Thread by @TimONeill007

Christian apologist @Lead1225 seems to think she can reconcile the contradictions between the Infancy Narratives in gMatt and gLuke. I have seen apologists try this before and the result is always a bizarre distortion of history in the name of ideology - i.e. my pet hate. She ...

... seemed very sure of herself (as apologists usually do), so I thought her attempt may even be worth a blog post in response. It isn't. It's feeble, so I'll deal with it in this thread. Here is her blog article:
christian-apologist.com/2019/09/14/sev…

Most of it doesn't concern me, but the part that does begins:
"Tim further identified what could be construed as embarrassing information in the Gospels. Specifically, Tim pointed out that Jesus came from Nazareth – and that the apostle Nathaniel questioned whether anything ...

...good comes from Nazareth (John 1:46). Tim claimed that this inclusion was embarrassing since Jesus was prophesied by Micah (5:2) to come from Bethlehem. Tim claimed the Gospel writers of Luke and Matthew added Bethlehem into the birth narratives to fit the prophecy from ...

... Micah. Yet this is an obvious contradiction. One on hand, Tim is claiming the Gospel writers including embarrassing truths – and on the other hand, he’s claiming they’re lying by inventing a passage about Bethlehem in the birth narratives."
There is no contradiction. The ...

John 1:46 and John 7:41-42 references to people being sceptical of Jesus because he was from Nazareth and not from Bethlehem simply show that this objection existed. It could be that the writer of gJohn didn't think the objection worth refuting or he may have assumed his ...

... intended audience was already aware of the kind of infancy narratives we find reflected in gMatt and gLuke. Either way, he didn't bother to counter the objections, other than by presenting Jesus *as* the Messiah. The writers of gMatt and gLuke, on the other hand, clearly ...

... considered this objection worthy of meeting head on. Thomason continues:
"If they were lying, why would they have not simply replaced “Nazareth” with “Bethlehem” and state that Jesus was born and raised in Bethlehem?"
The fairly obvious answer to this is that Jesus was ...

... clearly well-known to have been a Galilean from Nazareth - that's why the objections had arisen in the first place. By the time they were writing, these two synoptists had inherited traditions about a Jesus of Nazareth and had to respond to objections that he was from the...

... "wrong" town for a Messiah. So they had to respond by "explaining" how Jesus of Nazareth was "actually" born in Bethlehem. But their stories about this contradict each other. So Thomason goes on to try to reconcile these contradictions. She claims "[the Infancy Narratives]...

... fit together like pieces in a puzzle when one reads them in this order: Luke 2:1-40 and Matthew 2:1-23". That's cute, but it doesn't work because the gMatt story features Herod the Great and the gLuke story begins with the census of P. Sulpicius Quirinius. Herod died in ...

... 4 BC and Quirinius' census was in 6-7 AD. There is a ten year discrepancy that means Thomason's fancy footwork doesn't work. But she has apologists to the rescue!:
"[R]esearchers have also determined that Quirinius was the proconsul of Syria and Cilicia between 11 B.C. and...

... 4 B.C., when Herod died."
Which sounds great until you notice that all of these "researchers" just *happen* to be Christian apologists and ultra-conservatives from Bible colleges. No independent, unbiased historians accept this supposed earlier governorship of Syria by ...

... Quirinius. And it doesn't take much to see why. She goes on:
"Quirinius’ name has been discovered on a coin (McRay, 2008) and on the base of a statue erected in Pisidian Antioch (Ramsay, 1914; Wallace, 2017). In other words, the reason Luke noted the census taken by ...

... Quirinius was the first census is because it is likely he took a first census during his governorship between 11 and 4 B.C. and a second census in 6 A.D., as recorded by Josephus and in Acts 5:37."
Sounds impressive. Except ... it isn't. The name "found" on a coin was by ...

... the late Dr. Jerry Vardaman - a Christian eccentric who claimed he could see "microletters" on various coins that told him all kinds of remarkable things. Unfortunately, no-one else could see these "microletters" and to everyone else they just looked like random scratches....

... he never published his claims in any peer reviewed literature that I can find and no-one in the field of numismatics accepts his crackpot claims So who is the "McRay" that Thomason cites in support of this kooky claim? That would be John McRay, Professor of New Testament, ...

... Emeritus, in the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, a literalist Bible college. McRay uses Vardamann's amazing "microletter" coin as his sole argument for this supposed earlier governorship by Quirinius, citing an "unpublished paper" (see McRay, *Archaeology and the ...

... New Testament*, Baker Academic, p. 154, n. 5). So a Biblical literalist is citing a non-peer reviewed unpublished paper by a known crackpot. Not exactly devastating stuff.
So what about the inscription in Pisidian Antioch? Well, at this this one isn't some crackpot seeing ...

... things that aren't there. There is indeed an inscription mentioning Quirinius that was found in Pisidian Antioch in the early 20th Century - two of them, in fact. But they say he was a "*duumvir*" not a *legatus* and Pisidian Antioch wasn't even in Syria - in was off to ...

... north in Lycia-Pamphylia. How the hell do these inscriptions add up to Quirinius having an earlier governorship of Syria? To any actual historian, they don't. That requires the mental acrobatics of Christian apologists.

But the final and ultimate nail in the coffin of ...

... this and all the other apologetic attempts to have a census of Quirinius take place before Herod the Great's death is pretty simple: the Romans *NEVER* administered censuses in their client kingdoms. To do so would defeat the whole purpose of having client kings. After ...

... all, the arrangement was that the Roman Empire supported the local despot and came to their aid if, say, the Parthians crossed their border. In return the client king kept order, paid homage to the emperor and sent a healthy cut of tax revenues to the local *legatus* ...

... without fail. How that tax was assessed, collected, how fair it was - all this didn't matter to the Romans at all. So long as it made it into the imperial coffers. This is precisely why when the Roman deposed Herod Archaelaus in 6 AD and brought Judea under their ...

... administrative control for the first time, the first thing they did was ... hold a tax census. *THIS* was the census of Quirinius detailed by Josephus and referred to by gLuke. And it was ten years *after* the death of Herod.
For over 30 years now I have been challenging ...

... apologists like Thomason to show me a single example of a Roman governor administering a census in a client kingdom. And for over 30 years they have been failing to do so. Because it never happened.
So where does that leave us? It leaves Thomason's bungling of history in ...

... broad disarray. Case closed.