DISCOVERY 



101 



etc." And thus it came about that the child of 

 Nazarene parents was bom in Bethlehem. 



This passage from Luke contains statements bearing 

 on Roman Imperial administration, which at one time 

 excited the surprise and moved the suspicion of his- 

 torians. Mommsen, the greatest of nineteenth-century 

 historians of the Roman Empire, writing in 1883,' went 

 carefully into the literary and archceological evidence 

 available at that date, and came to the conclusion that 

 Luke must have grouped events belonging to different 

 periods into a single year, and could not be writing 

 accurate historj'. He concluded in particular that 

 Quirinius could not have governed Sjoia before the 

 death of Herod. Luke, as a matter of fact, does not 

 state definitely that Christ was bom before Herod's 

 death, but Matthew does, and I personally accept the 

 common view that Luke intends to imply it. Momm- 

 sen's opinion was almost canonical in matters of Roman 

 histon,'; and its eSect may be measured by the fact 

 that two learned and conservative writers in Hastings' 

 Dictionary of the Bible (1900), one of them a first-rate 

 authority on early Christian chronology, admit that, in 

 his dating of the birth of Christ, Luke has been con- 

 victed of error. Other scholars took the opposite view, 

 and new discover^' has proved them right. 



Combining Luke's narrative with the story as told by 

 Matthew, we find four distinct statements which the 

 Roman historian can test in the light of his knowledge 

 of early Imperial administration. 



1. That Christ was bom in the reign of Herod (who 

 died early in 4 B.C.). 



2. That at the time of Christ's birth, the first census 

 of the Roman Empire was being taken, by order of 

 Augustus. 



3. That this census was taken while Quirinius was 

 governing the Roman province of Syria. 



4. That to be enrolled, famihes had to report at a 

 prescribed place, which in the case of Joseph was " his 

 own city." 



A number of inscriptions have been found, chiefly in 

 Asia Minor, which bear on the date of Quirinius's 

 governorship of Syria. A number of documents on 

 papyrus have been found in Egypt which give a hint 

 of the probable date of the first institution of the Roman 

 census, and shed much light on its character and pur- 

 p)ose. I am concerned here onlj- with the inscriptions, 

 but may refer first, and very briefly, to the papyri. 



The papvTi prove for Egypt — and their combina- 

 tion wth hterary e\'idence makes the ssuiie thing highl}- 

 probable for all the Eastern part, at least, of the Roman 

 Empire — that there was a periodic census, taken every 

 fourteen years. The Roman Govenunent taxed its 

 subjects for the air they breathed, and boys became 

 liable to this poll-tax at the age of fourteen ; hence the 

 ' In his edition of the Monumentum Ancyranum. 



period. A series of dated census-papers have been 

 found belonging to the years 20, 34, 48, 62 A.D. If 

 we extend the series upwards, we get the years a.d. 6 

 (when we know, from Acts v. 37, that a census was 

 taken in Palestine) and 8 B.C. The latter year, as we 

 shall see below, may very well be the year of the 

 Nativity ; but as the question of the earher dates, and 

 the local arrangements in connection \vith the census, 

 is still canvassed by experts, we only lay claim to 

 the presumption that a census, called by Luke " the 

 first," was taken about 9-7 B.C. 



The papyri also show that the census authorities 

 ordered everj'one to return to his citj' or village to be 

 enrolled. Luke's statement regarding Joseph and 

 Mary is an interesting record of an early and partial 

 application of that principle of Roman Law which, in 

 a later development, forbade certain classes to leave 

 their home, tied the cultivator to the soil, and evolved 

 the serf of mediaeval Europe. But this is to travel 

 beyond our subject. 



Let us turn now to the inscriptions and the events 

 with which they were concerned. 



The moimtainous country in the south of Asia Minor 

 was notorious throughout the last century of the Roman 

 Repubhc as a nest of pirates and brigands. In 102 

 the Romans annexed the plain of Cilicia, which formed 

 a convenient base of operations against the pirates on 

 the sea and the clans in the mountains. We read of 

 more than one attempt to subdue the Taurus tribes, 

 the most considerable being the campaign of Servilius 

 Isauricus in 78-74 B.C., and the famous war of Pompey 

 against the pirates in 66. In 63, Pompey armexed 

 SjTia to Rome ; and Cilicia and S}Tia became a single 

 army-command. The army in Syria had the double 

 task of guarding the Euphrates frontier against the 

 Parthians, and controlling the tribes that dwelt in the 

 mountains to the north and north-west of Cilicia. To 

 this responsible dutj' four legions were assigned ; and 

 this army we Icnow to have been the only body of 

 " regular troops " in the Asiatic provinces during the 

 reign of Augustus. The Syrian legions were under 

 the command of the governor of Syria, who, by the 

 rules of the service, was required to have held the 

 consulship (and usually had considerable experience 

 of other provincial commands) before he became 

 governor of Syria. 



It is a matter of history that Quirinius (who had 

 already distinguished himself as a soldier) was consul 

 in 12 B.C. In the ordinary way, a Roman ex-consul 

 who rose to the Syrian command took a round dozen 

 of years to do it. Now, it is known that other Roman 

 ofiicials— we have their names and the dates of their 

 tenure of office— governed Syria from 9 B.C. till after 

 Herod's death in 4 b.c. Mommsen argued quite reason- 

 ably, on his evidence, that the first governorship of 



