Episode 71 - The One with Us Obsessing over Luke’s Census

Doubts Aloud Podcast

Show Notes

Merry Christmas one and all and what could be more festive than digging into the historical reliability of that Census?

The one Luke uses to set up his nativity narrative. We make our case as to why this matters, after all, Luke is said to be a great historian by many. Then we get to it dealing with the 3 main historical issues with the census as presented by Luke:he says it covered the entire Roman world but there is no record of it elsewhere,he presents this strange idea of ‘everyone’ going to their ancestral home to register andhe that it took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria which was about 10 years after Herod died, but Luke (and Matthew) also place the narrative in Herod’s reign.

Of course we dig into the better defenses apologists and bible scholars have proposed.

Links etc:

Read the key parts of the narrative: Luke1v5, v26-7 then Lk2v1-8 and then v22 and v39. A simple Uni Idaho link we used to start our research

https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/census.htm