Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

childhood are conspicuously absent from the earliest written documents. The
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material, which was compiled around 50 C.E ., makes no mention of anything that happened before Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist.
     The letters of Paul, which make up the bulk of the New Testament, are wholly detached
     from any event in Jesus’s life save his crucifixion and resurrection (though Paul
     does mention the Last Supper).
    But as interest in the person of Jesus increased after his death, an urgent need arose
     among some in the early Christian community to fill in the gaps of Jesus’s early years
     and, in particular, to address the matter of his birth in Nazareth, which seems to
     have been used by his Jewish detractors to prove that Jesus could not possibly have
     been the messiah, at least not according to the prophecies. Some kind of creative
     solution was required to push back against this criticism, some means to get Jesus’s
     parents to Bethlehem so that he could be born in the same city as David.
    For Luke, the answer lies in a census. “In those days,” he writes, “there came a decree
     from Caesar Augustus that the entire Roman world should be registered. This was the
     first registration to take place while Quirinius was governor of Syria. Everyone went
     to his own town to be registered. Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in
     Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem, the city of David.” Then, in case his readers may
     have missed the point, Luke adds, “because Joseph belonged to the house and the lineage
     of David” (Luke 2:1–4).
    Luke is right about one thing and one thing only. Ten years after the death of Herod
     the Great, in the year 6 C.E. , when Judea officially became a Roman province, the Syrian governor, Quirinius, did
     call for a census to be taken of all the people, property, and slaves in Judea, Samaria,
     and Idumea—not “the entire Roman world,” as Luke claims, and definitely not Galilee,
     where Jesus’s family lived (Luke is also wrong to associate Quirinius’s census in
     6 C.E . with the birth of Jesus, which most scholars place closer to 4 B.C.E. , the year given in the gospel of Matthew). However, because the sole purpose of a
     census was taxation, Roman law assessed an individual’s property in the place of residence,
     not in the place of one’s birth. There is nothing written in any Roman document of
     the time (and the Romans were quite adept at documentation, particularly when it came
     to taxation) to indicate otherwise. Luke’s suggestion that the entire Roman economy
     would periodically be placed on hold as every Roman subject was forced to uproot himself
     and his entire family in order to travel great distances to the place of his father’s
     birth, and then wait there patiently, perhaps for months, for an official to take
     stock of his family and his possessions, which, in any case, he would have left behind
     in his place of residence, is, in a word, preposterous.
    What is important to understand about Luke’s infancy narrative is that his readers,
     still living under Roman dominion, would have known that Luke’s account of Quirinius’s
     census was factually inaccurate. Luke himself, writing a little more than a generation
     after the events he describes, knew that what he was writing was technically false.
     This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp,
     but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus’s birth at Bethlehem to be understood
     as historical fact. Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even mean
     when we say the word “history.” The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable
     and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been
     an altogether foreign conceptto the gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering
facts
, but of revealing
truths
.
    The readers of Luke’s gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make
     a sharp distinction between myth and reality; the two were intimately tied together
     in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually
     happened than in what it meant. It would have been perfectly normal—indeed, expected—for
     a writer in the ancient world to tell tales of gods and heroes whose fundamental facts
     would have been recognized as false but whose underlying message would be seen as
     true.
    Hence, Matthew’s equally fanciful