I read a book (ikr?) called "From Jesus to Christianity" by L. Michael White (I recommend). In it he goes over the Biblical record of when Jesus was born and places it against the historical record. The book is good, too, because it tells of what is going on around the time Jesus was born in religious thought.
Anyway, here is the brief paragraph on Jesus' birth.
[i[Birth[/i] Prior to 4 BCE, during the last years of Herod's reign; clearly indicated in Matt. 2:1-23 and also in Luke 1:5. Historical considerations: The story of the census under Quirinius in Luke 2:1-2 cannot be reconciled with this date, since it occured in 6 CE, after the removal of Archelaus.
If the census part of the story is not true, what is lost? Does it damage the integrity of the story?
Last edited by Guest on Sun Dec 18, 2011 2:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
~Those who benefit from the status quo always attribute inequities to the choices of the underdog.~Ann Crittenden ~The Goddess is not separate from the world-She is the world and all things in it.~
Wow, this surely is a question for someone else besides me to answer but...I think the Matthew and Luke accounts are referring to two different time periods. Herod vs Quirinius. There are many related issues that remain under debate so my answer is, who knows?
:-)
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
I think it is a commonplace of New Testament scholarship that the 'infancy narratives' have problems fitting in with history. That is quite apart from the mistake of a 6th-century writer (Dionysius Exiguus, which being interpreted means 'Little Dennis') who left us with the problem that Jesus may well have been born in 4 BC according to the conventional reckoning.
Perhaps we should recall that even if we take those parts of the Gospels dealing with Jesus's adult life as being based on eye-witness sources written down not long after the events (which I do not think they were), the evidence available from the time of his birth three decades earlier would have been much, much more shaky and difficult to make sense of.
Zadok: I did not have a faith crisis. I discovered that the Church was having a truth crisis. Maksutov: That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.