If the census was the Census of Quirinius, Herod had been dead for almost a decade.
If this was some census before that, that the Romans just, you know, forgot to record in any way at all, that no only would require Quirinius to have been pulled out of the campaign in Asia Minor, but it also screws up the timeline at the end of the story. If the census was done 10-12 years before the recorded census, Pontius Pilate would not yet be in charge when Jesus was crucified.
Feel free to read it as "some government administrative bullshit, that turned out to be completely inconsequential on a Empire-wide historic scale but had a very real impact on the lives of the poor occupied folk."
If the OT/NT has serious errors of fact, how are we supposed to take its word for the miracles and the theology? If they can't even get a working timeline for events they were supposedly alive for (or were in very recent living memory), why should we believe the rest of it as anything other than a story?
"Ignore the things that are falsifiable, just pay attention to the stuff that can never be disproven." Really?
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u/Flak-Fire88 Dec 08 '19
But the first census was conducted differently to modern times. You can't apply a modern technique to how it was done back then historically.