last Ditch Attempts below). It simply
makes far more sense to read Luke as saying just what he says, rather than trying to lap on
layers of undemonstrable and implausible hypotheses grounded in nothing but fantasy. The
likely fact that Luke is borrowing from Josephus further undermines all such attempts at a
solution (cf. Luke and Josephus)..

Was "Quirinius" a Mistake for Someone Else?

Some are tempted to propose the notion that Luke made a mistake: that he really meant
Publius Quinctilius Varus rather than Publius Sulpicius Quirinius. Of course, this would

entail that Luke is wrong, and thus would admit that the text as we have it (which reads
"Quirinius") contradicts Matthew. And it fails to solve the census problem anyway (as
discussed above). But it is also not a plausible conjecture. Around the turn of the 3rd
century, it is believed that Tertullian claimed the Lukan census occurred during the tenure
of Gaius Sentius Saturninus (who was governor of Syria from 9 to 6 B.C.).[15.1] Of course,
Tertullian is not very reliable.[15.2] So the fact that he makes this claim in the context of
antiheretical rhetoric is enough to cast doubt on its authority. Moreover, this would have
been an easy mistake to make: the governor relieved by Quirinius was Volusius Saturninus,
who governed Syria from 4 to 5 A.D.
But this is all moot. For in fact Tertullian does not link Sentius Saturninus with the census
in Luke 2:1, as is commonly supposed by those who ignore the context of this passage.
Rather, he says censuses (plural, not singular) prove that Jesus had brothers, in defense of
Luke 8:19-21. Since Tertullian believed Jesus was the first born, just as Luke says he was,
there could not be any record of his brothers in the census of the nativity. Therefore,
Tertullian could not possibly have been thinking of the census during which Jesus was
born. So he may well mean another Sentius Saturninus (an ancestor of the other), who was
governor of Syria in A.D. 19-21 (Tacitus, Annals 2.76-81), a plausible time before which
Jesus' siblings would have been born. For the sentence sed et census constat actos sub
Augusto nunc in Iudaea per Sentium Saturninum, apud quos genus eius inquirere
potuissent, can be translated "But it is also well known that censuses were conducted under
the Augustus in that time in Judaea by Sentius Saturninus, consulting which they can
investigate his family."[15.3] But even if Tertullian meant brothers by a previous marriage,
and thus had in mind the previous Sentius Saturninus, this still would not be the census
during which Jesus was born, since Jesus had to be born later to a subsequent wife of
Joseph. And Tertullian in that case would simply be bluffing, since no census under the first
Saturninus would have counted the inhabitants of Judaea (as shown above and below).
So there is no basis for imagining any scribal error in Luke. Certainly, if Luke borrowed his
information from Josephus (cf. Luke and Josephus), then he clearly meant Quirinius. And it
is not likely that Luke was mistaking the men, rather than making a mistake in writing the
name: Quirinius is a cognomen, but Quinctilius is a nomen. In Roman nomenclature there
were three names: praenomen (a "first name" or "casual name"), like Publius (the fact that
the two men have the same first name cannot explain the mistake--that would be like
confusing Kevin Klein with Kevin Sorbo); nomen ("family name," the equivalent of our
last name), like Quinctilius or Sulpicius; and cognomen (like a "nick name" or a traditional
name, similar to our middle name), like Varus or Quirinius. It would be odd for an author to
confuse one man's cognomen for another man's nomen. This is all the more so since Varus
was a notoriously famous general, the only one to have lost legions in the early Empire (his
three legions were destroyed by Germans in 9 A.D.), a disaster echoing ominously across
the Roman world and credited with scaring Augustus into a non-expansionist policy, and
leading to the universal glory of Germanicus, beloved all over the empire, who recovered
the lost legionary standards in the reign of Tiberius. Why someone like Luke would mistake
a famous man for a relatively unknown one is hard to fathom. The reverse would have
made more sense. Finally, a mere transcriptional "error" would not likely produce "by
chance" the correct name of an actual governor under whom a census was known to be
made. But for those die hards who want to argue that anyway, see next. Others can skip it.

Can it be a Mere Type-o?

Even if we suppose a remarkably coincidental transcription error, such a mistake is
palaeographically unlikely. In Greek books of the time, which were written in uncial
(all-capitals), Quirinius is written KURHNIOS and Quinctilius is written
KUNTHLIOS. In order for a mistake to be made by Luke, or by a scribe very early in
the tradition (since all manuscripts agree completely on the spelling), RHN would
have to be seen in NTHL, which is all but impossible. Although it is common for LI
to be mistaken as N, if this mistake were made here then the name would have ended
up KURHNOS rather than KURHNIOS, since the I would be lost. But this letter is
there, requiring a second mistake. And this would not be enough. Four more mistakes
would have to be made as well in seeing the single letter R in the letters NT, which
even a modern English reader can see is quite implausible: it requires missing two
entire vertical strokes and then an entire grave, and then reading a T as a completed R.
And the notion, actually said to me by someone desperate to defend this argument, that
the N and T might overlap, and thus "look like" R is silly even in principle, and has no
precedent in any known writing--those letters never overlapped in uncial Greek.
Perhaps these theorists want to suppose Luke was half blind? Since he spells every
other proper name correctly, even that desperate thesis fails to make sense. Moreover,
due to popular and foreign usage the C tended to be dropped from Quinctilius, and if
Luke had read the Greek or Latin of the proper spelling, then his mistake would be
even more implausible, since KUNKTHLIOS is even farther from KURHNIOS. In
Latin inscriptions these names would have appeared as QUINTILIUS (or
QUINCTILIUS) and QUIRINIUS respectively. A mistake from the Latin would
require the unbelievable reading of NTIL as RIN. The way these letters are always
composed in stone or print would make a mistake of NT for R very unlikely: the grave
stroke of the R is smaller and lower than it is on the N; likewise, the horizontal stroke
on the T never crosses to the left of an N even when the letters are merged; and how
the remaining right side of this stroke could be ignored is difficult to imagine.
Moreover, the second vertical of the N is straight, so mistaking that as curved, as is the
case in the loop of an R, is most unlikely. Finally, a mistake of L for N is obviously
unlikely.

Was it a Census Conducted by Herod the Great?

One might try to argue that the census was actually not Roman at all, but conducted by
Herod. Of course, this is prima facie implausible, for it is most strange that Luke would not
simply say this, but instead associate it with a Roman governor and an Imperial decree: the
plain language and obvious context leaves no reasonable interpretation but that Luke meant
a Roman census (and again, the possibility that Luke is drawing on Josephus would support

this). Even if some other nations held their own censuses, the Jews held a negative attitude
toward taking a census in peacetime.[16.1] Had Herod conducted such a census on his own
initiative, it would have been a truly remarkable event, and could not have escaped mention
by historians such as Josephus. And Herod the Great enjoyed the greatest favor and
freedom of any client king ever under Roman influence, so any Roman attempt to "force"
Herod to run a census would have been even more inexplicable and unprecedented.
Nonetheless, Brook Pearson argues for this interpretation and his arguments will be
addressed here.[16.2] First, Pearson traps himself in a false dichotomy: arguing that Luke
can only be seen as "historically accurate" if Quirinius governed Syria in the reign of Herod
or the census took place before Quirinius, he then argues for the latter. But he ignores the
easiest solution of all: that Luke is right and Matthew is wrong. Of course, it is just as likely
both are wrong, but if one's goal is to defend Luke, one need only reject the historical
accuracy of Matthew. But having set up the goal of defending the only thesis he hasn't seen
refuted, Pearson is left to try and build a case on poorly-researched conjectures. His
relevant points are:
1 Pearson claims that "Josephus records a great deal of indirect evidence that a careful
and detailed system of census and taxation existed under Herod" (p. 265). But he then
presents evidence only of the latter: a careful and detailed system of taxation. He assumes
that taxation entailed a census (p. 266). But it did not. Only capitation and corvee taxes
(taxes paid per person) required a census. Most taxes had no need of census returns, which
were very expensive to administer: land taxes were based on records of property ownership,
which were maintained regularly throughout the year; tariffs and other taxes on
transportation or sale were levied on the spot; rents of royal land or animals were collected
by contractual agreement peculiar to every case; fixed tribute assessed on townships and
metropoleis was due in full no matter who had to pay it, and the general point of such
taxation was to leave the central power without the expense of having to worry how they
came up with it; taxes on produce were based on annual outcomes or predictions, and even
when the productivity of land was based on scheduled assessments, this had nothing to do
with counting people (and so would not require Joseph to travel).[16.3] What Pearson
needs to show is evidence that any sort of capitation or corvee tax was ever levied by
Herod, but he doesn't give a single piece of even indirect evidence of this. Pearson fails to
recognize that this is why Egypt had a 14-year census cycle: the only reason a census was
taken there at all was that a tax levied on each person began when boys reached the age of
14 (cf. How Often Was the Census Held?, above). There is no evidence of any such cycle or
capitation tax in Judaea in the time of Herod, and as noted above it is particularly
improbable for a Jewish king, and even more improbable that Josephus should never once
mention or allude to such a thing despite covering in detail every year of Herod's thirtyseven-year reign.
2 Pearson cites Heichelheim on the account books of Herod, claiming they "could not
have been possible" without a census (p. 266).[16.4] Of course, Heichelheim's work is
rather outdated, but this conjecture is plainly false from what we know of ancient taxation
(as noted above, most taxes required no census) and from the fact that the reference in
question is only to records of Herod's own estates and the annual income of the whole
kingdom, which affords no evidence at all of any capitation or corvee taxes (or even land

productivity assessments for that matter), and thus provides no evidence of census-taking.
[16.5] In fact, one passage Pearson cites implies the opposite: Herod's kingdom was taxed
by assigning fixed annual tribute to each territory, and thus not based on a census. This is
clear when Augustus reduces by a quarter the annual tax owed by the whole "Samaritan
territory," rather than, for instance, reducing by a quarter the tax each Samaritan had to pay.
In fact, Josephus uses here the word for tribute, which was not capitation or corvee tax but
a fixed annual amount levied on cities or groups of cities, who then had to figure out on
their own how to come up with it.[16.6]
3 Pearson cites evidence that there were 'town scribes' (kmogrammateis) under Herod
and therefore census records and therefore a census (p. 271). It never occurs to him to
investigate what else such scribes did: for in fact, government-employed scribes kept
property records and records of contracts, records pertaining to market taxes and tariffs and
and legal cases, and so on, and thus had plenty to do and plenty reason to be in every town.
Their existence does not in the least entail a census (indeed, one wonders just what Pearson
thinks they did in the years of down-time between censuses). Moreover, not all town
scribes were employed by the government: many were private businessmen who read and
wrote documents for a fee, hired by the great majority of people, who were illiterate. Thus,
once again, non-evidence is blown way out of proportion and turned into a phantom 'proof'.
4 Pearson tried to dismiss the obvious objection, that Luke refers the census to an
Augustan decree and the governorship of Quirinius, by insisting that ancient people dated
events by reference to the most memorable event near it, and thus Luke meant to refer to an
earlier census by reference to a later 'more memorable' one (pp. 277-8). Here all evidence
contradicts Pearson, and it is not surprising that he does not give a single analogous
example to demonstrate his generalization. Not only would people not have any good idea
eighty or so years later when 'the census of Quirinius' occurred without reference to some
standard chronology, but it was routine to date all events by regnal years of important
persons (or, in some places, from the foundation of important cities): coins, handled by
everyone, routinely did this, and it would be second nature to understand such a dating
scheme. And in fact this is just what Luke does in 3:1. If Luke is comfortable dating events
by a precise and normal means there, why would he use an imprecise and abnormal means
in 2:1-2? Thus Pearson's reasoning is entirely shot through. To the contrary, Luke associates
the census not with a private action of Herod, but with a decree of Augustus: a Roman
action, not a Herodian one. And Luke says it happened when Quirinius was governor of
Syria, not before (as has been amply shown above). Indeed, if we follow Rosen, the passage
may be taken to mean the first year of Quirinius' reign, making 2:2 just as precise as 3:1.
The bottom line is that there is no evidence of a Herodian census, and no reason to believe
there ever was one. And even if there were, there is no way Luke's reference could be to
such a census, and thus Pearson's argument is baseless. For the alternative claim that it
wasn't a census but a national oath, see Two Last Ditch Attempts below.

Was Herod Alive in 2 B.C.?

For the sake of completeness I will address an argument some Christian apologists
advocate out of desperation to preserve Biblical infallibility, drawing on a particular work
by Jack Finegan (Handbook of Biblical Chronology, rev. ed., 1998). This is the assertion
that in fact Herod the Great was still living in 2 B.C., and since we do not know who was
governing Syria then, it was "obviously" Quirinius. Besides having no evidence whatsoever
for either fact (and thus it is an entirely ad hoc theory), the evidence we do have stands
against such a thesis. For example, Josephus says, point blank, that Varus, not Quirinius,
was governor when Herod died (Jewish War 1.9-10). But the argument becomes the most
convoluted and obscure we've yet seen, demanding a rather lengthy treatment.
When did Herod die?
First, Herod simply could not have been alive in 2 B.C. (see Note 3.8). Josephus' principal
source for the reign of Herod in Jewish Antiquities books 14-17 (and presumably for the
parallel material in the earlier Jewish War) is the Histories of Nicolaus of Damascus, a
close friend of Herod, who in turn relied on first-hand knowledge and Herod's own
Memoires.[17.1] In fact, we know Josephus consulted Herod's Memoires directly, and
"others" (tois allois) who wrote about Herod's reign (Jewish Antiquities 15.174). Thus, to
propose that he erred in dating the king's death by a full two years (actually three, as
Finegan places his death in 1 B.C.) is incredible. Josephus says in Jewish Antiquities 17.191
and Jewish War 1.665 that Herod died thirty-seven years after he was proclaimed king by
Rome (40 B.C., a date confirmed by Appian, BC 5.75; and Josephus agrees, with a very
precise date: Jewish Antiquities 14.389, so there is no room to move here), and thirty four
years after he assumed the crown (37 B.C., as Josephus himself says: Jewish Antiquities
14.487), and since Josephus accurately proceeds through the years of his reign, including
several that have independent corroboration (such as "the seventeenth year" of Herod's
reign, securely placed by Josephus in 20 B.C., see 17.4), it is absurd to suggest he made any
mistake greater than a single year.
Finally, we cannot trust the reported coincidence of a lunar eclipse near to Herod's death
(Jewish Antiquities 17.167). Only a partial eclipse is astronomically confirmed for March
13, 4 B.C., which makes this an unlikely candidate, and it is unclear how much time
followed the event and his actual death anyway. But that kind of claim was commonly
made for great events (in this case a notorious murder) and thus is often not genuine, as I
explain in my essay on Thallus. Even if accepted, the only total eclipse in this period fell on
23 March 5 B.C., which would allow his death to fall in 4 B.C., and, in fact, all the events
supposed to happen in the interim more easily fit this than the partial eclipse of 4 B.C. Of
course, Finegan latches onto a total eclipse in 1 B.C. for his theory, but even to use this he
is forced to go against evidence in Jewish literature for the actual day of Herod's death (
506) which preceded that eclipse.
Besides this hand waving, Finegan's case is built largely in 228, where he attempts to redate Herod's coronation, against all evidence, to 35 B.C. He notes that Josephus reports
Jerusalem was taken in the 185th Olympiad (Jewish Antiquities 14.487), which ended in 36
B.C., but this Olympiad also includes 37 B.C., and as Josephus also gives the precise
consular year he can only mean that year, disallowing Finegan's hypothesis from the start.
But Finegan then notes that Josephus says this was "after twenty seven years" from when

Jerusalem was taken by Pompey in 63 B.C., which would refer to 36 B.C. Of course, he
fails to admit that this could just as well mean Jerusalem was taken in 64 B.C., or that
Josephus erred in his math, or that a scribe mistook eikosiex for eikosiepta, and since
Josephus otherwise names the year exactly, the latter two errors would be more likely. But
in actual fact, Josephus always counts the short portions of a Roman calendar year as
complete years, as many scholars of Josephus have noted, and thus he reckons inclusively,
so that "after twenty seven years" actually points to 37 B.C., not 36 as Finegan thinks.
This is obvious even on Finegan's own calculations: consular years began January 1 (142,
172), but Jewish years began in March (165, 513), and the Olympiads began in July
(185), and all three used calendars assigning different days to the months, so they often
fell out of alignment even with our Julian reckoning (all the more so before the reforms of
Julius Caesar in the 40's B.C.). Josephus uses all three schemes simultaneously, thus errors
(or ambiguities) of some months are to be expected in any date he gives. Josephus says
Pompey took Jerusalem in the third month (Jewish Antiquities 14.66) by Jewish reckoning,
in the year 63 B.C. by Roman reckoning, and Herod took the city on the same calendar day
in the third month by Jewish reckoning, in the year 37 B.C. by Roman reckoning, which on
both occasions was a day of fasting (Jewish Antiquities 14.487). The only known fast in the
third month (the month of Sivan, which crosses May and June) is that of the apostasy of
Jeroboam "who made Israel to sin" (Sivan 22 or 23).[17.1.5] It cannot be the Day of
Atonement as Finegan presumes (227), which fell in the seventh month. This means that
Herod was crowned after twenty seven Roman consular pairs held office, hence after
twenty seven calendar years on the Roman system. This is also twenty seven years on the
Olympiadic system, since the year 63 includes two Olympiadic calendar years for any event
that happens before July. Finegan also argues that Herod might have dated his regnal years
from the following new year (Nisan), but even if he reckoned this way he would sooner
date his reign from the previous new year, so that there would be no year zero for any of his
official acts as king, and so his coins could begin right away showing year 1 of his reign,
without having to wait nine months to start counting his years of rule. Indeed, we have no
evidence that any ruler in antiquity employed any other practice.
So, the fact of the matter is, Josephus reckoned Herod's reign as beginning in 40 B.C. with
a coronation in 37 B.C. There is no way around this, and thus when he dates Herod's death,
he can only mean 4 B.C., since he relates it to both events precisely (and one is confirmed
by another extant historian). That Josephus is wrong about something so central to his
histories and for which he had such good, eyewitness sources is simply not credible.
Finegan knows all scholars agree with this.[17.2] In fact, Finegan knows that all external
and circumstantial evidence is against him. For example, it is a fact that all three regnal
dates of Herod's successors match a coronation date of 4 B.C. ( 516). This includes
Archelaus, whose dates are also corroborated by Cassius Dio (55.27.6), and Josephus does
not have Archelaus declared king until Herod dies (Jewish War 1.670), but has Archelaus
deposed in 6 A.D. after 10 years rule (see above), which also puts Herod's death in 4 B.C.
And then there is Antipas, whose dates are confirmed in extant coinage, according to
Finegan himself. Finegan tries to suggest against this evidence that all three of these kings
were made co-regents with Herod in 4 B.C. until his death in 1 B.C., a claim that is
groundless and prima facie absurd. With Antipater, that would make five kings ruling
simultaneously! It is inconceivable that Josephus would not mention such a remarkable

action. Indeed, the political atmosphere of heated tensions and indecision about who would
inherit makes such a massive coregency profoundly unthinkable for Herod--his coregency
with Antipater (the only one Josephus mentions) was already such a disaster that Herod had
him executed a week before he himself died, and the other three were only assigned their
territories by Herod's will and confirmed by Augustus after Herod's death. Josephus is
absolutely clear on this. And it is the only logical way things could have happened.
Was Philip made king in 2 B.C.?
Apart from all this ad hoc assertion, Finegan's only 'case' for his hypothesized masscoregency is an attempt to redate the reign of just one successor, Philip, according to an
obscure textual variant ( 218). He proposes that in Jewish Antiquities 18.106 "in the
twentieth year of Tiberius" should be read as "in the twenty-second year of Tiberius," so
that Philip's "thirty-seven year" reign would have begun in 2 B.C. (and thus, so the
argument goes, Herod must have died then). The original basis for all this tinkering is the
fact that Philip's obituary is indeed placed in Josephus' narrative seemingly around the year
35 or 36. But it is clear that Josephus wrote "twentieth" and not "twenty-second," and
analysis shows that Josephus is either wrong about the dates of all the events he places in
this year, or else he is compressing many years together, or both. It is therefore most likely
that Josephus is correct about when Philip began his reign, just as he is with all the other
tetrarchs, and simply misplaced (or loosely placed) his obituary among external Roman
events he knew less well.
As evidence of Josephus' confusion about events, Cassius Dio dates the Vitellian parley,
which Josephus places before Philip's death, to the reign of Caligula, several years after
Philip's death (59.17.5, 59.27.2-3). And it appears that Tacitus may have, too: Vitellius, as a
future emperor, is an important person, yet the event is not recorded by Tacitus for the reign
of Tiberius, while Tacitus' account of Caligula's reign is lost. Likewise, Tacitus (Annals
6.31) and Cassius Dio (58.26) both date the other Parthian events to 34/35, which Josephus
places after 36/37. Thus, while Josephus dates the death of Philip as having happened
"about the same time" as all these Parthian affairs (Jewish Antiquities 18.96-105), they did
not happen in the same year. Indeed, it appears that the Parthian king Artabanus established
his son Arsaces as ruler of Armenia in 33 or 34 A.D., not 36 as Josephus' narrative implies
(s.v. "Artabanus" and "Armenia," Oxford Classical Dictionary). Since Josephus clearly did
not have a good idea of when the surrounding events actually happened, or else is not
discussing a single year at all, he is certainly being too vague to pinpoint an exact year
when he says Philip's death happened "around" then. Likewise, right after Philip's obituary,
Josephus says "around the same time" Herod and Aretas began to have a falling out, but the
narrative of this event spans several years in a matter of a few paragraphs. Thus, very little
can be concluded about the date of Philip's death from where Josephus has placed it in his
narrative.
What about that obscure textual variant? Finegan's only source for this claim is a
mysterious, unpublished speech given by David Beyer.[17.3] In Finegan's summary, he
never identifies any actual manuscripts, and though Beyer names them he does not identify
their relationship to other manuscripts or their known quality or origins. All Finegan (and
Beyer) does is "count manuscripts" and argue that older manuscripts are the most reliable.

But neither is true, as any palaeographer knows. We have no way of knowing which of the
manuscripts Beyer counted were copies of other extant manuscripts (and thus completely
irrelevant to the question), and we have no idea whether the manuscripts he looked at are
known to be reliable or unreliable or to what degree or in what ways. Older manuscripts
can sometimes be poorer than new manuscripts, since newer ones can be based on even
older but more reliable archetypes (see "On Calvinist Scorn of Textual Criticism" for more
about textual analysis), and older ones may stem from especially faulty textual traditions.
Moreover, Beyer examined only manuscripts in the British Museum and the Library of
Congress--yet the best manuscripts are in France and Italy--one of which is the oldest,
Codex Ambrosianae F 128, inscribed in the 11th century (the oldest manuscript Beyer
examined was 12th century); and another is the most reliable: Codex Vaticanus Graecus
984, transcribed in 1354; both confirming a reading of "twentieth," and thus invalidating all
his conclusions from the start. Finegan and Beyer seem ignorant of all of these issues.
Consequently, we cannot trust them here.
When, instead, we examine all existing critical editions of Josephus, composed by scholars
(Niese, Naber, and Thackeray) who themselves looked at the manuscripts, and properly,
identifying relationships among them and assessing their reliability, we find a very different
story. First of all, little more than a handful of manuscripts are worth even examining for
this passage--yet Beyer is counting dozens (none of which are even among the best),
proving that his investigation is completely disregarding the proper criteria of textual
analysis. Second, all scholarly editions agree: the word for "twentieth" (eikost) exists in
all extant Greek manuscripts worth considering. Where does the reading "twenty-second"
come from? A single manuscript tradition of a Latin translation (which reads vicesimo
secundo). Beyer's case completely falls apart here. The Latin translations of Josephus are
notoriously inferior, and are never held to be more accurate than extant Greek manuscripts,
much less all of them. Indeed, this is well proven here: whereas the Latin has 22 for the
year of Tiberius, it also has 32, or even in some editions 35, as the year of Philip, not the 37
that Finegan's argument requires. Thus, clearly the Latin translator has botched all the
numbers in this passage. Any manuscripts that Beyer examined were no doubt either from
these inferior Latin manuscripts, or Greek translations from these Latin manuscripts.
Therefore, there is no basis whatever for adopting "twenty second" as the correct reading.
Philip was crowned in 4 B.C. exactly as Josephus says, and just as all the other tetrarchs
were who inherited portions of Herod's kingdom. This means Herod died in 4 B.C., exactly
as Josephus claims.
Two Last Ditch Attempts
Even allowing such an inconceivable error on the part of Josephus, this whole theory runs
afoul of the problem that Quirinius could not have been governor of Syria twice (see
Section II above) nor could there have been a census in Judaea when Herod was still alive
(see Section III above). But Finegan employs two ad hoc maneuvers in an attempt to
bypass these facts:
(1) Finegan's response to the first conundrum is that Quirinius was actually prefect or
procurator of Syria in 2 B.C. ( 522), not an actual governor. But that is definitely
impossible: those were offices held only by knights (men of the equestrian class), never by

senators, much less senators of the most prestigious consular rank, and Quirinius had been
of consular rank since 12 B.C. This mistake is similar to that made by those who want
Quirinius to have been a co-governor. It just isn't possible or logical, and of course has no
evidence of any kind in support of it.
(2) Finegan's response to the second conundrum is that Luke was referring to some sort of
other 'counting' by Herod the Great. This could not be a census (see above). So Finegan
argues it was when "the people of Rome" proclaimed Augustus Pater Patriae, "Father of
his Country" ( 525), but Finegan has badly erred here: this is a reference to a vote by
Roman citizens, which would have nothing whatever to do with Judaeans. By confusing a
vote with an oath-taking, Finegan conjures the false claim that Luke is referring to the
registration of oaths of loyalty. Of course, this is already shot down by the fact that Herod
was not alive in 2 B.C., as we've seen. And we have no record of such an oath in Judaea in
that year or any year near it, despite the fact that Josephus usually records them: the last
such oaths commanded by Herod were in 20 B.C.[17.4] and in 8 or 7 B.C.[17.5] Worse, this
thesis is inherently implausible: Luke does not use the vocabulary of oath-swearing, nor
does he describe such a process. For example, Joseph would not travel to Bethlehem if all
he had to do was swear an oath of allegiance--that had to be done where he lived.[17.6]
Joseph's journey only makes sense in the context of a census, where family land could
require his presence (see second part of Luke's Description of the Census above). Likewise,
"that all that was inhabited be recorded," using apograph as the verb, repeated again as the
noun apograph, can only refer to a census: a register made for taxing. Indeed, the word
does not even mean "count," but "written up," which meant a detailed record-making, and
this term is never used in reference to registering oaths. Rather, some form of eunoe is the
correct word (Jewish Antiquities 17.42; cf. e.g. epi eunoiai in Jewish Antiquities 18.124 and
enmoton tn eunoian in Jewish Antiquities 15.368). Indeed, typically, oaths were not
registered at all: one swore before a magistrate and received a diploma attesting to the fact
that you swore, which you could present if anyone challenged the fact, as is shown in detail
in the martyrologies of those who refused to swear for Decius in 249 A.D. (and in accounts
of Christians avoiding martyrdom by buying forged diplomas). Certainly the burden is on
those who claim otherwise to present evidence, and I have never seen any.

Conclusion
There is no way to rescue the Gospels of Matthew and Luke from contradicting each
other on this one point of historical fact. The contradiction is plain and irrefutable,
and stands as proof of the fallibility of the Bible, as well as the falsehood of at least one
of the two New Testament accounts of the birth of Jesus.

[1.1] 2:1 egeneto de en tais hmerais ekeinais exlthen dogma para Kaisaros Augoustou
apographesthai pasan tn oikoumenn 2:2 haut apograph prt egeneto
hgemoneuontos ts Syrias Kyrniou. I have attempted to render all Biblical translations as
literally as possible without spoiling the genuine meaning in Greek.

Jacques Winandy recently claimed that a connective de after haut is required by the
rules of Greek grammar (it fulfills the role of a period in English), and thus its absence here
is peculiar, cf. "Le recensement dit de Quirinius (LC 2,2): une interpolation?" Revue
Biblique July 1997 (104:3), pp. 373-7. He takes this as evidence that this entire line began
as a marginal line note made by a scribe that was later accidentally assimilated into the text
(for an example of this very thing, see my discussion of Phlegon in my article on Thallus).
But given the evidence of borrowing in Luke from Josephus, I find this unlikely (see my
article on Luke and Josephus). It would be more probable that Luke simply made an error
or the de was lost in transmission.
But in fact, this is simply a Lukan affectation, for he often omits a connecting particle
when beginning a sentence with a pronoun (cf. Luke 1:32, 7:27, and esp. 23:51 for a close
parallel; Acts 1:14, 4:11, 6:6, and esp. 16:17 for a close parallel), and it is common in Koin
Greek for the nominative pronoun to mark transition. Winandy also regards the absence of
an article in this phrase as indicative of an interpolation, but his argument (and suggested
re-translation) are misguided: the absence of an article is perfectly acceptable for a
predicate adjective construction with a form of "to be" in Koin Greek. Moreover, the use
of the reflexive hautos as houtos is not unusual for Luke but would be unusual for a scribal
note. I must conclude that the phrase is genuine.
[1.1.2] One might suppose that Luke 1:42, Elizabeth's greeting to Mary, implies that Mary
is already pregnant, but it does not entail that. She may merely be anticipating the future, as
is the case in Deuteronomy 28:4, where the same present participle construction is used in
the Septuagint clearly in reference to future generations and not to present conceptions. And
this is likely, since there is no actual verb used in 1:42, while at 1:45 she actually uses the
future tense: what the angel told Mary will be fulfilled. Likewise, in 1:48-49, Mary doesn't
say she is blessed because she has conceived, but because God has chosen her to be the
mother of the messiah.
Some have noted that this entails a twelve year-long betrothal between Joseph and
Mary, but there is nothing incredible about a long betrothal--anyone familiar with societies
where marriages are arranged (even from birth) knows that well enough, especially when
the would-be husband is not yet financially sound or the woman's parents can't yet come up
with an adequate dowry, and as we have reason to presume Jesus' family very poor, we
might expect such complications. Mary's age would also have been an issue, if she was still
only a child at her betrothal. At any rate, we are never told when or even if Mary and
Joseph marry--they are still unmarried when Jesus is born (Luke 2:5), which would have
been nearly a year in and of itself.
[1.1.3] Mark Smith has composed a good article explaining in his own terms why attempts
to reconcile Luke and Matthew fail, while concluding with strong support for the accuracy
of Luke as against Matthew: Mark Smith, "Of Jesus and Quirinius," The Catholic Biblical
Quarterly, 62:2 (April, 2000): pp. 278-93.
Smith argues that Luke may have meant by "Herod the King" not "Herod the Great" but
"Herod the Ethnarch," in other words Archelaus, Herod's successor (ibid. pp. 285-6). Smith
makes a good case for this. I originally decided against it because I thought Luke was
otherwise very precise with the titles of men in power throughout Luke and Acts (a fact that
Smith himself documents), but Luke fails to be precise in naming the offices of Pilate and
Quirinius, too. Archelaus only called himself Herod on his coins (Burnett, Roman

Provincial Coinage 1992, nos. 4912-17) and the historian Cassius Dio also knows him only
as such (55.27), while even Josephus, who otherwise refers to Archelaus as ethnarch, could
still call him a king (Antiquities of the Jews 18.93), facts that slipped my notice before.
Additionally, the title of "ethnarch" is never used by any Gospel author, and appears only
once in the New Testament (2 Cor. 11:32), while at the only place in the New Testament
where the name "Archelaus" is used (Matthew 2:22), he is said to have basileuei, "reigned,"
a term that does not entail but nevertheless implies a status of king (basileus), in contrast to
other verbs of governing that could have been chosen. Likewise, though Archelaus was
technically a tetrarch, this term is only used in the New Testament of later rulers.
It has been suggested that the potential for confusion between the two Herods would
call for precision, since Herod the Great is the more famous. But this requires assuming, at
the very least, (1) that Luke thought of this (authors don't always anticipate every confusion
they could be causing) and (2) that Luke expected his audience to know there was a
technical difference in title between Herod the Great and his son Herod Archelaus (not
everyone was a history major) and (3) that Luke actually knew which Herod it was (his
sources may have been vague) and (4) Luke thought precision here mattered (even though
he doesn't attempt to identify the year with the kind of precision he does in Luke 3:1) and
(5) Luke thought the context (proximity to the census which came upon the removal of
Herod Archelaus) didn't already make it clear which Herod he meant and (6) Luke knew
what Herod Archelaus' formal title actually was (just because he had good sources on what
the titles were of other men in 30 A.D. doesn't mean he had good sources on what
Archelaus' title was fifteen years earlier) and (7) Luke wasn't bothered by contradicting
himself (or confusing his readers by appearing to contradict himself) by incorrectly
preceding a census in 6 A.D. with a king who had already been dead for ten years. Overall,
that's a lot of assumptions to adopt simply to overcome Smith's analysis. A few of these
assumptions could be granted, but to grant all of them is a bit much.
Hence I believe Smith could be right, and thus Luke intended the year of John's birth to
be 5 A.D.
[1.1.4] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.113-19; see also Bowersock's Roman Arabia,
pp. 65-6, and Kasher's Jews, Idumaeans, and Ancient Arabs, pp. 177-80.
[1.1.5] Robert Smith, in "Caesar's Decree (Luke 2:1-2): Puzzle or Key?" (Currents in
Theology and Mission 7:6; Dec. 1980, pp. 343-51), recapitulates a theory proposed by a
few other scholars that Luke created (or emphasized, if they are true) these features in order
to paint Jesus, via his family, as peaceful and obedient to Caesar, in contrast to rebels and
radicals with whom Christianity was often in danger of being compared. Smith shows very
clearly Luke's preoccupation with this theme, for Luke alone mentions numerous times
census-related rebellions and the theme of disobeying Caesar, while never showing Romans
committing an injustice (in all the trials related in Luke-Acts, the Romans come out as
superlative judges), and repeatedly emphasizing the unrebellious and obedient nature of
Christians, etc. Although I think it is clear that Luke has these apologetic concerns, I don't
think he needed to emphasize, much less invent, a universal census or a journey of Joseph
and Mary to convey them. Mark Smith and other scholars agree with me (op. cit. 1.1.3, p.
284).

[1.2] A.N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament 1963: p.
168.
[1.3] The famous P.Lond. 904, discussed in F. Kenyon and H. Bell Greek Papyri in the
British Museum 3 (1907), p. 125 (with plate 30), and in George Milligan Greek Papyri
(1910) pp. 72-3. Rostovtzeff cites other evidence proving that there was an idea of a return
to the idia, "place of origin," employed in some censuses conducted in the east, cf. Studien
zur Geschichte des rmischen Kolonates, pp. 305 ff. Also, cf. Rosen, op. cit., in 10.2.
[1.3.5] Mark Smith (op. cit. 1.1.3, pp. 287-91) even proposes a possible "tax dodge" was at
work, and otherwise explains how this migration is not as incredible as critics propose.
Robin Lane Fox, on p. 31 of The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible
argues that "Roman censuses cared nothing for remote genealogies, let alone false ones,"
but this isn't true. Membership in Roman tribes was certainly a fiction, yet essential for
census taking. It is possible that tribal fictions were maintained in Judaea for similar
purposes, and Romans would see an obvious utility in exploiting them to ease the counting
of a highly itinerant population (a great many Jews were herdsmen or pilgrims). Likewise,
it is very doubtful that Luke would use a system of census taking that his every reader
would know didn't exist--certainly, his apologetic aims would fail if his "explanation" held
no water. Therefore, there must have been something to it--for even if fiction, it had to play
on some fact or else the lie would be obvious to everyone. At the very least, we can suppose
many Jews believed they could trace a lineage to some ancestor in the town of their family
land, so as to justify their belonging there and to secure their claim in perpetuity, not to
mention the mere glory of tracing one's line to some tribal hero (many Greeks and Romans
did just the same). We can suppose that Luke believed (or wanted his readers to believe)
that Joseph had family land in Bethlehem, and that this was because it was a portion of
David's land, and since Jewish Law required the return of sold land every fifty years (Lev.
25:10-28), it was impossible to ever be dispossessed of it--thus, it might have seemed
obvious to every Jew that any family plot could be traced to an ancient owner, even if this
really wasn't the case. And as noted in the text above, residing outside the taxed area would
not exempt any landowner from taxation or the related census so long as he held any
property or citizenship in the taxed region.
[1.4] This same position is well argued by Lily Ross Taylor, "Quirinius and the Census of
Judaea," American Journal of Philology 1933, pp. 120-33, esp. pp. 129-31 and 133; and the
evidence is gathered and analyzed by S.R. Llewelyn, New Documents Illustrating Early
Christianity 6 (1992) pp. 112-32, and addressed in the context of Egypt by Bagnall & Frier
(cf. op. cit., pp. 14-6, in 12.5).
[2.1] 2:1 tou de Isou gennthentos en Bthleem ts Ioudaias en hmerais Hrdou tou
basiles. On the reigns of the Herods, cf. A. Jones, The Herods of Judaea, 1967, esp. pp.
28-155ff.
[2.2] Based on "Frier's Life Table for the Roman Empire," p.144 of T.G. Parkin,
Demography and Roman Society (1992), from Bruce Frier's Landlords and Tenants in
Imperial Rome, 1980); cf. also Coale & Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable
Populations, 2nd ed. (1983).

[2.3] Mark Smith (op. cit. 1.1.3, pp. 291-3) points out several reasons why Matthew could
be inventing this story, noting poignantly "If Luke has as a minor theme the submission of
Jesus' family to Roman authority, the central theme of the infancy narrative and early
chapters of Matthew is a theological, typological parallel between Jesus and Moses
acknowledged by virtually all interpreters...[and] the presence of a baby-killing tyrant is
essential" to this comparison, a role only Herod would serve, thus giving Matthew a reason
to "change" the date of the nativity to suit his theological purpose.
[3.1] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (completed in or shortly after 93 A.D.), 17.355
ts d' Archelaou chras hupotelous prosnemtheiss ti Surn pempetai Kurinios hupo
Kaisaros anr hupatikos apotimsomenos te ta en Suriai kai ton Archelaou apodsomenos
oikon.
[3.2] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1-2:
Kurinios de tn eis tn bouln sunagomenn anr tas te allas archas epiteteleks kai dia
pasn hodeusas hupatos genesthai ta te alla aximati megas sun oligois epi Surias parn,
hupo Kaisaros dikaiodots tou ethnous apestalmenos kai timts tn ousin gensomenos,
Kpnios te auti sunkatapempetai tagmatos tn hippen, hgsomenos Ioudain ti epi
pasin exousiai. parn de kai Kurinios eis tn Ioudaian prosthkn ts Surias genomenn
apotimsomenos te autn tas ousias kai apodsomenos ta Archelaou chrmata.
[3.3] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 17.342-4:
Dekati de etei ts archs Archelaou hoi prtoi tn andrn en te Ioudaiois kai Samareusi
m pherontes tn motta autou kai turannida katgorousin autou epi Kaisaros...ho toinun
Kaisar hs kousen, orgi...hrmsen auton eis tn exodon...Biennan polin...ta de chrmata
apnenkato.
[3.4] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.26:
Kurinios de ta Archelaou chrmata apodomenos d kai tn apotimsen peras echousn,
hai egenonto triakosti kai hebdomi etei meta tn Antniou en Aktii httan hupo
Kaisaros
[3.5] Cassius Dio, Roman History 55.27 (begun in 202 and completed around 235 A.D.).
Dio's history is annalistic (it covers events year by year), and for the year 6 he reports that
Archelaus' brothers accused him before Augustus who then deposed him and annexed his
territory to Syria. He clearly does not have his account from Josephus because Dio says he
does not know why Archelaus was deposed (though he should if he had read Josephus),
does not call him Archelaus but Herod the Palestinian (his political name; Josephus uses
only his real name), and implicates his brothers as his accusers even though Josephus only
mentions "leading men in Judaea and Samaria." For corroboration, coins minted in Judaea
by Roman officials begin in A.D. 6 (Burnett, Roman Provincial Coinage, 1992, no. 4954:

note that his supplemental volume corrects a typographical error: the coin in fact reads
"Year 36 of Caesar," i.e. the 36th year after Actium or A.D. 5/6).
[3.6] Antiquities of the Jews, 18.1-8, 20.102; Jewish War (completed between 75 and 79
A.D.), 2.433-4, 7.252-4.
[3.7] This isn't necessarily an independent confirmation, since Luke may in fact be
borrowing this from Josephus, cf. my article Luke and Josephus. Some try to claim that
Acts 5:37 refers to a different census, but this is illogical: it clearly says "in the days" of the
census and Luke has only mentioned one census, the one that happened "in the days"
(exactly the same words) of Augustus (Luke 2:1). Robert Jones in his web essay Historical
Evidence for the Gospel Accounts of Jesus Christ attempts to argue for two censuses by
claiming that in 2:2 Luke says only "a" census but in Acts 5:37 he says "the" census. Apart
from the fact that this would not entail an implication of two different censuses, it is also
wrong on the Greek, for Luke does not say "a" census but "this census" (haut apograph).
A pronomial adjective is even stronger than a definite article, not weaker. Indeed, the
absence of the article is actually a common idiom in Koin Greek, and does not carry the
same weight as its absence in English (it is more like a Cockney dialect, where the article is
often omitted even when normally necessary to the meaning).
[3.8] Many scholars have chewed over the facts and the consensus is that Herod may have
died in 5 B.C. instead of 4 B.C., but whatever the case he had to have been dead before 3
B.C. For analysis, see pp. 372-3 in Nikos Kokkinos, The Herodian Dynasty: Origins, Role
in Society and Eclipse (1998), and also, here, Was Herod Alive in 2 B.C.?.
[4.1] For Saturninus: Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 16.277-81, 16.344, 17.6-7, 17.24, 17.57,
Jewish War 1.577. For Titius: Strabo 16.1.28, Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 16.270-77 (vs.
16.277-81). For Varus: Velleius 2.117.2; Tacitus, Historiae 5.9.2; Josephus, Jewish War
1.617-39 & 2.66-80 (i.e. Varus there before and still there after Herod's death), Jewish
Antiquities 17.89-133, 17.221-23, 17.250-98.
[4.1.5] The date of the consulship of Quirinius is attested in consular lists found in stone
throughout the Roman empire, and by Dio Cassius 54.28.2 (cf. the relevant entry in Pauly,
Wissowa, & Kroll, Real-Encyclopdie d. klassischen Altertumwissenschaft). Tacitus Annals
3.48 and the Josephus passage cited above both paint a picture of Quirinius' consulship as
the pinnacle of a career that arose from obscurity, so it is very unlikely that he had held any
previous consulship that escaped mention in consular lists or other sources (e.g. as a suffect
consul, for example).
[4.2] J. Anderson, Cambridge Ancient History 10, 1934, p. 878. Syme, op. cit., pp. 873-5
(590-2), in [5.1], reiterates the fact, but points out some hopelessly sketchy evidence that
might make it a little more conceivable, though still unprecedented. Nevertheless, there is
no evidence for, and no sense or reason, in any repeated consular command.
[5.1] For the most decisive treatment of this item, cf. Ronald Syme, "The Titulus
Tiburtinus," Roman Papers, vol. 3, Anthony Birley, ed., 1984, pp. 869-884 (originally
appeared in Akten des VI. Internationalen Kongresses fr Griechische und Lateinische

Epigraphik: Vestigia xvii, 1973, pp. 585-601). The primary sources are Corpus
Inscriptionum Latinarum 14 3613 (= H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae 918),
with a photograph (pl. 33b) in J. and A.E. Gordon, Album of Latin Inscriptions 1, 1958 (cf.
also p. 70). I will translate all inscriptions literally within standard epigraphic conventions,
e.g. all abbreviations I expand fully, etc.
[5.2] Inscriptions suggest, but do not prove it. For the whole case for Piso, cf. Syme 5.1 pp.
878-81 (594-9). A.N. Sherwin-White concurs, and defends the same thesis further in
Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament 1963, pp. 162-6.
[5.3] E. Groag, Jahreshefte des sterreichischen archologischen Instituts in Wien 21/22
(1924) pp. 473f. Normally, for the use of iterum in this sentence to mean a second
governorship of Syria, it would have to appear before the verb, yet it clearly does not. Since
iterum does not appear before the verb, nor beside any adjective, the normal conventions
governing adverbs do not apply, since they only relate to the modification of verbs or
adjectives (Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar 439-40); instead, the established routine in
epigraphy is to place it as a modifier of the office, not the province. This has been
challenged by Sherwin-White (op. cit. 1963, p. 164, in 5.2), but all of his supposedly
"contrary" examples either prove Groag's rule instead or engage circular reasoning (and
thus do not in fact prove what he thinks). At best his argument only allows the possibility of
reading the sentence either way, which is insufficient to establish the sense needed here,
especially given that we have no evidence of any second governorship of the same province
in Roman history. Hence his conclusion has not been accepted (Syme, op. cit., p. 873, in
5.1).
[6.1] For details see H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (1892-1916) 2683 (in vol.
3), also in V. Ehrenberg and A. Jones, Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus and
Tiberius, 2nd ed. (1976), 231, and originally appearing in Corpus Inscriptionum
Latinarum 3 Suppl. 6687, from which I acquired the sketch.
[6.2] The Roman Near East (1993), pp. 48, 250.
[7.1] Sketch and photo, and all other details unless otherwise stated, from G. L. Cheesman,
"The Family of the Caristanii at Antioch in Pisidia," Journal of Roman Studies 3 (1913), pp.
253ff. The text is also available in H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae 9502-3.
[7.2] "Can We Trust Scripture?" Return to God Magazine 1:2 (1994) p. 16. No author is
named. The text was available as of August 2006 at
http://www.advancemeants.com/creation/rtgevd4.txt.
[7.3] My suspicion is based on an anonymous apologetic tirade in Comp-SoftwareInternational Digest 23:3 (Tuesday, 16 March 1999). This is hardly a source worth citing,
but it exemplifies some of the trends I have been exhibiting. The author says some
ridiculous things (like that Herod's son Archelaus was "governor of Syria in 1 B.C."), but he
cites Sir William Ramsay specifically, reporting that "he discovered an inscription at
Antioch of Pisidia establishing Quirinius in Syria 10-7 BC, while leading a campaign
against the Homanadenses (in the Taurus Mountains), a fact confirmed by Tacitus." In

actual fact, though Ramsay did discover both stones, his colleague G. L. Cheesman wrote
the relevant article on them (see 7.91 below), and these details match somewhat the
(entirely speculated) claims of Cheesman. Thus there is likely some intermediary source
involved. But again, the speculations of Cheesman are here presented as if "proven" by the
stone, and it is even suggested that Tacitus "confirms" all this, but he only confirms that
Quirinius conducted a war on the Homanadenses, not when or in what command, nor where
the Homanadenses were--the Taurus mountains is actually not the likely location (see box
above).
[7.91] G. L. Cheesman, op. cit., in 7.1. Though drawing on communications and other work
of Sir William Ramsay, the arguments in this article are Cheesman's.
[7.92] Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 2 6843.
[7.93] For details, cf. Syme, op. cit., p. 876 (592), in 5.1. The latest and most thorough
analysis of the evidence for this war is provided by Barbara Levick, "The Homanadensian
War," Roman Colonies in Southern Asia Minor, 1967, pp. 203-14. Cf. p. 213 on this point
in particular.
[7.94] For details, cf. Syme, op. cit., p. 876 (592), in 5.1.
[7.95] Levick, op. cit., pp. 39-40 and 211, in 7.93. Cf. Barrington Atlas of the Greek and
Roman World (2000), R. Talbert, ed., maps 62-6. Syme has also supported this entire
position at some length, refuting outdated scholarship on Quirinius, in "Galatia and
Pamphylia under Augustus: The Governorship of Piso, Quirinius and Silvanus," Klio 1934,
pp. 122-148.
[8.1] His chronological arguments, and the use of this pseudo-evidence, only appear in print
in two publications: "Jesus' Life: A New Chronology," Jerry Vardaman & Edwin Yamauchi,
eds., Chronos, Kairos, Christos: Nativity and Chronological Studies Presented to Jack
Finegan (1989), published by the small Biblical studies press Eisenbrauns (of Winona
Lake, IN); Jerry Vardaman, Chronology and Early Church History in the New Testament, a
series of typed and photocopied lectures delivered once, to the Hong Kong Baptist
Theological Seminary, in 1998 (only a few cheaply-bound copies of this exist; though I was
based in New York city, I had to acquire mine on loan from the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary of Kentucky). Vardaman also presents his conclusions, though not
his evidence or arguments, in another book he edited, Chronos, Kairos, Christos II.
[8.2] John McRay, Archaeology and the New Testament (1991), p. 154. McRay cites a
manuscript Vardaman sent him, which was never published, but a similar claim appeared in
one of the lectures delivered in China in 1998 (cf. 8.1). That Vardaman had this theory since
1989, had a more detailed manuscript in 1990, and yet never published in any peer
reviewed journal, but instead made a significantly different claim in an isolated foreign
seminary lecture eight years later, demonstrates that Vardaman either realizes he cannot
convince any real experts on the subject, or was told so by any independent reviewers he
submitted it to. I am not surprised.

[8.3] Vardaman, op. cit. 1989, p. 66, in 8.1.

[8.4] Vardaman, op. cit. 1989, p. 67, in 8.1.
[8.5] Vardaman, op. cit. 1989, p. 67, in 8.1, citing "hand-scratched microletters" produced
by E.T. Newell in the American Journal of Numismatics 46 (1912), p. 112. However,
Newell only shows evidence there of graffitti on coins: one or two letters, roughly
scratched by hand with an ordinary object, and quite visible to the naked eye. This
phenomenon is in fact well known and not unusual. But these are not "microletters" in
Vardaman's sense: they are neither microscopic nor do they literally cover coins with added
information, but only a few letters at most. Moreover, their date cannot really be
established, since the scratchings could have been made decades after the coins were
minted. In contrast, central to Vardaman's thesis is the claim that most of these inscriptions
were created by the minters and thus reflect official records.
[8.6] Vardaman, op. cit. 1989 8.1 p. 70 and 71.
[8.6.5] I subsequently found the coin on my own, and my estimates were almost exact: the
scale for his blow-up section is approximately 14:1 and the letters he sees would be less
than half a millimeter in size. The following is an enlarged reproduction of a plastercast of
the coin available in A. M. Burnett, Roman Provincial Coinage, 1992, item 4797:

This coin is only 26mm in diameter. Though a cast cannot preserve microscopic details, it
is still obvious that the coin was so smooth that all the details of the goddess's face have
rubbed off, yet Vardaman draws them in as if they are there; likewise the veins of the laurel
leaves are almost rubbed into oblivion right where Vardaman sees his microletters. I
examined the actual coin myself at the British Museum, with a digital microscope, and
found pits and cracks but no microletters. See: Richard Carrier, "Pseudohistory in Jerry
Vardaman's Magic Coins: The Nonsense of Micrographic Letters," Skeptical Inquirer 26.2
(Mar-Apr 2002): pp. 39-41, 61; and Richard Carrier, "More on Vardaman's Microletters,"
ibid. 26.4 (Jul/Aug 2002): pp. 60-61.
[8.7] Vardaman, op. cit. 1989, p. 72, in 8.1.
[8.8] Vardaman, op. cit. 1989, p. 62 (n. 5), in 8.1.
[8.9] Vardaman, op. cit. 1998, Lecture 1, pp. 8-11, in 8.1.

[8.95] Ibid., unnumbered appended page titled "The Problem of Theudas and Microletters
on the Lapis Venutus."
[9.1] For the nature of Roman Imperialism during the formation of the Empire, which was
nearly completed by the Republic, see William Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican
Rome: 327-70 BC (1979). Then, for Roman imperialism in early Imperial period, see
Martin Goodman, The Roman World: 44 BC - AD 180 (1997).
[9.2] Led by Judas the Galilean: Acts 5:37 (cf. 3.7); Josephus, Jewish War 2.117-8, and
Jewish Antiquities 18.1-8.
[9.3] A.N. Sherwin-White, "Quirinius: a Note" (op. cit. 5.2, 1963, p. 167), on Horst
Braunert's study "Der rmische Provinzialzensus und der Schtzungsbericht des LukasEvangeliums," Historia: Zeitschrift fr alte Geschichte 6 (1957), pp. 192-214.
[9.35] Justin Martyr's Apology 1.34 and 1.46 also shows that this is exactly how Christians
understood their own history: Quirinius was the first governor of Judaea, and Jesus was
born during the census he took there, which happened 150 years earlier. It is believed that
Justin wrote his first apology around 155 A.D., which produces a birth year of 6 A.D. (the
150th year before Justin wrote). Justin also claims that one can check the census records to
confirm this, but this is certainly a bluff: it is extremely unlikely that Justin checked them
himself. He does not say he did, and the information he gives is too vague to suggest he
was drawing on an official record. Had he read the actual record, he should have been able
to report at least one of the items the record would include: for Joseph there would be a full
name, age, name of father or family, residence, occupation, and amount of property, as well
as the character and extent of any land and the number of slaves owned. If a baby Jesus
would be listed at all in the census records, it would only be as part of this entry. It is also
unlikely that just anyone could access such important records--to prevent fraud, they must
have been kept under very tight guard and accessible only to Roman magistrates. Cf.
Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. (1996), s.v. "census."
[10.1] Sherwin-White, op. cit. 1963, p. 171 (n. 1), in 5.2.
[10.2] Klaus Rosen, "Jesu Geburtsdatum, der Census des Quirinius une eine Jdische
Steuererklrung aus dem Jahr 127 n.C.," Jahrbuch fr antike Christentum 38, 1995, pp. 515.
[10.3] cf. "proteros," Liddell & Scott Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with suppl.: section B,
esp. B.I.3.d. "prtos is sometimes used where we should expect proteros," often with the
genitive, but note how all examples that follow as proof of this can be rendered "first in
relation to"; also B.III.2.c, and B.I.3.a., "frequently used predicatively of being the first to
do something," thus "first in relation to" is the basic sense in all such contexts, as is
demonstrated further above. This is confirmed by H.W. Smyth's analysis of the appearance
of the superlative with the genitive plural (Greek Grammar, 1920, 1434), and in genitives
of comparison ( 1431). Hence, for example, if Luke meant in Luke 2:2 what he meant in
Acts 1:1, then Luke 2:2 would read "in the previous census when Quirinius was governing
Syria," which means the same thing as "in the first census when Quirinius was governing

Syria."
Note: Since composing the above, another attempt to defend a reading of "before
Quirinius" has been brought to my attention: Stanley Porter stops short of committing to it
but suggests it's a viable possibility in "The Reasons for the Lukan Census," in Paul, Luke
and the Graeco-Roman World, ed. by Alf Christophersen et al (2002): 165-88 (cf. pp. 17376). Pearson had also made this argument (see Was it a Census Conducted by Herod the
Great?). But Pearson and Porter ignore (or are ignorant of) all the grammatical points I
make in the text and note above, especially the fact that you can't have a genitive of
comparison that is separated from the comparative by a finite verb (and accordingly neither
he nor Pearson adduce any parallels for this), and the fact that we have ample attestation of
the way Luke prefers to say "before" and thus we have every reason to expect him to have
written this sentence differently if he really meant what Porter and Pearson want. In
addition, Porter too readily dismisses the fact that no ancient Christian ever understood
Luke 2:2 to mean what Porter suggests, despite the fact that it was written in their native
language (which is not Porter's).
[10.4] H.W. Smyth, Greek Grammar, 1920: genitive of comparison, 1431, 1434;
genitive absolute: 2070. Since the participle in the Quirinius clause is in the present 'tense'
it possesses what is called a 'continuous aspect', meaning that the action of the main
sentence must be happening at the same time as the action in the absolute clause, not before
or after. A participle in the future tense would be required for Quirinius' rule to follow the
census (just as the aorist or perfect tense would be needed for the census to follow the reign
of Quirinius).
In Yahoo Groups, some terribly inept arguments were made with the appearance of
authority about the Greek of this passage, and as this is spreading around on the web, I will
address them in this note, though anyone with any competence in Greek will see they are
bogus. In [Synoptic-L] Interlocking verse method-3c John Lupia makes several claims
already refuted in this essay (for instance, contrary to his claims, the word protos is not
followed by hgemoneus, since a finite verb stands between them), but some novel ones as
well:
(1) Contrary to Lupia, hgemoneus cannot be a noun: the form -ontos exists only in
the present participle construction. A participle is a verbal adjective. It can only stand in for
a noun when it is used as a substantive, which requires at the very least that it stand alone,
yet this would make it incompatible with a subject in the genitive (as Quirinius's name is).
It is therefore an adjective modifying Quirinius.
(2) As Lupia rightly says, hgemoneuma is a feminine noun (it means "a leading")
and hgemoneus is a masculine noun (it means "a leader"), but hgemoneus is not the
genitive of either word. The genitive of hgemoneuma is hgemoneumatos and the genitive
of hgemoneusis hgemones. This error being pointed out, he attempted to retract it with a
claim that he did not mean what he said (in a later post: Re: [Synoptic-L]
HGEMONEUONTOS).
(3) Contrary to his claim, the Octavian census of "19-20 B.C." (actually, 28 B.C.:
Mr. Lupia even has his dates wrong) was of Roman citizens only, not provincials, and thus
could not have included Judaea. There certainly must have been provincial censuses of
Syria before 6 AD, but we do not know their dates, and they would not have included
Judaea, which was not a part of Syria (nor Roman in any sense) until A.D 6. These facts are
demonstrated at length in other sections of the present work.

(4) Contrary to Lupia's arguments, the construction is clearly a genitive absolute, as

this is always the case when you have an independent subject in the genitive modified by a
participle in the genitive. Lupia also seems confused as to why the word for "Syria" is in
the genitive (syrias), though if he had any real knowledge of Greek he would know that this
is because hgemoneuein always takes a genitive object, not because hgemoneus is a noun.
[10.5] Acts 16:12 isn't even remotely relevant, since it only says "Philippi is the first city of
its part of Macedonia," which is not chronological and plainly translates as "first" (in
prominence), not "before."
[10.6] This is attempted by Stephen Carlson, "Luke 2:2 and the Census" (2004). Carlson
incorrectly identifies the preposition en as an adverb in Ephesians 6:2, although that may
simply have been a slip. More seriously, Carlson falsely claims Ephesians 6:2 shares the
same structure as Luke 2:2, but they aren't even close: there is no prepositional clause
following prot in Luke 2:2 but instead a verb followed by a genitive absolute. The
prepositional phrase in Ephesians establishes the context of comparison as conceptual
rather than chronological, whereas the genitive absolute in Luke establishes the context as
chronological rather than conceptual (it reads as when Quirinius was governing Syria
because of the preceding temporal marker "it happened in those days" and the immediately
following phrase "and everyone was going," together linking the Quirinius clause with the
temporal context and purpose of the story, not with any conceptual digression). Carlson is
thus ignoring contextual markers. Carlson also seems unaware of the ubiquitous use of
egeneto as a form of "be." He seems to think "was" is a "weak" translation of this verb
when in fact it's a common one, especially when used in a chronological sense (e.g. Luke
1:5, 2:13, 4:25, etc.; or Luke 1:8, 1:23, 1:41, 2:1, 2:6, 2:15, etc.). In fact, this connotation of
the verb appears over a hundred times in Luke-Acts alone, so I don't understand why he
thinks it peculiar. Carlson also repeats the mistake of citing an example of the genitive of
comparison (Mark 12:28) as a parallel for Luke 2:2, which cannot be a genitive of
comparison, thus eliminating any relevant parallel.
Carlson commits other gaffs in "Parsing Luke 2:2" (2004), incorrectly claiming that
without a definite article the intensifier haut becomes the subject and apograph prt
becomes the predicate, but there is no such rule. In Greek, it could be read that way, or the
reverse (haut apograph the subject and prt the predicate), or neither (haut apograph
prt as subject with no predicate). Moreover, in Koine Greek, articles are often omitted,
hence Carlson is incorrect to cite its absence as a reason to reject an attributive or predicate
position for the intensifying pronoun (just see Luke 20:42, 24:15; or Acts 15:32, 20:34). In
fact, such a usage could even serve as an intensified definite article (e.g. Luke 1:35).
Carlson also incorrectly thinks he can cite an Attic author (Thucydides) to establish an
idiom for a Koine author (Luke), even though these dialects often differ in their use of
articles and intensifying pronouns.
[11.1] Marchant gives the wrong title for his source: Corpus Inscriptorum Latinum 3rd
Supplement, doc. 6687. He really means Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (cf. 6.1 above).
The source of Marchant's error is his reliance on Ethelbert Stauffer's Jesus and his Story
(tr. by Richard and Clara Winston, 1960) which is so incredibly ignorant and incorrect
about so many aspects of Roman history, and historical method, that it is an embarrassment
to apologetic scholarship, at least in his treatment of the census (pp. 21-32). Since he is

often cited nonetheless, I will give here a general list of the kind of damning problems
present in his analysis that discredit him thoroughly:

Stauffer claims a census could take years to complete, even in Egypt, even though
he cites no primary evidence, and in fact papyri demonstrate that there was a
deadline of one year, and the census in Gaul, which he claims took forty years, in
fact took only three, and that due only to exceptional circumstances

As evidence for the nature of a census in Syria under Augustus, Stauffer cites
Lactantius describing census methods under the Tetrarchy in 300 A.D., yet that was
a radically different situation. Roman government in 300 barely resembled any
detail of government under Augustus, not the least of which being the fact that the
entire population had the Roman citizenship at the time, the provinces had entirely
different divisions and borders and officials, the world was in the midst of the most
disastrous economic depression hitherto known, and barbarians were clamoring at
every border posing a serious threat, requiring unprecedented levels of military
requisitions and bureaucratic control.

Stauffer assumes that the presence of Roman procurators in a kingdom entailed the
entire kingdom was regulated by a Roman taxation system, when in fact they
merely collected tribute, and rarely cared how kings came up with it.

Stauffer claims, again without any evidence, that Apamea was a free city when
taxed by Quirinius, when in fact that is false.

Stauffer offers no examples and no evidence of a client kingdom being subject to a

Roman census, yet claims it was routine.

Stauffer assumes Quirinius was appointed to the level of authority of Agrippa after
the latter's death, which is not only unsupported by any evidence, but is absurd on
so many levels it is hardly worth the effort of refutation (not the least fact being
that, had that been so, then it would entail Augustus was grooming Quirinius to be
his successor, as had been the case with Agrippa, yet Quirinius did not succeed him
nor is there any evidence he was ever even considered).

[11.2] See Warwick Ball, Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (2000), p.
160; the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000), R. Talbert, ed., lists five
Apameas, but one of those (map 92 grid B4) is deep in Persian territory and did not fall
under Roman influence until the early 2nd century A.D. (and then only briefly). Apamea on
the Orontes (map 1 grid K3) is the only city of that name both large enough and in Syria;
Apamea Celaenae (map 65 grid D1) is large enough but not in Syria. The other two were
very small communities and could not be the city in question: Apamea on the Propontis
(aka Brylleion: map 52 grid D4) and Apamea on the Euphrates (map 67 grid F2).
[12.1] John McRay, op. cit., p. 154-5, in 8.2.

[12.15] E. Meyer, Ursprung und Anfnge des Christentums, I.51.

[12.2] Special locally-elected censors performed this duty there: Cicero, In Verrem 2.131.
Cf. also Andrew Lintott, Imperium Romanum: Politics and Administration (1993), pp. 71,
75-6.
[12.3] This we know from the best possible evidence: The Res Gestae inscriptions,
recording the words of Augustus himself. The censuses are described at 8. They each
record between 4 and 5 million "Roman citizens" only (the whole empire must have had
more than fifty million inhabitants at the time), and the dates are precisely given by the
identification of office holders. Cf. Naphtali Lewis & Meyer Reinhold, eds., Roman
Civilization: Selected Readings, 3rd ed. (1990), I 195.
[12.4] Cassius Dio 53.22.15; Livy, Periochae 134 and 138; Desau, Inscriptiones Latinae
Selectae, 212.ii.36; Tacitus Annals 1.31-33, 2.6; on Cyrenaica we have papyri, cf. Braunert,
op. cit., p. 194, in 9.3.
[12.5] Arnold Jones, The Roman Economy (1974) p. 165; Roger Bagnall and Bruce Frier,
The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994), pp. 1-30; the fourteen year cycle in Egypt is
firmly attested from A.D. 34 to A.D. 258. Bagnall and Frier show how the Egyptian census
system probably had a seven year cycle before that (including a census in 3 B.C.), and that
the census process was reorganized in the year 5 to conclude in the year 6 (pp. 4-6). In
other words, completion of the census in Egypt was expected to occur in the year 5
(fourteen years after the year 10 B.C., since there is no year zero), but was in fact
completed in the year 6, and this delay was perpetuated thereafter. Combined with the fact
that Josephus reports that Augustus specifically sent Quirinius to take a census in Syria in 6
A.D., and simply added Judaea to it at that time, this suggests Augustus could have been
reorganizing his Eastern government in that year.
[13.1] This was the Homanadensian War, cf. box above for date and other details. Note that
the evidence suggests he also had an Egyptian legion in addition to a Syrian one, and he
may have had others. Legions were often called away from their regular posts for special
operations elsewhere, and when they were they were no longer under the command of their
former provincial legate but of the legate conducting the war.
[13.2] Syme, concurring with Ramsay, cf. 5.1 p. 875 (592). The most accurate geographical
scholarship on this issue is reflected in the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World
(2000), R. Talbert, ed., map 65 grid G3. Limited access was available from the port at Side,
but the mountain pass was dangerous for supply lines to cross in a gorilla war. Coordination
of a campaign by any competent general would have to have come from the open high
plains north of the mountains. Cf. also Levick, op. cit., pp. 203-6, in 7.93 and Syme, op.
cit., in 7.95.
[14.1] For the known details of how governorships actually worked, see Andrew Lintott,
Imperium Romanum: Politics and Administration (1993), esp. pp. 43ff.
[14.2] Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 16.280:

epi te Satorninou kai Ouolomniou tn Surias epistatountn eginonto logoi

The verb epistatountn does mean "put in command" but Josephus also describes Quirinius
as being put in charge of Syria-Judaea along with the knight Coponius, so the idea of a
being put in charge does not entail a governorship but any command position, like that of
prefect. And Josephus is elsewhere very clear about what position Volumnius actually held.
[14.3] Josephus, Jewish War 1.538:
Satorninos te kai hoi peri Pedanion presbeis, sun hois Ouoloumnios epitropos
The Greek term epitropos corresponds to the Latin "procurator" and sometimes stands for
"prefect," but both are equestrians and never senators.
[14.4] "In A.D. 74 or 75, for example, there seem to have been two legati Augusti in Africa
charged with the special duty of revising the frontiers," G. L. Cheesman, op. cit., p. 257, in
7.1. But the inscription proving this states very plainly per Rutilium Gallicum cos. pont. et
Sentium Caecilianum praetorem legatos Aug., "by the consul and pontifex Rutilius Gallicus
and the praetor Sentius Caecilianus, the legates of Augustus." Thus, these are not two
governors, but a consular governor and a lower-ranking praetor, who is a senator but of
lesser rank. Cheesman appears not to have even read the text, even though he troubled to
print the whole thing in a footnote. Instead, he inexplicably assumed the term "legate" only
ever referred to a governorship, when in fact it means simply "deputy" and was used even
by a governor to refer to his own subordinate staff.
[15.1] Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.19.
[15.2] For instance, Tertullian claims that Emperor Tiberius asked the Senate at Rome to
recognize Christianity as an official religion in Apology 1.5.
[15.3] See C.F. Evans, "Tertullian's References to Sentius Saturninus and the Lukan
Census," Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 24:1, April 1973, pp. 24-39.
[16.1] 2 Samuel 24:1-17 and 1 Chronicles 21:1-17 depicts taking a peacetime census as a
foolish sin (even the work of Satan). After David, Solomon only counted foreigners (2
Chronicles 2:17), and later kings counted only soldiers prepared for war (2 Chronicles 25:511, 26:6-15; logically, because they had to pay them). The only preacetime census of Jews
on record after David is the exceptional effort of Ezra, when Jews returned from exile and
racial purity had to be confirmed (Ezra 2; Nehemiah 7:5-67). The only other passage
suggested is 2 Kings 12:4, but that does not actually mention a census in any of the original
languages, but money paid to the temple--there is no mention of any effort to keep track of
who had to pay or who had paid.
[16.2] Brook Pearson, "The Lucan Censuses, Revisited," Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 61:2
(April, 1999), pp. 262-82. I deal here only with those arguments of Pearson not already
addressed above (Did Luke Mean "Before" Quirinius?).

[16.3] For a discussion of the typical sorts of taxes and how they were levied, see S.L.
Wallace, Taxation in Egypt from Augustus to Diocletian, 1938. Though this is somewhat
outdated, it is as yet unrivalled, and the general details have been confirmed, e.g. cf. C.A.
Nelson, ed., Financial and Administrative Documents From Roman Egypt (gyptische
Urkunden aus den Staatlichen Museen Berlin, vol. 15), 1983; esp. 2521 and 2525 with
commentary. Egypt was unique in many respects, especially with regard to specific details
(vocabulary, cycles, officials, rates, etc.), but the general sorts of taxes could more or less
be found all over the empire.
[16.4] Cf. F.M. Heichelheim, "Roman Syria," An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (T.
Frank, ed.) vol. 4, 1936, pp. 160-2.
[16.5] Josephus, Jewish War 17.229: this says nothing more than epistolas hoposa te
chrmata n kai ti ep' etos ephoita, "letters showing the amount of money there was and
what regularly came in every year." There is nothing here that has anything to do with a
census.
[16.6] Josephus, Jewish War, 17.319, the key words are to samareitikon ("the Samaritan
[territory]") and phoros ("tribute"), which usually referred to fixed annual amounts that are
due no matter how many people there are in the territory, and no matter who comes up with
the money or how.
[17.1] Jewish Antiquities 16.183-7, 14.9; for a full list of all relevant passages and other
sources confirming this, consult Jacoby's Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 90 and
236.
[17.1.5] Cf. A. P. Bloch, Day by Day in Jewish History: A Chronology and Calendar of
Historic Events, 1983, p. 209 (n. 65).
[17.2] Cf. 501 ff.; the few odd exceptions are fully rejected by contemporary scholarship,
cf. 512 (which is the source of all of Finegan's inept argument).
[17.3] David Beyer, "Josephus Reexamined: Unraveling the Twenty-second Year of
Tiberius," delivered at the annual national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature
(Finegan incorrectly calls this the Society for Biblical Literature), on November 19, 1995.
But for some mysterious reason, this paper was not published in the Society of Biblical
Literature 1995 Seminar Papers (ed. Eugene H. Lovering, Jr., Scholars Press: Atlanta,
Georgia), which otherwise reproduces the speeches given at the same meeting. The editor's
introductory note (p. ix) reveals a problem right away with using Beyer's presentation the
way Finegan does: the papers given at the meeting are "experimental and initial research on
a subject. Therefore they should not be considered finished works but works in progress." I
subsequently found Beyer's paper in Vardaman, ed., Chronos, Kairos, Christos II, and
Beyer says little more than Finegan does on this subject.
[17.4] Jewish Antiquities 15.368-370, w. 15.354 & 380, in the seventeenth year of his reign.
As discussed already, Herod's reign officially began in 37 B.C., when his Parthian rival was
finally defeated and Herod assumed the crown and control of Jerusalem, though he had

been approved for kingship by the Roman Senate in 40 B.C. (cf. AJ 17.191). That this was
20 B.C. is confirmed by the fact that Herod places an important state visit by Augustus at
the same time, and Augustus himself, in his Res Gestae, records this very visit (11), placing
it in 20 B.C. (thus aligning perfectly with the fact that Josephus dates the beginning of
Herod's reign correctly in 37 B.C.). Dio Cassius likewise confirms the very same detail
(54.7.4-6, 54.9.3), and we can safely presume it was fully corroborated by the histories of
Nicolaus and Herod's own memoires.
[17.5] Jewish Antiquities 17.34-43, w. 16.136 & 17.89. The fact that Josephus estimates a
number of those refusing the oath here does not imply oaths were being counted, since he is
only stating an estimate not an exact figure (that's why he gives only a nice round number),
and he is referring to the whole sect of Pharisaic rabbis, whose number would have been
roughly known anyway. Notice, also, how the two oaths recorded do not correspond with
the quintennial "prayers of wellbeing" for the emperor: these two oaths are not separated by
any arrangement of five-year periods. Thus Luke could not be referring to that, either;
moreover, his choice of language and circumstance further eliminates such an option, as
does the fact that this five-yearly oath was only made "by the consuls and priests" of Rome,
not the people, who instead prayed, not gave oaths, and "continuously" at "shrines" all the
time (Res Gestae 9). Though there may have been an annual oath-swearing by the people
subject to Rome (made on the anniversary of the emperor's accession), Judaea was not yet
subject to Rome. Besides, the whole population of the empire obviously did not have to
return to their ancestral home towns every single year just to pledge allegiance to the flag.
[17.6] Oaths are attested to in inscriptions wherein it is said all the members of a certain
municipality swore, and this means oath-swearers had to swear before a magistrate in the
city to which their village or town was an official suburb, and Nazareth was not a suburb of
Bethlehem--it is not even in the same territory. Cf. Lewis & Reinhold, Roman Civilization:
Selected Readings, 3rd ed., 1990, 1.201b-c & 2.3.

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