Harmonising the birth narratives
Baptist Trainfan
Shipmate
in Kerygmania
I noticed something in today's reading (Luke 2:22-40) which I hadn't noticed before.
After Mary and Joseph had presented Jesus in the Temple when he was eight days old, they returned to their home in Nazareth.
However Matthew has the Magi visiting Jesus at Bethlehem, at what I'd often presumed was a somewhat later date, from where the Holy Family flee directly to Egypt.
Has anyone else noted this apparent inconsistency, and resolved it?
After Mary and Joseph had presented Jesus in the Temple when he was eight days old, they returned to their home in Nazareth.
However Matthew has the Magi visiting Jesus at Bethlehem, at what I'd often presumed was a somewhat later date, from where the Holy Family flee directly to Egypt.
Has anyone else noted this apparent inconsistency, and resolved it?
Comments
Tation harmonised gospel doesn't seem to habr noticed a problem (although the search that led me to it, suggests the text is reconstructed anyway.
I'm sure I've seen the general point before (definitely that Matthew omits the Nazareth to Bethlehem step).
There was an excellent point on the Simeon thread that it would be a very silly thing to do after the Magi leave.
Although it might be possible, Birth, nativity magi visit*, on to Jerusalem (while the magi are going another route), continue on to Nazerath, Herod kills babies, Family (hears this and) runs to Egypt.
* For me the order being two years, would suggest Herod thought 'Jesus' could be up to 18 months old.
The sequence of events would then run
Birth - visit by shepherds - dedication in the Temple - return to Nazareth - visit of Magi - massacre of the innocents - escape to Egypt - return to Nazareth.
The problem I see with harmonizing this with Luke is that Matthew implies that Joseph and Mary are going to Nazareth for the first time when they come back from Egypt. Matthew seems to think that Mary and Joseph were living in Bethlehem at the time of the Annunciation. I mean that's how I read it in English. Don't know if it's the same in the Greek.
Admittedly, Herod hasn't noticed that the Census had taken place and that here had been an influx of travellers into Bethlehem around the time that the Magi first saw the star.
Luke 2 says that Joseph and Mary went from Nazareth to Bethlehem where the baby was born. It also strongly implies that Joseph had kinfolk there. It then tells us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
Matthew 2 says Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
Luke says on the 8th day, they took Jesus to Jerusalem. A distance of 5 miles (8km). So a day trip on foot.
Reading Matthew 2, the Magi arrive at Herod's Palace some time later. (Some months - upto 2 years is implied). They then follow the star to a house where they deliver their gifts.
Matthew records that The Holy Family fled to Egypt before travelling to Nazareth later.
Luke says they returned to Nazareth. (Ch 2 v 39).
The conflict exists only if you read Luke as saying they went directly home from Jerusalem. There are some who will insist for textual / language reasons this is what Luke means. I find that unconvincing. It means "after" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Conversely, you have a 8 day old baby and your choice is a 4 day journey to Nazareth (90 miles/140km) vs a 2 hour return to Bethlehem where you can build your life. Joseph, a carpenter by trade, can set up shop and work there for a while. In a town where he has relatives. A week or so earlier they'd been stuck in the downstairs room with the animals but the baby arrived - as they always do - at their own time and convenience. But now he might have a better option. Certainly in a few months, finding a place to stay and work seems very likely. Thus Magi would find them in a house.
Critics will always want to create conflict in the same way that some will refuse to see an issue whilst refusing to look closely.
However, the two gospel accounts agree on much; location of birth, where the family settled and Jesus grew up as well as the names of Jesus's parents. Neither story directly conflicts with the other (subject to the criticisms above, I mentioned).
The greater problem is one of timing. Luke times Jesus's birth during Quirinius's time as governor of Syria, whilst Matthew puts it in the reign of Herod the Great. Many historians think these two historical time points don't overlap. I remain content to think the gospel writers got it right. Luke has been vindicated as an historian so many times. The classic being that it is still stated in many books that the Romans didn't hold censuses. There's been subsequent archaeological finds that show they did. In general the sources used to discredit the gospel writers have much less provenance than the gospel manuscripts.
The gospels are not biographies. John spends half his work writing about a single week! Mark and John don't even mention Jesus' birth at all, so it's a unsurprising that neither birth narrative is complete in and of itself. They tell different parts of the whole and never actually disagree with each other!*
I think people see conflict because they want to.
AFZ
*allowing for the caveats above.
My Greek is not good enough either but my reading of it is different. To me, it implies only that Matthew didn't know why they choose Nazareth.
Interestingly, Luke implies that Mary was from Nazareth but is silent on where Joseph is from. He may well have grown up elsewhere (I.e. Bethlehem) and come to Nazareth to meet his bride. Hence when in Egypt, waiting to return, there are at leastt
two places they might return to....
AFZ
P.s. Oh, BTW, Luke also places these events in the reign of Herod as he states that Elizabeth became pregnant whilst Herod was king and Mary's conception and angel appearance six months later.
I accept what it says in chapter 1 of the gospel according to John so I don't feel the need to harminise Matthew and Luke.
On rereading it, I can see your point on the choice of Nazareth.
I was wondering why, if Joseph was from Bethlehem, they had to stay in someone else's house?
I had never noticed this - Thank you!
Harmonizing is a perfectly sensible thing for people to want to do. It is not some horrible evil that insults the writers, or modern scholars, or whatever. It's just a normal activity of people who happen to be interested in the question "What really happened and when?"
So could we maybe give it a break, all the folks who keep saying "stop that"?
Okay.
This is what I make of it, and of course I could be wrong.
Look at the two Gospels with infancy narratives. Matthew's has a really dark tone--he gets into the massacre, and the refugee stuff, but even before that, the threat to Mary's reputation and the possibility of a divorce. He's also super focused on Joseph's view of the story. For whatever reason, these are the lenses through which he has chosen to write the events-as-they-happened, and that's okay. No doubt it says something about his theme and purpose and possibly audience.
Luke, too, has a viewpoint-but his is much lighter, more joyful, positive, and happy. It is also very focused on women characters. And so when he makes his selection from the events-as-they-happened, he chooses to write about the bits Matthew mostly ignores--the visit to Elizabeth, the shepherds at the manger, the visit to the temple at the time of dedication, etc. Fine, that suits Luke's theme/purpose audience.
There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with choosing from the series of events in order to support your writing purpose. Comp teachers beg their students to do a better job of this, all the freaking time. Put in what supports your purpose in writing; leave out what does not. Even in biography (which the Gospels are related to, if not precisely the same genre), people do this.
It is a modern assumption that the writer of a story is obliged to put in all the "important" bits -- meaning, of course, the bits we personally consider important or interesting. Modern readers can get quite indignant at not being told things we feel we have a right to know, like what Jesus was doing between age 12 and 30. The ancients, well... in a lot of ways, they aren't nearly so anal as we are. They give you what they choose to give you; and if Luke doesn't want to destroy the joyful tone of his infancy narrative by suddenly dragging in a mad king, horror, massacre and Jesus' refugee experience, well, then Luke isn't going to do it. He'll just go straight from the presentation in the temple to a conclusory statement about Jesus' youth in Nazareth. He's allowed to do that. I'm allowed to do that, if I'm retelling the story some Sunday morning to a bunch of people I judge would be better served by leaving out the whole Herod episode. For whatever reason. It's how authors work.
By and large, I agree with all this. One slight correction--Jesus would have been circumcised at home (it's a home thing, you don't go to the temple or synagogue for this) on the eighth day. He was presented at the temple when he was about six weeks old, according to the law of the firstborn sons (Numbers 18), and Mary made her sacrifice for purification at that point (the two turtledoves thingy).
The writer of Matthew's gospel would not have understood what a star is and how far they are from Earth. The concept of pinpointing a star over Bethlehem is a bit daft.
I don't think Matthew was any stupider than you or I. I think instead that he was trying to describe some sort of unusual phenomenon for which the word "star" was the closest he could come. I mean, maybe he should have said "glowy thing up in the sky" or some such? Just to be more technically correct, maybe?
But he's not trying to write a science book. He is telling the story of a time when something that resembled a star (whatever it actually was) behaved oddly, so he calls it a star for simplicity's sake, and then he goes on to explain how it behaves so you get the full picture. He realizes the behavior is uncharacteristic of a normal star. Of course he does! Otherwise why even record the story at all?
Nobody outside an observatory sits down to write a riveting story like, "Tonight Polaris was in its usual place, doing what it usually does, shining." Why bother?
There is some thought Jesus and Joseph may have been stone masons, even metallurgists. See this article.
Thank you, yes. Getting my timings of rituals mixed up... Still a six week old is not necessarily one you'd chose to take on a 5 day journey if you had the option of 2 hours back to Bethlehem and to stay there awhile. Who knows what their plans were before the Magi showed up and Herod went crazy (-er)?
I like the details in Luke here:
Except that's not what Leviticus 12 says the sacrifice should be:
That's v6. But in v8, it adds this:
Which tells us two things about Mary: She was an observant Jew and she was poor. Jesus was born into a faithful family who followed Yahweh but he was also born into poverty.
Luke is big on details. Which is but one of the reasons why I would be very surprised if he was wrong about Quirinius's governorship.*
AFZ
*There's some good academic debate on this point and there is (AFAIK) no proper corroboration of Luke but in the past 150 years or so whenever people have criticised Luke because of the lack of confirmation elsewhere, further evidence has always supported him. Hence my confidence that either the dates from other sources on Quirinius' governorship are wrong or he was governor more than once (one of the explanations)...
As both Gospels fix the birth to the reign of Herod the Great and we're fairly certain of when he died, that's a good fixed point historically.
- Angel appears to Zechariah in Jerusalem
- Angel appears to Mary in Nazareth. “You’re going to have a baby, your past-the-age relative is going to have a baby”
- Mary visits Elizabeth in the hill country of Judea
- Mary tells Joseph about the baby. He decides to end the betrothal quietly (This could have happened before the Visitation.)
- An Angel tells Joseph not to be afraid to marry Mary (Matt 1.20ff)
- Joseph and Mary are married (Matt 1.24)
- Decree for taxation is issued (btw ‘all the world’ might simply mean a non-specific ‘everyone’ cf. French ‘tous le monde’. Also the registration could be an unknown census in the time of Quirinius but the Greek can equally be translated ‘this was the census before Quirinius…’)
- Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem. Jesus is born and laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn guest room…’ Mary and Joseph could quite possibly be staying with relatives of Joseph. Angels etc. Shepherds come to see the ‘baby’.
- Eight days after birth Jesus is circumcised and named (in Bethlehem, not Jerusalem)
- Forty days after birth Jesus is brought from Bethlehem and presented in the temple in Jerusalem
- (Mary and Joseph choose to stay in Bethlehem for an unspecified period. Why? Work for Joseph? Allow time for the too early arrival of Mary’s first child to be blurred? Other possible reasons)
- Wise men arrive in Jerusalem and are directed to Bethlehem where they visit a ‘child’ (not a baby) in a house (not a stable)
- Joseph and Mary flee to Egypt
- Herod ‘in his fury’ has his soldiers slaughter all the boys in Bethlehem two years old or under (based on the information about time of birth from the wise men)
- Herod dies and Joseph is free to return. They decide Bethlehem is a bit too close to Herod’s son in Jerusalem
- They return to Nazareth. (Matthew’s language here reflects the fact that it’s is the first time he has mentioned Nazareth to his readers.)
IMHO, while other interpretations are possible this is a perfectly reasonable reconstruction of events. It assumes an set of actual events which are reported differently by Matthew and Luke according to the different emphases if their writings.More on the question of when the family returned to Nazareth —Mary and Joseph ARE good observant Jews, and so unlikely to go anywhere while Mary is in a state of ritual impurity due to childbirth. To say nothing of the physical challenges of such travel. So certainly not right after the circumcision at 8 days, and highly unlikely right after the presentation at six weeks. Socially speaking, there was everything to gain by staying in Bethlehem for at least a few months or even years. The age of the baby would be far less clear (and thus the fact of premarital pregnancy) the longer they avoided Nazareth.
The political evidence is in favor of them staying in Bethlehem until the Magi came--after all, Herod is far more likely to be worried about a rival living on his doorstep than about one 90 miles away in Galilee. And fleeing to Egypt makes a lot more sense if you're already in Bethlehem. From Nazareth a sensible family would flee north, rather than tiptoeing south past Herod on the way to Egypt.
Personally, my reading of Luke 1.39 is that Mary rushed away to see Elizabeth as soon as the news had been given. She stays there for three months until Elizabeth is almost ready to give birth, and Mary knows the pregnancy for sure within her own body (and, at twelve weeks, well-established).
Then she returns leaving Elizabeth amid final preparations for the birth of John and braces herself to break the news to Joseph. I would take Matthew’s εὑρέθη ἐν γαστρὶ (‘found to be with child’ or more literally ‘found having in the womb/belly/stomach’) to be a standard periphrasis rather than significant as to how the pregnancy was revealed.
Really enjoyed this.
For me, the harmonisation is natural and easy. No contradictions, just different emphases and narrative selection which is easily put together as one story if you want the one story. Which - of course - speaks to the veracity of the accounts.
I have for a while wanted to look at the resurrection narratives in the four gospels...
AFZ
Herod hadn't noticed the census because he was dead. Luke claims that the census took place when Quirinius was the governor (legatus) of Syria, which was 6 CE. Herod the Great died in 4 BCE.
Depends on the books being harmonized and why. For example, we might have an inherent suspicion of the reasons why someone might try to harmonize Uncle Tom's Cabin with The Leopard's Spots. Both have the same general setting (mid-nineteenth century United States) and even share some of the same characters (e.g. Simon Legree) but trying to contort our understanding to demonstrate that both books are "true" and don't have any points of disagreement does violence to the message each author is trying to convey. Stowe and Dixon did disagree about some very important things. The same could be said of Matthew and Luke. Trying to show that they're both telling the same story ignores the fact that they're telling very different stories and probably had reasons for doing so.
As I noted elsewhere there are basically only three points of agreement between the two Nativity stories.
You can click through if you want to read the longer version, or if you want to see how the discussion of this topic went nearly three years ago.
Yes, you clearly remain of the same view. However, I remain unconvinced by your arguments. I asked you then why one particular source over another. I return to my earlier point that I trust Luke as he has been consistently and repeatedly vindicated. So if Luke says there was a coinciding Quirinius's governorship with Herod the Great reign, (or other textual understanding) then I suspect he's right. Moreover, as I noted above, in Chapter 1, Luke places Elizabeth's pregnancy within the reign of Herod. Therfore by implication, Mary's pregnancy also (or pretty close to it).
AFZ
Which is, arguably, good reason for accepting the otherwise equally plausible translation of the Greek: “this was the census before Quirinius was governor of Syria”
Why not record who was governer of Syria at the time of the census ?
Except it's not equally plausible. A date of 6 CE makes sense for the first Roman census of Judea because that was the first year of direct Roman rule in the province. Before that they were under the rule of the Roman-allied Herodians and a decree from Cæsar Augustus to conduct a census would have had about as much effect on Judea as the decennial U.S. census has on the U.K.
The purpose of Roman censuses was to determine the manpower available in areas under direct Roman control, and also the taxes available (usually in the form of grain to feed the legions). For client states (like Herodian Judea) there was typically a fixed tributum and it was the job of the client to come up with it by whatever means available. In other words, one of the big advantages of a client state is that it offloaded arduous administrative tasks (like censuses) onto the client. This allowed Rome in the late Republic/early Empire to run fairly efficiently with (relatively) lean state capacity.
We can see an earlier example of this in Syracuse, Rome's first overseas client state. Hiero II of Syracuse was required by treaty to provide the Roman legions in Sicily with supplies. (This was during the First Punic War.) How and where he got these supplies was Hiero's problem. It wasn't Rome's job to provide Hiero with administrative support, which would defeat the whole purpose of leaving control in local hands.
Luke doesn't claim that Herod the Great's life coincided with Quirinius being governor of Syria. He simply notes that the birth of Jesus took place during the Quirinius census. People who want to harmonize this with Matthew's dating of the Nativity to the reign of Herod the Great may make this assumption, but Luke never does.
I'm not sure that's an implication that follows. One of the notable things about Luke's nativity is that all the human characters are relative nobodies. The only times he mentions lords and magnates is as a date reference to fix a point in time. So the birth of John the Baptist is "In the time of Herod king of Judea" while the birth of Jesus takes place during "the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria". This is a fairly common dating technique in antiquity. Things would be linked to the reigns of local rulers, something the historically literate among the populace could place in time. We have a lot of attestations in the form of "during the year Lepidus and Arruntius were consuls . . . ". As far as I know we don't have any of the form "an unspecified number of years before Eubulides was archon . . . ".
This is all thoroughly logical and detailed but it doesn't actually change anything. None of that makes Luke wrong. Luke puts events in the time of Herod and then there's a separate reference to Quirinius and the census. To doubt Luke is to place other sources above his account or to disallow any other understanding. What's the justification for this?
AFZ
In the same way I might write that "a friend of mine was born in the Middle East on the day the Iraqi War broke out. (This was the first war, before George W Bush was President of the USA)."*
AFZ
*this is entirely true, a colleague of mine was born in Kuwait City as the Allies launched their attack on Iraq in 1990, marking the start of the first Gulf War.
Once again, Luke does not claim that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great. You're getting him confused with Matthew. Luke is pretty straightforward in his claims. So is Matthew. I'm not putting either one above the other, simply noting that they are both claiming different things and that ignoring this requires a lot of very convoluted reasoning to pretend Luke isn't saying what he's saying.
Here's how Luke's Nativity of John the Baptist begins:
A date marker to place events in time, followed by the narrative. Pretty straightforward by the authorial conventions of the time. Now here's beginning of Luke's Nativity of Jesus:
This is almost an exact parallel to Nativity of John. Right at the beginning there's a date marker to anchor it in time, followed by a narrative of what happened. I see no good reason to conclude that Luke is changing up his authorial style between chapters for no apparent reason.
No ancient historian would record events that way, especially not a war. It would always be ascribed to whoever was leader at the time. Do you have an example from antiquity of this kind of dating technique?
I didn't start the Nativity of John the Baptist there, Luke did. That's where he chooses to start telling the story of the birth of John. It may be inconsistent with the way he starts his narrative of the birth of Jesus, but that was his choice as an author. He's giving us what he thinks is the needed context for later events. I'd also make the note that Luke is linking the time of the prophecy of Mary's pregnancy to the time of Elizabeth's pregnancy, not Mary's pregnancy itself. Ancient writers did know about foreshadowing as a technique.
Authors explain things they think need to be explained and don't bother explaining things they don't think need any explanation. One of the best reasons for thinking that Mary's pregnancy is significantly later than Elizabeth's is that Luke tells us that. He goes out of his way to put a temporal marker on the birth of Jesus ("In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.")) so that his readers wouldn't make the assumption that chapter 2 immediately follows the events of chapter 1. If we're meant to infer that Mary's pregnancy quickly followed Elizabeth's this date marker is not just unnecessary, it's counter-productive.
Let's not get tied up with trying to harmonize the historicity of the events. Let's not get up with losing site of the forest for two trees.
This may be true of the later narrative, but of the Nativities Luke spends a lot more time detailing points that would be familiar to Jews. (Circumcision, Temple sacrifices following the birth of a firstborn son, visits to the Temple for Passover, etc.) None of that is present in Matthew's account of the Nativity. This may, of course, be an example of authors explaining what they think needs explanation to their audience and not bothering to explain things they don't think need it.
Unless @BroJames is correct and you’re building your argument on an incorrect translation.
FWIW, I really don’t have much investment in whether Luke and Matthew align or not; it doesn’t change how I read them; I’m pretty much with @Gramps49 on that score. But it seems to me your argument is based as much on selective reading and assumptions as you claim arguments to the contrary are.
I'm not confused at all with Matthew. I'm simply reading Luke 1 as well as Luke 2.
If chapter 2 immediately follows chapter 1 specifying a different date is unnecessary. That's not a slam dunk argument because authors do unnecessary things from time to time, but it's one that should at least be addressed. So far no one is addressing it other than saying (or implying) Luke is wrong.
Also arguing for the date of 6 CE is the fact that any Roman census prior to that would have excluded Herodian Judea for reasons explained earlier.
Please forgive me if I'm misrepresenting you here but I would summarise what you're saying as follows:You are saying that Luke 2:1-3 is a time-stamp to differentiate the timing of Jesus' birth from the previous narrative around John.
That raises two points: Firstly that's not necessarily the reason for Luke including the reference to the census. It also makes sense that he would put it here to explain how the Holy Family ended up in Bethlehem, rather than to separate out the two events in time. Something that would otherwise be very surprising. Secondly, if it is a time stamp to put Mary's pregnancy ~6CE and Elizabeth's at ~4-2BCE (depending on which date is taken for Herod's death) then Luke 1 becomes incoherent and not internally consistent. That doesn't make your argument fail of course but does make Luke 1 really odd.
Luke 1:26 puts Mary's Angelic visitation in the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy and Luke has already dated that to the time of Herod the Great. After the angelic visit, Mary goes to her relative Elizabeth whereby Elizabeth and the foetal John the Baptist prophesy together about the child Mary will bear. (v 41-44). Now this does not mean that Mary has to be pregnant at this point although it can be read that way. But if Luke's intent is to tell us that Mary did not give birth until some years after Elizabeth (at least 7 is the minimum we need here, on this reading) then Chapter 1 is all a bit odd. In verse 49, Mary says that God has 'done great things' for her. The past tense jars slightly here but more bizarre is v34. Mary is astounded at the idea that she will conceive as she is a virgin. The angel confirms that she should be astounded but that it is by God's power. If she didn't conceive until some years later, then surely her response would be "So, Joseph and I will marry and then conceive..." She clearly took the words of the angel to mean immediately (or very soon) and
the angel didn't correct this understanding. A weaker argument is to suppose that the 3 months Mary spent with Elizabeth coincided with the first 3 months of her pregnancy.
The text does not explicitly say that the two pregnancies overlapped but it is the most obvious way to read the text. Therefore I would not read Luke 2:1-3 as a differentiating time-stamp but rather an explanation for how Mary and Joseph found themselves in Bethlehem at the critical time.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the reference to Quirinius is problematic. From my understanding of this (and I am in no way, an expert, just an interested amateur), the death of Herod the Great is as fixed as anything can be in ancient history. We can be very confident that it lies somewhere in the time frame 2-4BCE. Similarly, there is documentation that puts Quirinius' governorship later at ~6CE. My point here is that to then say Luke and Matthew therefore contradict each other (Or Luke contradicts himself even) is a jump. As you know Ramsay argued that Quirinius had an earlier governorship as well. The evidence to support this is weak to non-existent I think. Equally, maybe Luke meant something slightly different to what we think he meant (especially given the translational considerations). All I am saying is that perhaps Luke knew things that we don't and there are several ways it which it might be resolved.
It's your assertion that it's unresolvable that I find problematic. It's quite reasonable to argue that Luke is putting the birth narrative at the time of ~6CE. However, it is equally reasonable to say that Luke isn't doing that and for other reasons, we think Matthew (and also Luke) actually put the nativity around ~4BCE.
AFZ
We've also got the interesting question of which year was he crucified? Something much more likely to have been important to a fledgling movement. Made trickier by John having Passover start on Friday evening while the Synoptic gospels have it starting on Thursday evening.
They did have a system for dating events ab urbe condita (AUC, "from the founding of the city"), but it was not in common use even among Romans, who would typically date things by consular year. (e.g. in the year of the Consuls Sabinus and Rufus . . . ) I'm not sure it was ever used much by non-Roman historians. AUC dating only really became "popular" during the Renaissance, when editors would sometimes add AUC dating to Roman era manuscripts.
It's a timestamp to fix an event in time. Whether it "differentiates" these events from the previous chapter is a literary judgment.
But it does make things problematic from a biological point of view. If Mary was impregnated during her visit to Elizabeth (during the reign of Herod the Great) and didn't give birth until the Quirinius census that gives her a gestational period of a decade. If she was impregnated during the reign of Herod the Great and gave birth after a normal gestational period she would have given birth long before the Quirinius census.
I'm unfamiliar with Ramsay's argument specifically. I do know there is a gap in our knowledge of who was governor of Syria from 4 BCE to 1 CE, but whoever it was it almost certainly wasn't Quirinius, who was fighting a war in Galatia during that timeframe. He even got a Triumph in Rome for his service.
Even if we accept the highly dubious argument that Quirinius had a previous governorship of Syria it wouldn't explain why a Roman census would involve moving people around in a non-Roman (though Roman-allied) country.
Luke undoubtedly knew things we don't. As an author he chose what to include and what to exclude from his narrative. That said, Luke's narrative is internally consistent if taken as written without resorting to the kind of secret decoder ring arguments being put forward here. Luke's narrative is externally inconsistent with Matthew's, which is what we'd expect given that (as far as we know) they composed their works separately.
In chapter 1, in the context of the Annunciation, Luke says Mary was betrothed to Joseph. In Chapter 2, Luke describes Mary as still being betrothed to Joseph when they go to Bethlehem. If John the Baptist was born in or before 4 BCE, and Jesus wasn’t born until 6 CE, that leaves Luke telling us that Joseph and Mary’s betrothal lasted 10 years or longer. And that in a time in which, as I understand it, the typical Jewish betrothal appears to have been around one year.
It seems to me that @alienfromzog has correctly observed that your insistence that Luke 2:1–3 is a time stamp that establishes Jesus was born years after John the Baptist raises coherency problems with what Luke says elsewhere.
Unexpected perhaps, but not impossible. At least not at the same level as a ten year pregnancy.
It's not my insistence, it's Luke's. Luke asserts that Jesus was born during the Quirinius census. He does this pretty clearly, and ties the occurrence of the census into his larger narrative in chapter 2. The census motivates his characters to take certain actions. If you want to argue that Luke was wrong about that feel free, but the idea that Luke is just mentioning an irrelevant factoid at the beginning of chapter 2 does very much have the secret decoder ring feel to it.
The problem here, as I see it, is not that you are necessarily wrong, but rather your apparent belief that treating Luke 2:1–3 as a definitive time marker resolves any remaining ambiguity in Luke 1–2. It doesn’t, and it raises questions of “if that’s the case, then why did Luke say this?”
I’m certainly not saying Luke is wrong. I’m not even saying you’re wrong. I’m saying that various parts of Luke 1 and 2 are hard for us to piece together coherently. I tend not to attribute that to Luke being wrong, but rather us to bring so far removed from the context of Luke’s original audience that some meanings that may have been obvious to them are foreign to us. I have no problem living with that ambiguity.
As I pointed out earlier, this is very much at variance with the way ancient historians specified dates. I'm not claiming my knowledge of this area is comprehensive, but I've asked for examples of other ancient historians dating events in this way ("sometime before Lepidus and Arruntius were consuls . . . " instead of "in the year Lepidus and Arruntius were consuls . . . ") and been met with deafening silence.
If the Census of ~6CE was well known and Josephus would support this then it would make sense for Luke to contrast it by saying, in effect "this is a different one"
In any event, like I’ve said, you may well be right about the significance of Luke 2:1–3. But others have noted other questions and incoherences that are raised regarding what else Luke wrote if you’re right about that Luke 2:1–3. What I’m pushing back against is the way you seem dismissive of, or ignore altogether, the points others have made.