Joseph in Bethlehem

somewhere else: Nativity Narrative Revisited · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Joseph in Bethlehem

SKEPTICS DEBUNKED! Why Did Joseph Go to Bethlehem
Jimmy Akin | 20 May 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcJT2U4A2p0

4:32 Tax declarations to this day are with the tax office of your own city.

The sceptics are simply harping on the "discrepancy" of involving an ancestral city.

5:55 I have a somewhat different view. Meeting the sceptics halfways.

Joseph really went to an ancestral city.

B u t he did so because the tax registration (I take it it really was one) was ongoing in Galilee (which was already a Roman Province), would have been the first time when Joseph would have registered as resident in Nazareth before Roman authorities, which gave him leeway to deflect, say something else was his city. Given Bethlehem was the city of King David, he was not lying.

The Roman officer was not aware that Bethlehem in Judaea was outside the actual Roman Empire, Judaea being still a protectorate. Joseph neither found, nor expected to find, Roman officials for the census in Bethlehem. Either the Roman officer sucked at geography, or he thought Joseph meant a different Bethlehem.

"Located in the Galilee near Kiryat Tivon, around 10 kilometres north-west of Nazareth and 30 kilometres east of Haifa"

Either way, the Roman officer didn't mind Joseph going to "Bethlehem" this being "his own city" and Joseph didn't mind calling his ancestral city "his own city" ...

He was on business in Nazareth, but he just wasn't precise for the Roman how longstanding it was.

After Egypt, I think Joseph had a somewhat different view of Roman tax collectors, given they contrasted somewhat favourably with Herod the Great by that time ...

The tax census in Galilee is deduced from "the whole world" but it is forgotten, the one everyone in archaeology is talking about is the one (years later) in Judaea, when Judaea became a Roman province.

9:40 And the other family members offered Joseph, Mary and the Newborn Child a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

I don't think Bethlehem was what we would call Joseph's primary residence. He didn't have the keys to a house there. More like it was so in the eyes of Jewish law.

10:59 I note that you omitted the problem of the tax census in Judaea, which people rebelled against. It was after the birth of Our Lord.

My view takes care of this problem too.

When God was born according to the flesh, there was no census ongoing in Bethlehem, at least no Roman census.

Luke 2:5 To be enrolled with Mary his espoused wife, who was with child.

= They enrolled a real loyalty census, but to the Temple, by fulfilling the law.

But Galilee was already having a Roman census. That one is forgotten, because Josephus wasn't Galilaean. And because it was overshadowed by the later one in Judaea, both because Jews tended to concentrate more on Judaea, and because it made much more of a stir.

11:27 Blessed Pentecost!