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In
today's selection - in his controversial and best-selling new book, Zealot,
Reza Aslan relates that there is no separate historical evidence for either
the census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem (which was important
since the Old Testament had prophesied that the Messiah would be born in
Bethlehem), nor Herod's massacre of all the sons born in and around Bethlehem
in a fruitless search for the baby Jesus:
"As
interest in the person of Jesus increased after his death, an urgent need
arose among some in the early Christian community to fill in the gaps of
Jesus's early years and, in particular, to address the matter of his birth in
Nazareth, which seems to have been used by his Jewish detractors to prove
that Jesus could not possibly have been the messiah, at least not according
to the prophecies. Some kind of creative solution was required to push back
against this criticism, some means to get Jesus's parents to Bethlehem so
that he could be born [there].
"For
Luke [in his gospel], the answer lies in a census. 'In those days,' he
writes, 'there came a decree from Caesar Augustus that the entire Roman world
should be registered. This was the first registration to take place while
Quirinius was governor of Syria. Everyone went to his own town to be
registered. Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea,
to Bethlehem, the city of David.' Then, in case his readers may have missed
the point, Luke adds, 'because Joseph belonged to the house and the lineage
of David' (Luke 2:1-4).
"Luke
is right about one thing and one thing only. Ten years after the death of
Herod the Great, in the year 6 C.E., when Judea officially became a Roman
province, the Syrian governor, Quirinius, did call for a census to be taken
of all the people, property, and slaves in Judea, Samaria, and Idumea -- not
'the entire Roman world,' as Luke claims, and definitely not Galilee, where
Jesus's family lived (Luke is also wrong to associate Quirinius's census in 6
C.E. with the birth of Jesus, which most scholars place closer to 4 B.C.E.,
the year given in the gospel of Matthew). 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 (and the Romans were quite adept at
documentation, particularly when it came to taxation) to indicate otherwise.
Luke's suggestion that the entire Roman economy would periodically be placed
on hold as every Roman subject was forced to uproot himself and his entire
family in order to travel great distances to the place of his father's
birth, and then wait there patiently, perhaps for months, for an official to
take stock of his family and his possessions, which, in any case, he would
have left behind in his place of residence, is, in a word, preposterous.
...
"The
readers of Luke's gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make
a sharp distinction between myth and reality; the two were intimately tied
together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less
interested in what actually happened than in what it meant. It would have
been perfectly normal -- indeed, expected -- for a writer in the ancient
world to tell tales of gods and heroes whose fundamental facts would have
been recognized as false but whose underlying message would be seen as true.
"Hence, [the Gospel of]
Matthew's equally fanciful account of Jesus's flight into Egypt, ostensibly
to escape Herod's massacre of all the sons born in and around Bethlehem in a
fruitless search for the baby Jesus, an event for which there exists not a
shred of corroborating evidence in any chronicle or history of the time
whether Jewish, Christian, or Roman -- a remarkable fact considering the many
chronicles and narratives written about Herod the Great, who was, after all,
the most famous Jew in the whole of the Roman Empire."
Author:
Reza Aslan
Title: Zealot Publisher: Random House Date: Copyright 2013 by Aslan Media, Inc. Pages: 29-31
Zealot: The Life and Times of
Jesus of Nazareth
by Reza Aslan by Random House
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