ra30 in case his readers may have missed the point
LUKE (2:1-4) ADDS, "because Joseph belonged to the house & lineage of David"! Lucky Luke is right about one thing & one thing only? Ten years after the death of Herod the Great, in the year 6 CE, when Judaea officially became a Roman province, the Syrian governor, Quirinius, did call for a census to be taken of all the people, property & slaves in Judaea, Samaria, & Idumea - not "the entire Roman world," as Luke claims, & definitely not Galilee, where Yesh's family lived (LL is also wrong to associate Quirinius's census in 6 C.E. with the birth of Yehoshua, which most scholars place closer to 4 BCE, the year given in the gospel of Matthai!
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 (& Romans were quite adept at documentation, particularly when it came to taxation) to indicate otherwise. LL's suggestion that the entire Roman economy would periodically be placed on hold as every Roman subject was forced to uproot himself & his entire family in order to travel great distances to the place of his father's birth, & then wait there patiently, perhaps for months, for a official to take stock of his family & possessions, which, in any case, he would have left behind in his place of residence, is, in one 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 LL'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; which seems an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the euangelical gospels to grasp, but LL never meant for his story about Yesh's birth @ 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 quite critical analysis of observable & verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to these euangelical gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering FACTS, but of revealing TRUTHS.
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 (& Romans were quite adept at documentation, particularly when it came to taxation) to indicate otherwise. LL's suggestion that the entire Roman economy would periodically be placed on hold as every Roman subject was forced to uproot himself & his entire family in order to travel great distances to the place of his father's birth, & then wait there patiently, perhaps for months, for a official to take stock of his family & possessions, which, in any case, he would have left behind in his place of residence, is, in one 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 LL'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; which seems an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the euangelical gospels to grasp, but LL never meant for his story about Yesh's birth @ 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 quite critical analysis of observable & verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to these euangelical gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering FACTS, but of revealing TRUTHS.
22 nov 2015 - bewerkt op 25 nov 2015
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