Was Luke wrong about the census?

Is it possible to reconcile Luke's account of Jesus's birth with other information we have from the same period that seems to contradict it? David Armitage explores how we might approach the widely debated issue.

One of the best-known elements in the Christmas story is the journey of Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem, despite Mary’s advanced pregnancy, to participate in a census associated with a Roman official named Quirinius. At the centre of every nativity play is the resulting crisis, as Mary and Joseph hurry to Bethlehem but – unable to find accommodation – take up residence with the livestock.

From a historical perspective, though, the census story is widely regarded as highly problematic, because it seems difficult to reconcile with other information about that period, and especially with the account provided by the historian Josephus. Writing towards the end of the first century AD, Josephus describes a census carried out by Quirinius just after Archelaus (a son of Herod the Great) was deposed as ‘ethnarch’ of Judaea by the Romans. The rationale given by Josephus for this census is that at this point (in AD 6) the Romans annexed Judaea, incorporating it into the province of Syria (Antiquities of the Jews 18.1-3). Consequently its status for Roman taxation changed, necessitating registration of property.

The difficulty is that both Matthew and Luke seem to place Jesus’s birth—and hence, for Luke, the census—within the lifetime of Herod the Great, who is most commonly thought to have died around 4 BC. The census of Quirinius, at least as described by Josephus, thus seems to have been about ten years too late.

Was Luke just wrong about the census?

For many people, this apparent contradiction between Josephus and Luke is easily resolved: Josephus was right, and Luke was mistaken. Either Luke got the details of the census incorrect (perhaps naming the wrong official) or—more drastically—he created or reproduced from another source an episode that was essentially a fiction. There are, however, good reasons to be cautious about such negative judgements.

An important point in favour of taking Luke’s account seriously is the distinct likelihood that he had access to testimony from individuals closely connected to those involved in the relevant events. If Luke was (as is widely believed) the associate of Paul who travelled with him in the period described in the later chapters of Acts, this implies direct acquaintance with at least one member of Jesus’s family: his brother James, a notable leader amongst the believers in Jerusalem⁠—see Acts 21:18. This provides a straightforward route by which Luke could have learned about events associated with the birth of Jesus, even if James’s mother Mary was herself no longer alive when Luke visited Jerusalem with Paul.

There is therefore a case—from a historical point of view—for at least reading Luke’s account with an open mind and not concluding too quickly that he must have been uninformed. Whilst it is sometimes claimed that the details of Jesus’s birth would have been lost to the early Christians, this is not very persuasive given the prominent role played by at least one member of his immediate family in the crucial first decades.

A second reason to be wary of playing off Luke against Josephus and declaring Luke to be in the wrong is that the accounts given by Josephus can themselves be problematic historically. For example, as Andrew Steinmann has made clear, the consensus position regarding the chronology of the end of Herod’s reign is far from certain.[1] Of course, questions about the census cannot be resolved by arguing that Josephus just gave the wrong date for it, since the account in Antiquities 18 locates the census in a wider set of events associated with the exile of Archelaus, and not with the last years of Herod the Great. If Josephus was wrong about the timing of census of Quirinius, this would imply confusion of events on a larger scale. This might seem unlikely; Josephus himself was only one generation removed from the events in question. However, as shown by John Rhoads, Josephus’s use of his sources (even for relatively recent events) was on occasion erratic; there are indications that in juxtaposing information from different sources he sometimes misplaced or even duplicated events.[2] Rhoads argues in detail that Josephus conflated events at the end of the reign of Herod the Great with events following the exile of Archelaus, and that in so doing he wrongly associated the census of Quirinius with the later event.

Any idea that Luke must necessarily be second-best to Josephus when it comes to comparing their accounts of the census should therefore be set aside. Rhoads himself acknowledges that the overall case he builds may not be persuasive to all, yet his article does establish clearly that Josephus’s account—no less than that of Luke—needs careful analysis and should certainly not be prioritised over Luke by default.

Has Luke been misunderstood about the date of the census?

Whilst the question about the census might be resolved by claiming that either Luke or Josephus was wrong, another possibility is that Luke has been misinterpreted, and that—understood correctly—his account is compatible with Josephus.

The Greek language of Luke 2:2 is not straightforward, and there is some ambiguity. The description of the census is as follows: 

This is regularly translated as something like ‘this was the first registration when Quirinius was governing Syria’. As already observed, Quirinius, at least according to Josephus, was governor of Syria following the ousting of Archelaus—too late to coincide with Jesus’s birth in the time of Herod the Great. It is possible, though, that Quirinius could previously have held another significant administrative post in the region, during which a separate earlier census occurred. This would make sense of the fact that—in this translation—Luke 2:2 refers to the first census. It is difficult to find space for a previous governorship of Quirinius in the known chronology of governors of Syria, but Sabine Huebner (Professor of Ancient History at Basel University) has recently argued that the key term ἡγεμονεύοντος (hēgemoneuontos) need not necessarily refer to the actual post of governor, but is flexible enough to encompass other roles such as that of a financial procurator—a position which could well be associated with registering property.[3] Not enough is known of Quirinius’s earlier career to confirm or exclude such a possibility.

Others have proposed that the Greek could mean: ‘this was the registration before Quirinius was governor of Syria.’ This would mean that before the ‘famous’ AD 6 census of Quirinius, another one was carried out by someone else, and that Luke is clarifying for his readers that he is referring to this earlier one. Whilst some respected commentators (for example John Nolland[4] and David Garland[5]) have evaluated this approach positively, others are less persuaded, regarding it as a strained way of reading the Greek. As Nolland points out, though, 'On any reading, the Greek of Luke's sentence is awkward'.

Corroborating evidence for an earlier census (whether under Quirinius or someone else) is lacking, but this does not mean the possibility can be excluded; our sources of information for the period are far from comprehensive. It is nonetheless possible to enquire whether Luke’s account plausibly belongs in the setting in which he places it. In view of evidence of relevant ancient census practices, particularly as reflected in papyri, Huebner concludes that Luke’s account does credibly fit in its purported context. Whilst certainly not claiming that the historicity of Luke’s specific story is thereby established, she does suggest that—even if fictional—it is ‘thoroughly realistic’ and that the author of the Gospel ‘knows and respects the historical circumstances of the time in which he places the birth of Jesus’.[6]

Has Luke been misunderstood regarding the connection between the census and the nativity?

The options described above assume that the traditional reading of the nativity story is correct: that it was because of the census that Mary and Joseph were in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. There is a more radical possibility: that Luke 2:1-5 does actually refer to the AD 6 census as described by Josephus, and that Luke introduces it as part of a brief digression—what we might call a ‘flash-forward’—in which he describes a return visit by Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem some years after Jesus was born there. Mentioning this return visit, which could have involved registration of property that Joseph still owned in Bethlehem (his original hometown), would presumably serve to emphasise the official connection of the family of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ with Bethlehem, the town of David.

This approach works from the assumption that Luke knew that the census of Quirinius happened some years after the end of the reign of Herod the Great—and, crucially, that he thought his readers would also know this. If this was so, naming Quirinius would be a deliberate way of indicating to these ‘knowledgeable’ readers that he was jumping forward in time and introducing events later than the main thread of the story (something that he clearly does elsewhere; see Luke 3:18-20).

According to this reading of the Greek text, Luke 2:6 then resumes the main thread of the narrative, explaining that it was in the very place that Joseph had property to register—his true family hometown—that Jesus was born. Given this interpretation, the text does not conflict at all with Josephus’s account, and moreover can be reconciled much more straightforwardly with Matthew’s (census-free) telling of the story of Jesus’s birth than can the traditional interpretation. It is beyond the scope of this article to set out in detail the case for this alternative hypothesis; interested readers can find the full argument in my 2018 Tyndale Bulletin article Detaching the Census: An Alternative Reading of Luke 2:1-7 .

Certainty and the census?

Where does this leave us? Howard Marshall suggested in his commentary on Luke that for this question ‘no solution is free from difficulty’.[7] This surely includes the commonly advanced ‘solution’ that Luke was just wrong. Given Luke’s professed aims, his careful use of external historical markers elsewhere, and his probable access to at least one of Jesus’s family members, the idea that this story is a fiction invites scepticism. On the other hand we cannot ‘prove’ any of the other proposed solutions. But this is the nature of historical work in general: it cannot provide scientific-style certainty about individual events in the past, but rather can establish plausible grounds for reasonable reconstructions. For such reconstructions, dependence on the testimony of others is inevitable. Judgements about particular events will inevitably be bound up with one’s overall assessment of the author whose testimony one is using, and also whether their claims about specific events cohere with the wider circumstances in which those events are ostensibly set.

Regarding questions about the census in Luke 2, it is important to emphasise that the author of Luke-Acts does more widely show real care regarding historical details.[8] Consequently, when Luke makes claims related to Graeco-Roman history for which the fit with other sources is less obvious (as with Luke 2:1-2), there are good historical reasons to at least take his version of events very seriously, being open to the possibility that our wider historical reconstructions, and our interpretations of other sources, may need to be adjusted.

The reference to the census in Luke 2:1-2 is arguably the most difficult historical problem in the New Testament; there are few other texts which present comparable challenges. Yet even in this instance, whilst we may not be able to point to a single definitive solution, we can be clear that the frequent claims that Luke has been shown decisively to be wrong are unwarranted; historically credible and coherent interpretations of Luke’s account are undoubtedly possible.