Nativity Narrative Revisited

Nativity Narrative Revisited · "and all Jerusalem with him"

Here is a video, I'd have loved to put at least two comments below:

Fact-checking the Bible | David Ellis Dickerson
6th June 2018 | TED Archive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MnCjpw7iBI

There is a problem with this approach, namely "Les commentaires sont désactivés. En savoir plus" ... that's why this article is here, and not on Assorted Retorts.

But the description before my "comments", here, from under the video:

In this hilarious talk, David Ellis Dickerson shares his experience writing wholesome Bible trivia for the Emmy-winning TV show “American Bible Challenge,” a show that split its contestants into teams who answer questions that draw from the Old and New Testaments. Writing these questions was, to say the least, challenging.

And now, for my three "comments"

I

4:34 "why in the world would you have a census that required people to go back to their ancestral homeland, when the whole point of a census is to found out where you are now, so we can get your tax money?"

Let's see what the text says on the terms of the census:

Luke 2:3 And all went to be enrolled, every one into his own city.
sec. Lucam 2:3 et ibant omnes ut profiterentur singuli in suam civitatem.

And I'm pretty sure, Nestle Aland also has the Greek for "into his own city" and not "into his fathers' city" ... so, what happened?

I see exactly two options. Feel free to use the word "heard" instead of "read" in the following. I doubt pronvincials were offered papers explaining the orders.

A) St. Joseph read the terms as written in a Roman context, and applied them according to a Hebrew one by infamiliarity with the Roman one;
B) St. Joseph read the terms as written in a Roman context, and applied them according to a Hebrew one in order to circumvent the order.

There is basically no possibility that St. Joseph was simply applying the order as it was meant. I'll come back to an acquaintance's theory which contradicts this, but apart from his theory, no. If it was a tax census, St. Joseph made a pilpul on the terms of a legislation to circumvent it, like Pharisees (the generation contemporary to Our Lord!) did to the law of God, but he just did it to the law of Caesar.

Now, a simple question is, why not simply stay in the city where you have a house?

Let's take a modern census. You have a flat in Paris where you live ten months of the year, and a house in Bretagne where you live part of the time that you are free. Your call to income declaration happens to come when you are for some reason in the vacation house. Should you send it to the proper Municipalité in Bretagne, or to the proper Arrondissement in Paris? Well, if you spend ten months in the Paris flat, it's safe to say the Paris flat is your "principal homestead" meaning where your declaration goes, even if you are in Bretagne where you write it.

No state in the world would find it more reassuring to make your census declaration go to the office of whereever you happened to be right when and where you heard the order, whoever you were and whatever your particular circumstances. I am sure France would not go like this:

• "thank you dear police for delivering me from the kidnappers, would you kindly help me to get to Paris, I will send you money later?" - "no, you have only to tomorrow to do your income declaration, you must do it here"
• "ah how nice to see my children again, picking them up from the summer camp - how about the train to Paris?" - "excuse me sir, have you already made your income declaration?" - "no" - "well, all of you need to stay here until that is done" - "but my business is in Paris!" - "doesn't matter!"
• "ah, fine to sign a contract with you maestro, see you again in Paris" - "well, I think tax officials over here would prefer you to stay over night to make your declaration of income ..."
• "so, I'll be late to leave in my taxable income declaration in Lille, on monday" - "no, you must do it now, here in Marseilles" - "but I was just over for a prolonged business trip" - "still, the priority is putting in the declarations on time!" - "but I don't have any money or assets here, they are all in Lille!" - "no problem, we don't really want your money, we want the census, that's all!"

So, even in very modern circumstances - I'll take these parodies of a uchrony to refer to a reality without internet or fax - where one is is not always where one should make the census or declaration.

But ... if you change your work and get a work in Bretagne, near your house, instead, that suddenly becomes your principal homestead. It's a thing that can very normally change over a life. You are a citizen of France (if you are), not a citizen of Paris or of a municipality of Brittany.

Now, not all countries work quite like this even now. I think, if you move from San Francisco to New York City, while you are either place a citizen of the Federation, you are also for some time (I think) still a citizen of California before you do the paperwork to become one in New York State. But I could be mistaken. Perhaps those who moved to New York City on September 5th last year, could no longer vote for (or against, not checked which I would) Gavin Newsom on September 14 last year. Perhaps they would need to do no paperwork except on adresses to vote for or against Kathy Hochul this year. But I think there would be a case for some paperwork between voting Governors of California and voting Governors of New York State, beyond just registering the adress change ...

Certainly, in the Holy Roman Empire, you could be a citizen of the 343:rd state (Liechtenstein, now a sovereign state without an army) even if you were residing in Vienna (currently an enclave in Nether Austria, residence of Emperors back then). Within the Holy Roman Empire, an entity like Liechtenstein or Austria (smaller and bigger than present so named state) or Salzburg (not yet part of Austria!) or Bohemia (quasidependent on Austria) would in a very clear sense be your city. If it involved any kind of voting (most didn't as to the supreme government of it, but typically one would be voting on some subordinate level), that was where you could vote.

But taxes? Well, I have a feeling even if Mozart was a citizen of Salzburg, he may have paid taxes in Vienna when he lived there or in Prague when he lived there, unless his incomes were below poverty level ...

But the old and pagan Roman Empire, to get back to the actual business at hand? Well, here we are speaking partly of artisans and partly also of landowners. If you were a citizen of Mantua, you probably had land in Mantua. You may be in Rome for some subordinate monetary business, but it was in Mantua you had your land, so, even if you lived in Rome all year round, you went to Mantua ... except, again, neither Romans, nor Mantuans, actually paid taxes. Provincials did. Citzens didn't. The concept of citizens paying taxes actually is from later on when some late Emperor made all pronvincials citizens, not sure if it was under the Antonines or even later. By then, getting taxes at all needed citizens to pay taxes, no one left inside who wasn't a citizen (or a slave) and no one outside who could be forced to pay taxes.

Now, in St. Joseph's day, Galilee was already a Roman Province. Judaea was semi-sovereign, like Puerto Rico, with Herod as its quasi-sovereign king. By going from Galilee to Judaea, St. Joseph managed to do tax evasion, at least on this first occasion of the census. On arrival in Bethlehem, no mention there was any Roman census official to actually take up St. Joseph's name and status.

We can nearly see the scene ... "so long, farewell, auf Wiedersehn, good by-ye" ...

St. Joseph : "excuse us, we need to go on a journey"
Roman Centurion : "but you surely are going to make your census, aren't you?"
St. Joseph : "well, the rule says to go to your own city" (meaning province / "state" in the Roman Empire, in the original sense) "and I am going to my own city" (Jewish sense : city of my ancestors).
Roman Centurion : "off you go, and God speed your journey"

Perhaps it was even a less problematic than that (as with von Trapps not actually walking over Alps to Switzerland, but taking a train to Italy - note that it is my reconstruction that I compare to Hammerstein and the Gospel that I compare to "The von Trapp family singers"), since Seppora where St. Joseph would perhaps have been an associate at carpentry, was hiring lots of labour from afar, and St. Joseph could have been simply residing (not as a citizen) for his limited time's work (which was going to get different after Egypt, see Matthew).

II

The point about Matthew and Luke, he admits there is no straight contradiction, even if that requires some "narrative twiggling."

That the Bible is messy, sure. We know the full content of Christmas story, Nazareth to Bethlehem for Nativity, from Luke, Bethlehem, to Temple, to Bethlehem, to Egypt to Nazareth, from Matthew, but full sequence figured out, from tradition, counting these as two parts of same story.

III

7:38 "... because if you saw the whole thing raw and uncut, you would never trust it blindly again - thank you!"

Well, I am not trusting it blindly, I am just trusting it more after I have seen the issues than before!

Thank you!

PS, an afterthought, instead of going to my earlier friend's theory on the matter ... the wording in the Gospel, would it be the official one from Rome, or would it be the one as accessible to St. Joseph, to Our Lady and to Our Lord over His blessed childhood?

In a modern setting, this would coincide. The governmental body would invest in a printing press that would then print out as many examples of the official order as they thought were needed, and some beyond that and would also make sure the post office distributed it to every citizen's or sometimes every resident's mailbox. Now, postal offices were invented about 1500 - 1600 years later, by Turn und Taxis in the Holy Roman Empire, printing presses (using movable type in Latin letters) were invented c. 1450 years after this event, while papyrus was available from Egypt and cheaper than the later prevailing parchment, it was still more expensive than our paper, and especially writing by scribes was more costly than printing, so, this was impossible.

St. Luke is giving us the order as available to the Holy Family, that is as a Roman official, perhaps a centurion, pronounced it in Seppora or Nazareth proper when conveying the order. He might have been tired, angry, wanted to joke around with the locals by being impressive, or whatever. We cannot be sure he used the exact words of Caesar's order (though "own city" would be correct, for reasons stated, more like "all the world" would be a simplification or intimidating brag). And St. Luke is not claiming to be a historian of Roman administration (though the words on Quirinius cannot be an error), he's claiming to be a biographer of Our Lord. Therefore, the wording of the order he is giving, inerrantly, is the one accessible at that occasion to the Holy Family./HGL