Was Jesus actually born in Bethlehem?

What evidence would you expect, and why do you discount the evidence in the bible, again?

Archaeologist Dr. Clifford Wilson writes:

[Critics] challenged the Bible’s claim that Quirinius [the Latin spelling of Cyrenius] was governor of Syria at the time. He was governor at the time of the census fourteen years later, in AD 6, but, it turns out that he was also a high official in central Asia Minor in 8 BC, actually being in charge of the Army in Syria. It appears that he was able to repulse a local uprising that probably delayed the implementation of the poll tax in Syria for some time” (Wilson, C. 1980. Rocks, Relics and Biblical Reliability. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, p. 116).

Or, perhaps you can't harmonize the gospels and need help thinking straight.

Maybe that.

Because Matthew also says Jesus is a Nazarene.

Matthew 2:23 And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, “He shall be called a Nazarene.”

Or maybe you joined the devil's lost rebellion against God, and believe only lies.

Maybe that.

Obvious trolls

There's no mention of it in any other source. At all. That's kind of suspicious for a widespread, heinous act like that from a ruler that was already unpopular. And there's no archaeological evidence for it, either. Not to mention how it's similarity to the Moses narrative makes it kind of suspect.

As far as that quote, it's not referring to the census of Quirinius, which Luke specifically states was the census in his story. There's no evidence that census had that requirement. It also happened 12 years after Herod died. That alone makes the two gospel accounts incompatible; if Jesus was born during the census, Herod wouldn't have been alive to try to kill him.

Of course there's trolls here.

I'm here to tell trolls they don't have to go to hell.

>"I was pretending to be retarded" doesn't work in heaven any more than it works here.

No mention of Herod slaughtering people, including his own family members.

Nobody ever said they'd rather be a pig in Herod's court than be in his family.

Is being this utterly and completely ignorant of history a requirement for people to post here?

Luke says the first census.

Which implies there is a second census. The one you're talking about, where Quinirius is officially a governor.

And these censuses are 14 years apart.

Come on, big boy. You can do the math. Just remember there's no Year 0.

In what way is that conformation he ordered the death of every male child under two under his reign? No one else mentions it.

I know this board is primarily used for Christian shitposting, but come on, this is the academic consensus.

Bethlehem was a small town and rulers committing heinous acts was a common occurrence in antiquity. Even by today's standards historians don't record every African village that gets razed during tribal warfare so it really isn't that surprising that it wasn't recorded.

So why is it almost identical to the story of Moses? Down to the dream warning and the massacre of children and the flight to fucking Egypt?
Why does Josephus not mention it even though he fucking hated Herod? He would have loved to talk about that one.

Herod killed members of his own family for political intrigue. Not for imagined paranoid delusions.
And the pig statement was sourced from a 5th century text by Macrobius. Nice. And I can write that George Washington raped babies, take my word for it, I lived within three centuries of him!

You do know that Judea wasn't a Roman territory until 6 CE? So why would they take a census of a land where they have no tax income?

Jesus and Moses have a lot in common; God is a poet and makes His story rhyme.

As for Josephus, the massacre occurred before he was born and because it happened in a tiny town it's unlikely anyone would have noted it for Josephus to find out about later.

No one would have noted the king of Judea slaughtering all the babies in an entire town to protect him from a prophecy?

You're grasping at straws

Your acting like "King of Judea" is some prestigious office that historians would have cared about when in reality Herod was a Roman puppet watching over the boondocks. So no, contemporary historians would not have been paying much attention to what he was doing when there was much more important things going on with Augustus who was caesar at the time.

>"Since the enrollment by households is approaching, it is necessary to command all who for any reason are out of their own district to return to their own home, in order to perform the usual business of the taxation… "

That only applies to the case of itinerant travelers, idiot. It doesn't mean that people had to return to "their towns of origin", only that they had to travel to their actual place of residence in the case that they would not be there.

Learn to read, moron.

>Jesus and Moses have a lot in common;
This only proof that the people writing the gospels had a very firm grasp at the old Testament.

I want to fuck Roadhog

The original Greek simply says ἑαυτοῦ πόλιν or "his own city" so it is completely in line with the papyrus account.

Do you really think veterans who were settled in Germania were recalled back to Northern Italy and Cisalpine Gaul where they were recruited from?
Or Roman colonists and merchants and magistrates and sailors all returned to where they born?

What does that have to do with the claim about Jesus not being born in Bethlehem?

God-damn, you really are an idiot.

If I am a fool then you drove me to it.

>"my bad reading comprehension isn't my fault, it's yours for confusing me!"

kys

the debate is whether the gospels are accurate and OP says they aren't because he erroneously translates ἑαυτοῦ πόλιν as "towns of origin" instead the more general and correct translation which is "his own city" and has historical precedent as demonstrated in this post meaning luke's account is corroborated by secular sources

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlehem_of_Galilee

you completely disregarded his point here which shows that your interpretation is incorrect

when joseph, a jew, heard the decree to return to ἑαυτοῦ πόλιν (his own city) this in his jewish mind would mean he would return to his tribal homeland of bethlehem because he was from the tribe of judah. jews take tribal identity VERY seriously and so a city of david such as bethlehem

is where jospeh would have considered ἑαυτοῦ πόλιν

This has to be a troll. Herod was one of the richest men of his day and basically an absolutist dictator over Judea, not just some random guy nobody gave a shit about.

He was nothing compared to Augustus.

And why the hell would the writers of the Bible give two fucks about Augustus? That's like saying authors in Zimbabwe shouldn't write about Mugabe because Obama is more important.

utter nonsense. if this was enough to make jews think they should head for their ancestoral homeland there would have been massive migrations out of the galilee area, greece, Alexandria, and every other place in the empire home to jews.

Literally the only reason anyone still remember Herod's name is because he is linked to Jesus of Nazareth. The evangelists were telling Jesus' story so Augustus is relevant insofar as he was caesar at the time of Christ's birth just as Herod is only relevant because he ruled Judaea during that time as well.

joseph was already in israel though so his worldview and thus the way he interpreted ἑαυτοῦ πόλιν would be totally different than a hellenized jew in the diaspora

>Literally the only reason anyone still remember Herod's name is because he is linked to Jesus of Nazareth.
You mean people remember him for that TODAY, but we're talking about the Apostles and Josephus. In first century Judea every fucking Jew in Judea knew who Herod was, considering he made a tremendous impact on the country and his descendants ruled over Judea until 100 AD.

Josephus was born after the Gospel events and the contemporary historians during Herod's reign would have been too preoccupied with Augustus' reign to note some slaughter in a random village in Judaea.

We're talking about Herod who you called basically some random guy Josephus shouldn't give a fuck about, while Josephus knew his great grandsom personally and a huge chunk of what we know about Herod comes from Josephus.

Josephus would have no way of knowing about the slaughter of the innocents because it occurred before he was born and wasn't noted by contemporary historians (at least as far as we know given the vastly incomplete archaeological record) because Augustus was a more important topic.

I don't really care about the Bethlehem slaughter, that was some other guy, just to make that clear. I'm just baffled at someone more or less saying that Herod was irrelevant, in fucking Judea.

Judea is only relevant because of Jesus.

Not really, no. There's a big ass arch on Via Sacra that describes the conquest of Jerusalem and Titus' military career in Judea is one of the reasons why he even became emperor. So Judea is pretty important even if you take Jesus out of the equation.

History celebrates victory, who Titus conquered was irrelevant.

Minor conquests don't get someone made Emperor you fucking idiot.

oh please. we have extensive writings from Philo of Alexandria who was contemporary to this along with Jesus's entire life. Yet he does not mention anything about a massive slaughter of children, which sure as hell is a big thing to note even if it's in a small town. that's the kind of thing that starts a riot. Philo of Alexandria wrote quite a bit about politics in Judea. he's one of our main sources for Pilate.

But it does make you rich!

The truth is, Jesus did not exist. All these stories are pure fiction.

Herod and the jews were famous

>Was Jesus actually born in Bethlehem?

Does it matter?

In Matthew, the Holy family are in Bethlehem well before Jesus is born because the wise men in the East see the star and it takes them enough time to travel from Persia, we're supposed to understand from the narrative because they're called Magi, all the way to Jerusalem. They journey to Bethlehem, and then they get there not long after Jesus is born.

And then the angel appears to Joseph in a dream and says Herod's going to kill all the babies, so Joseph takes the family, they move to Egypt for a while. He gets another dream years later, how many years, who knows, saying that Herod the Great is now dead. They go back home, they're going to go to Bethlehem. Instead they move to Galilee to avoid Herod's son, who is at the time, according to Matthew, ruling in Judea.

Luke, it's according to this world census that they go to Bethlehem in the stable, you don't have a stable in Matthew, they're just maybe in a home or according to a lot of traditions there was a cave somewhere. They stay in that area for a month, we know that because it says that they first have Jesus circumcised on the eighth day from his birth, and then the time of purification takes place, according to Leviticus, which is about a month long, they take Jesus to the presentation of the temple in Jerusalem. And it's after that, so a month or so after his birth that they then move back home to Nazareth.

All the Christmas stories are later tradition, probably the one thing most of us would say is that Jesus probably was from Nazareth, he's called Jesus of Nazareth. And the traditions that got him to Bethlehem for his birth are probably later pietistic traditions that Matthew and Luke later developed for different reasons, to get Jesus born in Bethlehem for fulfillment of prophecy reasons. It's impossible really to harmonize them without coming up with fantastic unbelievable conjugations of Jesus moving back and forth to Egypt.

>Herod was one of the richest men of his day

Doubtful. Judaea really was a backwater. Sure, he might have been wealthy comparatively speaking, but it is extremely unlikely he was anywhere close to "one of the richest of his day".

To the idiot claiming "Josephus couldn't have known about the slaughter of the infants in Bethlehem because it was such an isolated and unimportant place!': then how did Matthew (or the actual author of the Gospel of Matthew) find out about it?

Apparently it's an argument from silence to say no one noted a particular event in the Gospels

But mostly all the scholars agree he existed, so he existed, user. That's why Tacitus mentioned him and Josephus' James passage is barely contested

Tacitus merely mentions that there existed a cult in Rome that worshiped a so-called "Chrestos". That's like reading the Theogeny and thinking Zeus is real because it tells of what many Greeks believed in.

The star was in the East, you idiot, not theWise men

It has to be about Jesus, bro, it has to be. My own personal incredulity and bias won't let me look at any other scholarship besides the ones that agree with me

checked

Argument from silence, bro

>Matthew 2:1 Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem,

Got me there

Although my interpretation could make that fit I won't say it here because I have no sound argument

>he does not mention anything about a massive slaughter of children, which sure as hell is a big thing to note even if it's in a small town

It really wasn't; infanticide was common during antiquity.

psychohistory.com/books/the-origins-of-war-in-child-abuse/chapter-8-infanticide-child-rape-and-war-in-early-states/

Because Christians preserved the details surrounding Christ's birth since it was important to them. Herod slaughtering children would have been completely unmentioned in history had Jesus not been connected to it.

>then how come Josephus didn't get the info from them huh?!

Because Christianity was still largely irrelevant when Josephus was writing which is why he only gives Jesus a paragraph in the first place.

He gives less relevant people more space in his histories. Guess there wasn't a lot to go on for Jesus

>Because Christianity was still largely irrelevant when Josephus was writing which is why he only gives Jesus a paragraph in the first place.

The actions of Herod would not be irrelevant to Josephus.

Only Christians would have preserved that information and why would Josephus want to interview Christians?

The historical record does not support the claim that Jesus was born Bethlehem. This does not mean he was not, but that the claim he was is not supported by history, and thus more likely a fabrication. This is basic academic consensus at this point.

Jews hated Christians so it's not like Josephus would have thought to reach out to them.

The question is why would Christians save Josephus' works

Royal edicts are typically recorded in any literate society.

Josephus' works were "saved" by the Romans and later Christians preserved (and annotated them) because they are valuable histories that mention Jesus of Nazareth.

>and annotated them

You mean added outright fabrications to them.

Do you know what percentage of contemporary documents have survive from antiquity?

I'm sure there are more valuable histories that mentioned Jesus too and they destroyed those

I believe the information they included is true however they almost certainly added language Josephus himself would not have used.

This edict didn't need to survive from antiquity, it needed to survive to Josephus, a historian who personally knew Herod's close descendants.

You seriously trying to use "muh common sense" (ignoring the fact that this doesn't actually hold up to common sense) style argumentation against what is academic consensus at this point.

Ultimately it is conjecture either way; you cannot argue that because something wasn't recorded (outside of the Gospels) that it didn't happen and people are entirely free to dispute the "academic consensus."

Sure, you're free to do so, but common sense doesn't beat actual scholarship. There's no reason to believe Jesus was born in Bethlehem or that the slaughter of the innocents occurred.

The reason to believe it is because it is recorded in the Holy Scriptures.

How do you know the Holy Scriptures aren't mythical allegories?

By faith.

Faith doesn't make progress

As I said: no reason.

>

So a lack of it does?

>a smart person agreed with it once, it must be true

Let's ignore the fact that intelligence correlates with all kinds of crazy-ass beliefs.

Rationality makes progress. Faith just goes around in circles chasing its tail

All I am saying is that faith demonstrably makes progress.

Faith grows and matures.

By quote mining?
Based on what? Does faith have a method for it to grow and mature? Does faith demonstrate universal truths backed by evidence?

Faith is like a mustard seed; it starts small but with God's help it grows into tree that birds make their nest in.

You're not making any demonstrable accusations, they're all baseless

They're based on God's Word.