Did Luke Botch the Census? A Historical Look at Luke 2

Critics will tell you that Luke’s Christmas story is riddled with contradictions and historical goofs. That there’s a 10-year gap between Matthew and Luke’s timelines. That there was no census. That Quirinius wasn’t in charge. That Rome wouldn’t have done a census under a client king. That nobody traveled for registration. And that Luke was just making up details to get Jesus to Bethlehem.

Bart Ehrman leads the charge, claiming “Luke’s Christmas story is filled with historical problems” and laughing off the idea of people returning to their ancestral towns.

Sounds damning—until you actually check the facts. These objections have been recycled for decades. Let’s walk through them and see if they hold up.

1. Luke is not confused. His chronology is totally consistent.

You’ll often see internet atheists say there’s a ten-year gap between Matthew and Luke’s nativity accounts.

Matthew places Jesus’ birth during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC—so the birth must be before then.

But Luke mentions a census under Quirinius, who became governor of Syria in 6 AD. That’s the only recorded Roman census in the region, and it happened about a decade later.

So the claim is:

• Matthew = before 4 BC
• Luke = 6 AD
  And both can’t be true. Checkmate, silly Christians.

But is that what Luke really says? Nah.

He begins his Gospel by anchoring the narrative in the reign of Herod the Great: “In the days of Herod, king of Judea…” (Luke 1:5). That’s when John the Baptist is conceived, and shortly after, Jesus (Luke 1:26–33). So from the start, Luke puts Jesus’ birth during Herod’s reign.

Fast forward to Luke 3:1: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar…”—that’s AD 28. Then in Luke 3:23, we’re told that Jesus began his ministry “about 30 years of age.” That places his birth around 5 or 6 BC, which fits perfectly with the end of Herod’s reign. Luke even references the AD 6 census in Acts 5:37, tying it to Judas the Galilean’s revolt—years after Jesus’ birth. Luke shows clear awareness of the AD 6 census and keeps it separate from the nativity timeline.

Some critics will insist this must refer to the well-known AD 6 census, based on a rigid reading of Luke 2:2 where many English translations render prōtē as “first registration.” But the Greek word prōtē can also mean “former” or “earlier,” as in John 1:15 and John 15:18. Luke is likely saying this was an earlier census associated with Quirinius, not the later one that triggered the tax revolt.

2. Critics say there’s no evidence of an earlier census under Quirinius. That’s false.

Bart Ehrman confidently asserts, “There is not a single reference to any such census in any ancient source, apart from Luke” (Jesus, Interrupted, p. 32). First of all, Luke IS a historical source. Luke gets way too many historical facts right to not be treated as a historical source.

Second, that’s just wrong. Augustus himself, in his own words, brags about multiple censuses in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (section 8), stating: “I conducted three censuses alone… in which about 4,000,000 Roman citizens were registered.” The first of these began in 8 BC. Now, while these were primarily for Roman citizens, it shows that empire-wide census activity was already happening at the time Luke describes. And like most things Roman, the rollout would have been staggered, hitting different regions at different times.

The Epitaph of Quintus Aemilius Secundus  also documents a census in Syria conducted under Quirinius around 9–6 BC—the right time frame for Jesus’ birth.

That’s not apologetics, that’s history etched in stone.

Critics like Ehrman and Dan McClellan will often argue that Quirinius wasn’t governor at that time, so Luke must be mistaken. But Luke uses the Greek hēgemoneuontos (verb form of hēgemōn), which simply means “ruling” or “governing.” It does not require Quirinius to be the formal legate. 

As BDAG (Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich Greek-English Lexicon) notes, ἡγεμονεύω means:

“to function in a leadership capacity, govern, rule”
— including both provincial governors and general officials in charge of a region.

Luke’s usage is totally appropriate for someone like Quirinius, who exercised administrative oversight in Syria before his formal appointment as legate. The word does not require that he be the official governor listed in Josephus—it only requires that he was acting in a ruling capacity at the time. And Tacitus (Annals 3.48) straight up names Quirinius as having served in Syria, reinforcing that he had an established presence in the region prior to his formal governorship.

Interestingly, early Christian writers seem to back up Luke’s account. Around AD 150, Justin Martyr—writing from Rome—mentions the census under Quirinius and even invites his readers to go check the Roman archives themselves (First Apology 34). That’s a pretty bold move if the records didn’t exist.

What’s also telling is that Justin doesn’t call Quirinius “governor,” but epitropos—a procurator. That’s a lower-ranking official who would’ve been responsible for actually carrying out the census on the ground. And that lines up perfectly with the term Luke uses—hegemoneuō—which doesn’t require Quirinius to have been the top civic authority, just someone with ruling or administrative oversight.

Tertullian, writing a few decades later (c. AD 200), says the census Joseph took part in happened under the governorship of Saturninus (Against Marcion 4.19). So putting this all together, it looks like Quirinius wasn’t the governor during Jesus’ birth, but the official—probably the procurator—tasked with running the census under Saturninus’ watch. That explains why Luke names Quirinius instead of Saturninus: Quirinius was the one actually overseeing the process. Luke wasn’t confused, he was way more spot on than some modern scholars give him credit for.

So no, Luke isn’t misusing the term. He’s using a standard, flexible Greek verb that fits the situation.

3. “Rome wouldn’t have ordered a census under a client king like Herod.” Actually, yes they would.

This one comes up a lot. Since Judea didn’t officially become a Roman province until AD 6, skeptics will quickly jump in with: “Aha! You see? The census must be the one conducted later under Quirinius.” It’s your classic argument from silence mixed with a priori history—deciding ahead of time what couldn’t have happened, not because the evidence says so, but because it doesn’t fit the critic’s assumptions.

You’d think there was some ancient Roman handbook called How to Govern Client Kingdoms, with a big bold line that says: “Thou shalt not conduct a census under a client king.” But we don’t have anything like that. There’s no law, no policy, no decree—just modern critics acting like their guesswork is gospel.

And even worse, the guess is wrong. Tacitus, in Annals 6.41, says that in AD 36, Rome stepped in and ran a census in Cilicia, a client kingdom—not a Roman province. The local king couldn’t handle it, so Rome sent in troops to enforce it. So yes, actually Rome did conduct censuses in client kingdoms. That’s not a theory. That’s just a historical fact.

And Herod wasn’t some free-wheeling monarch doing his own thing. Near the end of his reign, Augustus slapped him down—writing a nastygram to him saying that he’d no longer treat him as a “friend” (rex socius), but as a “subject” (rex amicus) (Josephus, Ant. 16.9.3). He was demoted, lost taxing authority, and Rome even made his people swear loyalty to Caesar (Ant. 17.4.2). So no, Herod wasn’t calling all the shots for a time. The idea that Rome couldn’t have ordered a census under Herod folds.

And even if—if—we had some Roman document saying censuses weren’t allowed under client kings (which we don’t), that still wouldn’t settle it. The Soviet constitution promised religious freedom—and still threw Christians in gulags. The U.S. Constitution protects freedom of assembly—but try holding a church service during COVID in California or Illinois. Governments don’t always follow their own rules. The skeptics are way too confident in their claims here.

So no, Luke’s not reporting some absurd impossibility. He’s describing exactly the kind of messy, politically pressured world Rome actually ran.

4. What about traveling to their ancestral homes?

Ehrman, McClellan and others mock the idea of traveling to one’s ancestral city, as if Luke is describing a mass migration across the empire. But he misses the point. 

Papyrus London 904 (dated to AD 104)—a decree from Gaius Vibius Maximus, the Roman prefect of Egypt—clearly orders people to return to their hometowns for the purpose of a census enrollment (ἀπογραφή). Some critics wave this off as irrelevant—“It’s too late and it’s Egypt, not Judea.” But that misses the point. The papyrus shows that Roman administrative practice included ordering people to return to their hometowns for census purposes. Bureaucracies tend to follow patterns, and Egypt just happens to preserve more paperwork. F.F. Bruce rightly notes that while this example comes from Egypt and is later, the practice “need not have been confined to Egypt.” (Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament, 194)

Craig Blomberg further clarifies this in The Historical Reliability of the New Testament (pp. 132–133). Luke doesn’t say every Jew had to return to some tribal homeland going back a thousand years. The phrase “his own city” (Luke 2:3) would refer to a person’s place of birth, legal residence, or recent home. The Greek (polis heautou) is used this way throughout Scripture (e.g., Josh. 20:6; 1 Sam. 8:22; Ezra 2:1; Neh. 7:6; Matt. 9:1). Most Jews still lived near their ancestral towns. Bethlehem may have been Joseph’s legal or family seat. The census travel wasn’t some crazy, empire-wide mass exile, it was normal administration. Critics are just overreading the text and assuming stupidity on Luke’s part. 

5. Did Luke invent the census to get Jesus to Bethlehem?

Sometimes skeptics will say Luke makes up this crazy census to get Jesus to Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy in Micah 5:2. But that’s like using a steam-roller to crack a peanut. If Luke were inventing the story to force a prophecy fulfillment, he could’ve just said Jesus was born there—done. Or he could make up a simpler story, like Joseph getting a job there connected through his family.

Instead, he introduces a Roman census, legal procedures, and political backstory that complicates the story and leaves it wide open it to criticism. This would be the clumsiest plot device ever. And notably, he never even quotes Micah 5:2. That makes zero sense from an apologetic standpoint. And note that neither Celsus nor Julian the Apostate ever raised an objection to it. Weren’t they in the perfect position to swat down such an easy, softball-level gaffe—if it actually was one? I wouldn’t press the argument from silence too hard here, but I find it kind of telling that Julian, a Roman Emperor who you’d expect to have access to the Empire’s historical archives, says nothing about it, despite him being a harsh, outspoken critic of Christianity.

Bottom line:

Luke doesn’t deserve the dismissive hand-wave he often gets. His account fits with what we know about Roman administration—messy, inconsistent, and very much capable of doing things outside the lines when it suited them. From Quirinius’ involvement in earlier Syrian affairs, to the kind of travel Roman censuses actually required, to the way client kingdoms were treated when Rome got annoyed—Luke’s account lines up better than most critics realize.

The burden isn’t on Luke to meet modern historians’ preferences. It’s on critics to show that what he reports couldn’t have happened. And so far, they’ve come up way short. The census objection is a card that critics need to stop playing.