Luke And The Census (November 27, 2005)

More from my son’s letter from college:

"When I brought up the census as one indication that the [Virgin Birth] story was based in fact, he dismissed my claim by saying the facts of the story don't hold up - how, for example, it would have been chaos for everyone to go back to their home town to report. How would you respond to this particular instance?"

I wrote back,

When the professor says "it would have been chaos for everyone to go back to their home town to report," it seems he is simply unaware of the facts on the ground. Chaos or not, that is what they did. Any good scholarly commentary on Luke refers to the census edict issued in neighboring Egypt in A. D. 104, which reads,

Gaius Vibius Maximus, Prefect of Egypt [says]: Seeing that the time has come for the house to house census, it is necessary to compel all those who for any cause whatsoever are residing outside of their provinces to return to their homes, that they may both carry out the regular order of the census and may also attend diligently to the cultivation of their allotments.

The census that Luke records was not unique. They did them every 14 years.

More generally, it is good to be aware that among liberal scholars there is an almost constant elitist condescension toward the writers of the Bible. These scholars have somehow figured out - without evidence, without doing their homework - that the biblical writers were clever con artists who made stuff up and their gullible audiences swallowed it. They pretend to know with omniscient rigor all the historical and cultural nuances of the day and so can declare with absolute authority what could or could not have happened.

I don't mind if a given scholar chooses not to believe a text for whatever personal reason he or she might have. What annoys me is when they couch their disbelief in terms of "the assured results of scholarship" when in fact they are just expressing a doubt as prejudiced against the Bible as the faith of a fundamentalist is in favor of it. The important thing is for everybody to do their homework and let the facts speak no matter what the biases of faith or unbelief dictate.

The homework on Luke as a historian shows that, in areas that we can confirm, he is extraordinarily careful and accurate, which should give us reasonable confidence about his reliability in matters that we can't confirm. He is famously precise, for example, in his terms for government officials ("magistrate," "town clerk," "procounsul" etc.) that varied from place to place throughout the Mediterranean world. Archeological scholarship has confirmed that Luke's terms were inerrant, giving strong evidence that he had actually been to those places. No one making up the story at a desk in Antioch could conceivably have been that accurate.

Making up a phony census with a contrived "return-to-your-home" policy would have been uncharacteristic of Luke, and it does not seem reasonable to expect that he could have slipped it past Theophilus, the recipient of his letters. If your professor's view is correct, Theophilus would have been left scratching his head and wondering, "What in the world is this? Who ever heard of a census where people return to their home towns?" No, Theophilus knew about the practice. Luke was not writing in a cultural vacuum.