Chapter 2
Six months later, the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus issues a decree that a census will be taken of the entire Roman Empire. Everyone has to go to their own town to register, so Joseph heads to Bethlehem, since Bethlehem is the ancestral town of David and Joseph is of the line of David. Mary his betrothed is with him, and she is nine months pregnant. While they’re in Bethlehem, the baby comes due, and she gives birth to him. “She wrap[s] him in cloths and place[s] him in a manger, because there [is] no room for them in the inn.”
During the night, some shepherds are in a pasture nearby, and an angel visits them. He tells them not to be afraid, and that he brings good tidings. A Savior has been born; the shepherds will find him wrapped in cloths and laying in a manger. Suddenly, a host of other angels appear next to the first one, and they sing, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” The shepherds go and find Mary and Joseph and the baby. They excitedly run out and tell everyone about the baby and the angels they saw, then come back to worship God. Mary treasures their words and ponders the message of the angels.
A few weeks later, Mary and Joseph go to Jerusalem, only a few miles away, to give the proper sacrifices in accordance with Jewish law. A righteous priest named Simeon lives in Jerusalem, and the Holy Spirit once promised him that he would see the Messiah before he died. On an impulse from the Holy Spirit he goes to the temple, and Mary and Joseph, with the baby, approach him to see about the sacrifices. As soon as Simeon sees Jesus, he recognizes him as the Messiah, and praises God saying, “Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace.” He says a few more stanzas about the mercy of God’s salvation, and Mary and Joseph marvel at his words. Simeon prophesies to Mary that her child “is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel … And a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”
A prophetess named Anna (who is 84 years old and a widow, and worships night and day and never leaves the temple) comes up to them and gives thanks to God for the baby Jesus, and leaves to tell everyone she can about him. Joseph and Mary return to Nazareth, and Jesus grows up to be strong and healthy. The family makes an annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover, and on one such trip, when Jesus is twelve, Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem without his parents realizing it. They get partway to Nazareth and realize they can’t find him; they go back to Jerusalem and search for him for three days. He is in the temple, listening to the teachers there and asking them questions. Everyone is amazed at his understanding and his answers.
Mary finally tracks him down, and with a combination of relief and anger asks Jesus, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” Why? Jesus asks. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” Mary and Joseph don’t know what he’s talking about, and they all head back to Nazareth. Jesus is an obedient child from then on. Mary loves him intensely, and treasures every moment with him.
Commentary
I forewarn you that I am easily distracted today.
The logistics of such a large census must have been crazy. There’s only two ways to do it, really. Either have mobile census takers who go out to count the people, or have stationary census takers and make the people come to them. The first way would risk double-counting people (e.g. a person getting counted once at home and once at work, or if they are visiting family, getting counted once at the relative’s house, returning home, and getting counted again) unless there was a great deal of coordination among the mobile census workers. The second way, having the census workers set up shop in centralized offices and make the people come to them, seems to be the way that Augustus chose. The risk with this method is undercounting people, because it would be difficult to enforce attendance and there would be no real way to know if somebody failed to register.
A census would yield tons of demographic info, but the gambit of having everyone go back to their “ancestral homeplace” is actually a pretty smart move for a new ruler, because that would sort everyone by their tribal origin. Visitors to a region would be weeded out of the data, because they’d have to go to their homeland too, so all data returned would be tribe and ethnic specific. For the first Emperor, a new ruler on a new throne, rebellions would have been his number 1 priority, and being able to keep such precise (for the times) demographic tabs on untrustworthy conquered tribes and peoples would have been half the battle right there. However, it also would have been hugely inconvenient for everyone being counted, and Augustus wouldn’t have wanted to ding his popularity either. This leads me to suspect that Augustus probably added a big old caveat to his census declaration, something along the lines of, “Everyone must return to their ancestral homeplace to be counted, UNLESS it is more than x number of miles distant, in which case they must report to the nearest city containing a census office instead.” The Romans were nothing if not pragmatic. But enough of that.
The manger story is weird, for a couple of reasons. First, Luke basically introduces Mary all over again, even though half the last chapter was all about her. It’s almost like he’s not writing his own story so much as editing other writings together, and didn’t quite smooth out the edges where they joined. I did a lot of smoothing in the summary; check out the original and tell me Mary’s totally unnecessary re-introduction isn’t at least a little weird: Luke 2:4-7.
Secondly, I grew up my whole life with the story of Christmas, about Joseph and Mary saddling up their camels or donkeys or whatever and journeying to Bethlehem, only to discover that the whole town is packed to the rafters with other census-goers, so they beg and plead for a room at an inn to stay in but the innkeeper basically tells them “sorry” and flashes a palm-woven No Vacancy sign at them, but they manage to at least score a space in a stable, Jesus is born in the stable, they wrap him in swaddling and place him in a manger, and then shepherds come and sing and stuff. I had a lot of expectations, is what I’m saying. Then we arrive at The Story, the magical moment, the adventure we’ve all been waiting for, and! … it takes exactly two sentences. Two miserable, paltry sentences. Luke doesn’t even mention a stable, just implies there’s one since there’s a manger; no mention of the census crowds, or their being the reason for the inn being full; even the inn itself barely gets a mention. Two sentences! What’s the deal? Even Matthew gave more description than this, and Matthew was like Ernest Hemingway with ADD! Bah.
Re the angel’s song. I gave in and quoted the King James translation, because the NIV version is dumb. Um, ok, well… by “dumb” I mean “it sounds different than what I’m used to.” I know, I know. I’ve heard this verse quoted from the King James ever since ever, and reading the NIV version just sounds strange; it’s like watching the movie Bladerunner after you’ve already read the book. The movie just can’t capture the magic of the classic. For the curious, the NIV writes the song like this: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.” Bladerunner is a great book, by the way. A Philip K. Dick classic; the original title was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The movie was good too, but it just didn’t quite have the same spirit as the book.
Also! While I was looking up the KJV verses, I also noticed that in the KJV, it doesn’t mention a census at all – it refers to a tax. It says that Augustus sent out a decree declaring that everyone must be taxed, and that everyone had to return to their ancestral city “to be taxed.” If that’s the case, it certainly renders my lengthy ramble about census logistics useless, not that it wasn’t anyway. Looking up the verse in various translations on biblegateway, it looks like most bibles translate that part as either “census” or as synonyms for census, e.g. “enrolled”, “registered” etc, and from what I can see the KJV is the only one that uses “tax”. So, in the very same post where I’m extolling the beauty of the King James version, it also seems that the KJV might not be super accurate in some parts. Why’d you do me wrong like this, King James?
Luke seems to have a real thing for songs. First Mary’s and Zachariah’s songs back in chapter one, now the angels’ song and the priest Simeon’s poem. Luke also seems to pay a lot more attention to Mary. The other gospels mostly ignore her after Jesus is born, but here we see her personal thoughts, her actions as a parent, and her love for Jesus. Joseph is still mostly a silent figure, though.
So far there’s almost no similarity between Luke and Matthew/Mark whatsoever; definitely not the copycatting and identical words and identical stories that we saw between Mark and Matthew. So far it’s looking like Luke definitely wrote his independently.
biblereread 