The Nativity, however, must be placed, not only before this, but, as St. Matthew's account seems to imply, some time before it ; for the age limit fixed for the massacre of the innocents, and the sojourn of the Holy Family in Egypt, have both to be allowed for, even ii the one is to be qualified by Herod's determination to set a limit on the safe side, and the other by St. Luke's silence. The Birth of Christ may so far be placed one, two, or even three years before Herod's death, B.C. 7-6.
With the longer interval from b.o. 7 would tally Kepler the astronomer's 8uj,'gestion, that the star of Mt 22 was a con- Junction o( thb planets Jupiter and Saturn, such as occurred in the constellation Pisces m May, October, and December of B.C. 7. The statement of a medlfflval Jew, R. Abarbanel, that the conjunction of these two planets in Pisces is to be a sign of Mt ssiuh's coming, may perhaps have been derived ultimately from ancient traditions known to the Chald;i!an8. On the other hand, it is maintained that the conjunolion of B.o. 7 was never close enough for the planets to appear as a single star, though even this would hardly be conclusive against Kepler's view. But in any case chronological conclusions cannot be primarily rested on such a basis.
b. St. Luke dates the Nativity by a general census ordered by Augustus and carried out in Syria by the legate "Vuirinius (2^ aiTij [^] diro- ypa<p^ irpibTT} iyivero iiyffiovtvovTOs ttjs ^vplas KvpTjvlov). The bracketed article is to be omitted with B t) (and in efiect h) ; the clause is to be rendered.
not * this was the first census [of those that were made] while Quirinius was governor of Svria,' but Hhis was taken as the first census [of tlie whole series down to the present] while Quirinius,' etc. : so Clement of Alexandria, 6rc irpHorov iKi'Keuaap diro- ypa<pas yev^adat. [iStrom, i. 2L 147, p. 407, ed. Potter).
A famous census did indeed take place, Quirinius being the governor sent to carry it out, ten years or more after the Nativity, when Judaia, on the deposition of Archelaus in a.d. 6, became a Roman province ; and it provoked the revolt of Judar the Gaulonite or Galilean {Ant. xvii. xiii. 5, xviii. i. 1 ; Ac 6-*7> But there is also reasun to believe that Quirinius must be thf name wanting on a mutilated inscription which describes somi otHcial who twice governed Syria under Augustus ; and in that case another census might be postulated for his other tenure to justify St. Luke, if it were not that even this other cannot possibly have coincided with the Nativity. The period from B.C. 10 or 9 till Herod's death is exhausted by the tenures of M. Titiua, C. Sentius Saturninus, and P. QumtiUus Varus. Varus came as the immediate successor of Saturninus not later than the sunmier of B.c. 6 — tor coins of his are extant of the 25th year of the era of Actium (Sept. B.C. 31J, i.e. Sept. b.c. 7 to Sept. B.C. 6— and wu still in office at the time of Herod's death. Quirinius conse- quently had either left some years before the Nati\ity or did not arrive till after it (^Ant. xvi. viii. 6, ix. 1, xvu. v. 2, ix. 3 ; Mommsen, lies Gestce Divi Augusti^, p. 169 ff.).
St. Luke then is in error in the name of Quirinius ; it does not follow that he is in error in the fact of a census. * It must be remembered that the chronological data of Lk 2 and 3 were in all probabihty supplied by himself and not by his "sources'"; Gore, Dissertations, p. 20. The evangelist's acquaintance with Palestine was perhaps limited to the two years of St. Paul's imprisonment at Cssarea ; and if his source made mention simply of a census, he may easily have been misled into identifying it with the great Roman census of a.d. 6-7, made the more famous by the revolt it occasioned. Nor is there any inherent improbability in the hypothesis of a census in Judiea somewhere within the years b.c. 8-5. Of another cUent prince, Archelaus of Cappadocia, Tacitus happens to relate that he took a census
* after the Roman manner' under Tiberius ; Ann. vi. 41. And if Herod did set himself to supply the information to hia suzerain (for the statistics of the resources of the empire, dependent states included, were a favourite study of Augustus), it may well be believed that he veiled his purpose under forms adapted to the susceptibilities of his Jewish subjects, and so, in avoiding the scandal caused by the later Roman census, avoided also the notice of history.
St, Lnke*s evidence, then, adds nothing trust- worthy for the chronology of the NatiWty beyond its synchronism with a census.
c. But if St. Luke's census has no date, or rather a wron^ one, does early Christian tradition help to fix the Nativity more nearly?
Patristic writers, in nearly all cases where a date is given for the Nativity, appear to deduce it from the date of the Baptism or Ci-ucifixion ; though it may be noted in passing that the earlier Fathers are a good deal nearer the mark with the year B.C. 3-2 than Dionysius Exi^uus, the 6th cent, author of the present calculation of the Christian era (Iren. Hter. HI. xxi. 3, ed. Massuet ; Clem, Al. Strom. I. 21, p. 147; *Tert.' adv. Judceos, 8; Hippolytus in Dan. iv., ed. Bratke, p. 19, 1. 3).