Appendix: Jehovah helps: the birth of Jesus

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Luke's nativity story, plus commentary.
Luke 8: 8-39. Commentary and explanatory information is found below the birth story. About 2000 words.

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The stories about the birth of Jesus are placed in appendices because they are not at all essential to the message of salvation. There are a number of questions as to their authenticity. The remainder of the gospel accounts clearly are recollections of words spoken and actions taken by Jesus, though the writers were not always certain of where, when, or in what order, events occurred.

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Luke says,

It so happened during that time that Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a worldwide taxation census be conducted..

This census occurred when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Everyone went to his ancestral town in order to register.

At that time, Joseph, with his pregnant fiance Mary, left the Galilean town of Nazareth in order to register in Bethlehem in Judaea. Bethlehem is known as the City of David, being of the house and family of David.

In any case, Joseph for some reason traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem with his pregnant wife.

On arrival in Bethlehem, Mary's water broke and the baby was delivered – in an animal manger because the inn was full up. Mary wrapped her firstborn son in a newborn's cloths.

Luke adds,

Several shepherds were keeping a night-watch on their flock in a field nearby. Suddenly, Jehovah's angel was right next to them, and everything lit up with God's glory.

The men were frightened, but the angel said, "Nothing to fear. Behold: I bring you awesome news that is wonderful for everybody. Born to you today in David's city is a Savior [later known as Christ the Lord]. And here is a sign for you: Lying in a manger, you will find a baby in newborn cloths."

Suddenly a host of divine beings appeared with the angel, thundering:

Glory to God in the highest heaven!
On earth, peace among humans, for whom he cares deeply.

Once the angels vanished, the shepherds made haste to see what the Lord had revealed. In Bethlehem, they quickly found Joseph and Mary, with the baby lying in the animal manger, as they had been told. Immediately they told the parents about what they had just seen and heard concerning the child. Mary never forgot this incident, and continuously mulled it over.

Luke continues,

On the eighth day after birth, it was time for the baby to be circumcised in order to fulfill Jewish law. At the ceremony, the lad was officially given the name Jesus (which means Jehovah helps or Jehovah saves).

Once Mary's time of purification was done (when Jewish women were kept apart from others after the menstrual period or after childbirth), they brought him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, in accordance with Jewish custom based on the scriptures that say that every firstborn who is male will be deemed holy to Jehovah. (Under the law, they were required to offer for sacrifice in the Temple either a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.)

Now there was a devout and upright man in Jerusalem who had been looking for the Consolation of Israel. Being one of the rare Jews blessed with the Holy Spirit, he had been assured by the Spirit that he would not see death before first seeing what he had so longed for [that is, the Lord's Anointed].

The Spirit led him into the Temple, and on seeing the baby with his parents, took him in his arms and praised God,

Now let your servant depart in peace, O Lord
for, as you said, my eyes have seen your salvation
prepared in front of all peoples:
a light for revelation to the gentiles
and the glory of your people Israel

After blessing the parents, Simeon told Mary, "This child is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel, and for a sign which is spoken against, so that the real thoughts of many will be revealed. Yes, and a sword will pierce through your own soul."

Soon after this, the prophetess Anna, the daughter of Phanuel of the tribe of Asher, approached. She was a very old woman who had been married for seven years and a widow for 84 years. She spent most of her time in the Temple, worshiping, fasting and praying for others night and day. She talked about the boy to anyone who was interested in the Redemption of Israel.

The information on the Quirinius census is found in the current version of Luke 2: 1–5.

Quirinius' first census of Galilee and Judea occurred in 6 a.d. (or possibly 7 a.d.). But scholars tend to agree that the date implied for Jesus' birth here is implausible. That is, 6 or 7 a.d. seems contrary to various other data given. Thus, they tend to see Luke's infancy narrative as a pious interpolation – perhaps inserted to fight the Marcion heresy, which dehumanized Christ.

The Catholic scholar Raymond E. Brown notes, "The wrong temporal sequence in the Acts reference suggests that the Luke-Acts author did not know precisely when this census took place ... and so he may have mingled it with the troubled times of Archelaus's father, Herod the Great, ten years before."¹

After Caesar Augustus removed Herod Archelaus² as ethnarch of Judaea, the emperor appointed Quirinius as his legate for the newly formed Syrian tetrarchy, thus putting the Judaean part of the new administrative area under direct Roman rule. In the name of the emperor, Quirinius required that everyone in his tetrarchy register for a census. As Herod the Great, Archelaus's father, was a hereditary ruler of Judaea, he had paid Rome a vassal's tribute, which his tax gatherers gained without necessity of a census. But Quirinius, imposing the Roman system, required to know how many people lived in his region for taxation purposes.

Generally, scholars put the year of Jesus' birth as within the period spanned by 6 b.c. to 2 b.c. So clearly Luke's story appears to be anachronistic. Our earliest version of Luke comes from Marcion, who led a sect strongly at variance with orthodox Christianity, and Marcion's version lacks the infancy story. But, as Marcion is reported to have pruned Luke rather a lot, we cannot tell whether he lopped off that story or whether it was never in the earliest Luke.

In any case, I find it quite interesting that Brown's list of Roman legates for Syria includes Quintilius (or Quinctilius) Varus for 6 to 4 b.c., or perhaps a year or so longer. That time period corresponds to the period of Jesus' birth.³ In other words Quintilius governed in the time frame for Jesus' birth. The names of the two governors strike the ear as very similar and we can well imagine people confusing them. So is it unreasonable to conjecture that the two names were merged in the historical data available to an editor or writer of Luke?

The chief problem with that idea is that Quintilius would not have compelled the vassal king of Judaea, Herod, to perform a census. But, in 4 b.c., soon after Herod the Great's death, a rebel named Judah seized the arsenal of Galilee's largest city, Sepphoris, and armed the citizenry. In response, the Syrian governor Publius Quintilius Varus sacked Sepphoris – which is just a few miles north of Nazareth – and sold the population into slavery.

Also interesting is the fact that this Judah was the same man who in 6 a.d. led a revolt against the census of Quirinius, the census noted in Luke. That census was not imposed on "all the world" but on the whole of the new Roman tetrarchy over Jewish Palestine because Rome had deposed one of the vassal rulers and begun direct rule, which meant that it would now collect taxes directly. But, the census – which is forbidden in the old Jewish law – sparked Judah's second insurrection.

Hence, we have the possibility that Joseph took his family south to get clear of the rebellion or its aftermath. But civil unrest also rocked Jerusalem, with thousands slain. The suppression of the first insurrection by Quintilius Varus's legions was a catastrophic event for Jews, according to rabbinic sources.

So it does indeed look as though the Luke account's time discrepancy was a result of a simple confusion of nearly identical names. Luke's writer assumed Joseph was responding to Quirinius's census, which was associated in his mind with Judah's rebellion – though he was unaware that there had been two rebellions by the same man fought against first Quintilius in 4 b.c. and then Quirinius in 6 a.d. (these years correspond to the reign of Archelaus).

But, another intriguing possibility is that the historian Josephus failed to realize that he was reporting as independent happenings two different versions of the same set of events. Could Quirinius have been the Sabinius of the earlier revolt? Was a census for tax purposes conducted before or soon after the death of Herod the Great? Minority scholarly opinion favors that idea.

In any case, I find the idea of Joseph fleeing a war zone with his pregnant wife more reasonable than the idea of his taking her 90 miles in order to enroll in a census. Scholars tend to doubt that the Romans would have required such a thing – though Roman rule could be harsh. In fact, the high plausibility of my conjecture tends to corroborate the essential claim that Joseph removed with his pregnant wife from Nazareth to Bethlehem. A skilled carpenter can work anywhere.

We may stretch this reasoning further and suggest that during the couple's flight from the war zone, they stopped in Bethlehem mainly because Mary had to give birth.   As said, the civil violence was not confined to Galilee. Revolutionaries took advantage of the fact that Archelaus had to go to Rome to resolve a dispute over whether he was to rule Judea in the wake of his father's death.

While he was away, a bloodbath struck Jerusalem as religious patriots tried to remove the Roman eagle from the Temple. Perhaps Joseph stopped in Bethlehem so his wife could give birth but, considering the awful atrocities (rabbinical tradition calls this period a "terrible" time for Jews), headed south to one of the Jewish colonies in Egypt, as Matthew says, rather than directly back to Nazareth, as Luke indicates. We might expect that God would make sure his precious son was kept safely away from the tumult.

We should not be overly troubled by the cloudiness of the tales of events surrounding Jesus' birth, realizing that modern historians probably have much more information about events 65 to 95 years before the infancy narratives were composed than the authors had at the time. It would have been no small chore to obtain relevant information of events that occurred decades prior to Jesus' earthly ministry, especially because it is unlikely that the writers had access to Roman archives. And many archives were destroyed when Jerusalem was overrun in 70 a.d. But even had they had some access to official records, they were living in an era when transmission of information was not all that easy. No printing presses, no typewriters, no telephones, no computers.

On the other hand, though there is much that we don't know, various Roman and Jewish documentation has emerged – along with the forensic expertise of archaeologically oriented scientists, giving modern historians more data on the period around the time of Jesus' birth than the birth narrative writers had.

(Lack of instantaneous communications and photography also helps explain how it could be that officials in Jerusalem could be so skeptical of Jesus' miracles while he was not so far away. For example, Jericho is only about 15 miles from Jerusalem, but that's far enough so that all these officials had were jumbled verbal reports.)

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1. An Introduction to the New Testament by Raymond E. Brown (Anchor/Doubleday 1996).

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2. The best account of Archelaus's reign is from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia
https://miraclecurebook.blogspot.com/2020/09/herod-archelaus-troubled-career.html

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Herod Archelaus: a troubled career

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Below is one of the best accounts I have encountered on Archelaus. The apparent conflations and errors of Josephus and others have been corrected and put in perspective.
The original is found at
The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906)
http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1729-archelaus

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By Richard Gottheil and Louis Ginzberg
Jewish Encyclopedia (1906)
Son of Herod I.; king of Judea; born about 21 B.C., his mother being the Samaritan Malthace. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Rome for education, and, after a stay of two or three years, returned home with his brothers Antipas and Philip, who likewise had attended the schools of the Imperial City. His return was possibly hastened by the intrigues of Antipater, who by means of forged letters and similar devices calumniated him to his father, in the hope of insuring for him the same sanguinary fate he had prepared for his brothers Aristobulus and Alexander. As a result of these slanders, Herod designated Antipas, his youngest son, as his successor, changing his will to that effect. On his death-bed, however, four days before his demise, the king relinquished his determination and appointed Archelaus to the throne, while Antipas and Philip were made tetrarchs merely. Nothing is known definitely of the occasion for this change, though there may be some foundation for the statement of Archelaus' opponents, that the dying king, in his enfeebled condition, had yielded to some palace intrigue in the latter's favor.

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Copper Coin of Herod Archelaus. Obverse: ΗΡΩΔΟϒ (Hrodoy=Herod).
A bunch of grapes and leaf. Reverse: ΕΘΝΑΡΧΟΥ. (Ethnarchoy=Ethnarch).
A helmet with tuft of feathers: in field to left a caduceus.

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Archelaus thus attained the crown with little difficulty at the early age of eighteen. That aged plotter Salome found it convenient to abet Archelaus, and secured for him the adherence of the army; hence there was no opposition when he figured as the new ruler at the interment of Herod. The people, glad of the death of the tyrant, were well disposed toward Archelaus, and in the public assembly in the Temple the new king promised to have regard to the wishes of his subjects. It very soon became manifest, however, how little he intended to keep his word. Popular sentiment, molded by the Pharisees, demanded the removal of the Sadducean high priest Joezer (of the Boethus family), and the punishment of those former councilors of Herod who had brought about the martyrdom of the Pharisees Mattathias and Judas. Archelaus, professing always profound respect for the popular demand, pointed out that he could not well take any such extreme measures before he had been confirmed by the Roman emperor, Augustus, in his sovereignty: just as soon as this confirmation should be received, he declared himself willing to grant the people's desire. His subjects, however, seem not to have had confidence in his assurances; and when, on the day before Passover—a day when all Palestine, so to speak, was in Jerusalem—they became so insistent in their demand for immediate action, that the king felt himself compelled to send a detachment of the Herodian soldiery against them into the Temple courts; and when this detachment proved unable to master the enraged populace, he ordered out the whole available garrison. In the massacre that ensued, three thousand were left dead on the Temple pavements.

Division of the Kingdom by Rome
As soon as the tumult had been somewhat allayed, Archelaus hastened to Rome to secure the required confirmation of his succession from Augustus. He found that he had to encounter opposition from two sides. His brother Antipas, supported by many members of the Herodian house resident in Rome, claimed formal acknowledgment for Herod's second will, that nominated him king. Besides, the Jews of Palestine sent a deputation of fifty persons—who were supported by about 8,000 Jewish residents of Rome—and petitioned for the exclusion of the Herodians from any share whatever in the government of the land, and for the incorporation of Judea in the province of Syria. Such was the disloyalty among the Herodians, that many members of the family secretly favored this latter popular demand. But Augustus, with statesman-like insight, concluded that it was better for Roman interests to make of Judea a monarchy, governed by its own kings tributary to Rome, than to leave it a Roman province administered by Romans, in which latter case there would certainly be repeated insurrections against the foreign administration. As it would be more prudent to make such a monarchy as small and powerless as possible, he decided to divide Herod's somewhat extensive empire into three portions. Archelaus was accordingly appointed ethnarch—not king—of Judea, Samaria, and Idumea, with the exception of the important cities of Gaza, Gadara, and Hippus, which latter were joined to the province of Syria. Antipas and Philip were made tetrarchs of the remaining provinces, the former receiving Galilee and Perea, and the latter the other lands east of the Jordan.

Insurrectionary Outbreaks
While these negotiations were pending in Rome, new troubles broke out in Palestine. The people, worked up almost into a state of frenzy by the massacres brought about by Herod and Archelaus, broke into open revolt in the absence of their ruler. The actual outbreak was without doubt directly caused by Sabinus—the procurator appointed by Augustus to assume charge pending the settlement of the succession—owing to his merciless oppression of the people. On the day of Pentecost in the year 4 B.C., a collision took place in the Temple precincts between the troops of Sabinus and the populace. Sabinus utilized his initial success in dispersing the people by proceeding to rob the Temple treasury. But disorders broke out all over the province, and his forces were not sufficient to repress them. Judas, son of the revolutionary Hezekiah in Galilee, a certain Simon in Perea, Athronges and his four brothers in other parts of the land, headed more or less serious uprisings. It was only when charge was assumed by Varus, the Roman legate in Syria, with his numerous legions, assisted, moreover, by Aretas, king of the Arabs, and his auxiliaries, that any measure of peace was restored to the land, and this not without the loss of several thousand Roman troops. What the loss on the Jewish side must have been may perhaps be surmised from the rabbinical tradition that the outbreak under Varus was one of the most terrible in Jewish history.

Banishment and Death
Archelaus returned to Jerusalem shortly after Varus suppressed the insurrection. Very little is known of the further events of his reign, which lasted ten years; but so much is clear, that instead of seeking to heal the wounds brought on the country by himself and his house, he did much to accelerate the ultimate overthrow of Judean independence. In the year 6 of the common era, a deputation of the Jewish and Samaritan aristocracy waited on Augustus in Rome, to prefer charges against Archelaus, with the result that he was immediately summoned to Rome, deprived of his crown, and banished to Vienne in Gaul, where—according to Dion Cassius Cocceianus, "Hist. Roma," lv. 27—he lived for the remainder of his days.

Archelaus was a veritable Herodian, but without the statesman-like ability of his father. He was cruel and tyrannical, sensual in the extreme, a hypocrite and a plotter. He observed the customary seven days of mourning for his father, but in the midst of them gave to his boon companions a congratulatory banquet on his accession. He carefully avoided placing his image on his coinage in deference to pharisaic susceptibilities; but he nevertheless allowed his passion for his widowed sister-in-law, Glaphyra, to master him, and married her in defiance of the sentiment of the people and the Pharisees, who regarded the union as incestuous (Lev. xviii. 16, xx. 21). He deposed the high priest Joezer on his return from Rome, not in obedience to popular complaint, but for a money consideration. Joezer's brother was his successor, although the latter was of exactly the same type. Indeed, Archelaus, in his short reign, deposed three high priests for purposes of profit. Against this serious list of evils there is hardly anything good to set in contrast, beyond perhaps the fact that he inherited from his father a certain love of splendor and a taste for building. He restored the royal palace at Jericho in magnificent style, surrounding it with groves of palms; and also founded a city, that he called in his own honor Archelais.

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Bibliography

Grätz, Gesch. d. Juden, iii. passim;
Ewald, Gesch. des Volkes Israel, iv. passim;
Hitzig, Gesch. des Volkes Israel, ii. passim;
Schuuml;rer, Gesch. i. passim, and the literature therein indicated. On coinage, see Schürer, ib. p. 375, note 4; and Madden, Coins of the Jews, pp. 114-118.