Through Ancient Eyes

The Census of Quirinius--The Historical Horizon

“And it happened in those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This census took place for the first time when Quirinius was governor of Syria” (Luke 2:1-2).

Mary and Joseph register for the census. Image curtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The modern reader of the New Testament—both scholar and lay person alike—faces a similar problem: to read the past through the eyes of the ancients. We seek to understand the reality to which the New Testament bears witness. Our separation from the past is greater than we realize. Yet, to read the past through the eyes of the ancients, we must assess the horizons of the ancient people, from their viewpoint. Only when we view their world through their eyes—their spatial, historical, and cultural horizons—can we truly understand them. The modern scholar armed with his or her scientific tools and methods tends to import anachronistic and artificial categories of thought, time, and space into the past, not least of which is a modern secularism. The “separation of church and state” often appears most clearly within the modern academic study of ancient faiths and cultures. The devout lay person or pastor searches the New Testament to affirm and confirm their faith, to find God’s word for them today. As such, they import their theological beliefs and modern worldview into the past, overlooking the relationship between the words of the Bible and its world.

The beginning of Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth (Luke 2:1-2) highlights the challenges of reading ancient literature—even sacred literature like the New Testament—through the eyes of ancient peoples. Luke, like any other writer, was the product of his world. To understand his outlook, we must assess his horizons—geographical, historical, and cultural. This is the first of a two-part study, which will demonstrate how to do this. In doing so, we hope to bring clarity to two problems readers of Luke’s Gospel have wrestled with for a long time, namely the date of the census in relation to Jesus’ birth and the question of “a worldwide” (?) census.

Dates mattered to the ancients. Not strictly as chronological markers either. Dates allowed ancient authors to make a point beyond a mere point in time.^[1] Dates reflected the ancients’ ideas of the divine organization of the universe. For example, Josephus, the first century Jewish writer, placed the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70 on the same day the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in 586 BC. It is unclear whether the two Temple destructions occurred on precisely the same date, but Josephus sought to make a bigger point. So too, he placed the fall of Masada on Passover. Previously in his narrative, he related how the Jewish rebels on Masada slaughtered the Jewish community of En Gedi on Passover a couple of years prior. They slaughtered Jews on Passover; they died on Passover.