Luke's Christmas Lesson

If history is made up of individuals, it is also certainly made up of moments. The birth of Jesus Christ occurred in one divine moment centuries in the making, and remarkably, only one historian in the entire world has recorded that moment: the Apostle Paul's beloved physician and traveling companion, Luke. I never realized just how viciously Luke's account of Jesus' birth had been attacked until I borrowed a book one day from my father's extensive library. It doesn't look like a book you would be enticed to open unless you had to, and I had to because I was preparing a Sunday school lesson. Entitled Luke the Historian in Light of Research, this soft, peach-colored book has a rather ugly cover that screams of the 1970s. Inside, however, lurks a goldmine of historical information compiled by A. T. Robertson over one hundred years ago. First published in the 1920s, Robertson's book as it landed in my father's library was a reprint published by the Evangelical Reprint Library. This book deserves not only a leatherbound cover with gilded pages; it demands to be read along with the writings of Luke.

Archibald Thomas Robertson handles with the curiosity of a scientist and the precision of a lawyer the riveting findings of Sir William Mitchell Ramsey, a renowned British archaeologist and historian from the late Victorian era. Ramsey wasn't exactly an atheist, but he was a skeptic, and he certainly questioned Luke's accuracy of events surrounding the birth of Jesus. Trained at Oxford, Ramsey was honest enough to do his own research in Asia Minor over a period of 34 years. Although his goal was to disprove the Bible's accuracy, he reached the inevitable conclusion that Luke was "a historian of the first rank." As A. T. Robertson relays Ramsey's findings from his own rich background of scholarship at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he writes with both artistry and objectivity in a style rarely found today. His passion for Biblical inerrancy shines from his pages, of which I have read a mere fraction.

The short answer to Ramsey's question is that Luke is not only correct in his delivery of the details surrounding Christ's birth, he is correct in a way that sets him apart for all time. Before we delve into at least some of Ramsey's findings that vindicate Luke from the mocking eyes of the German Higher Critics of the Tübingen School with which Ramsey was initially associated, let's think about just how important it is that Luke's details are accurate. If Jesus Christ was born at the time that Luke said He was, and if Caesar Augustus indeed ordered the census that registered the birth of Jesus Christ, this becomes one of the greatest dramatic ironies of history. A Roman emperor associating himself with deity orders the first census that unwittingly records the birth of the Son of God?

Caesar Augustus, born Gaius Octavius and later known as Octavian, was Julius Caesar's great-nephew and became his adopted son and legal successor. Although Julius Caesar was assassinated for giving himself too much power, this fate did not teach Octavian a lesson. On the contrary, Octavian not only became the first Roman Emperor, he also generally regarded himself as divine. His rise to power follows a fascinating 400-year period of Jewish history during which no prophet spoke any new word from the Lord. But, while God appeared to be silent during the Intertestamental Period, He was by no means inactive. During this period of spiritual darkness, the Lord was moving nations into place to receive the Light of the World. Paul writes in Galatians 4:4-5, "But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons." It is as if not an hourglass, but a century glass or even a millennium glass, had been emptied of the last grain of sand exactly on time according to God's plan. And do we not mark our calendars to this day from the birth of Jesus Christ?

During this 400-year period, we see the rise and fall of the Persian Period, the Greek Period, and the Period of Independence, and the rise of the Roman Empire. The Persian Period stretched from 430-332 B.C. and saw Judea become a Persian province with significant autonomy. The Greek Period lasted from 331 to 167 B.C., but Greek history may have begun as early as the time of the Biblical judges. As a sidenote, it is fascinating to realize that The Trojan War and Homer (1000 B.C.) correlate with the age of David and Solomon, and that Pericles and Socrates (469-399 B.C.) were contemporaries of Ezra and Nehemiah. During the Intertestamental Period, Alexander the Great (336 B.C.) conquered much of the known world in his twenties, sparing Jerusalem and spreading Greek culture and language all over his empire, despite the brevity of his thirteen-year reign.

Then came along a type of antichrist, Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164 B.C.), who tried to exterminate the Jews and devastated Jerusalem in 168 B.C. He defiled the Temple by sacrificing a pig on the altar. His reign of terror, during which he sold the Jews into slavery and destroyed every copy of the Scriptures that he could find, led to the Maccabean revolt, one of the greatest and most heroic feats of history. The Period of Independence (167-63 B.C.) records how the priest Mattathias and his son Judas won "battle after battle against unbelievable odds" (Halley's Bible Handbook). Judas reconquered Jerusalem and purified and rededicated the Temple during the Feast of Dedication. His rule led to the governing of an independent Judea.

The Roman Period began in 63 B.C., with the Roman Empire itself lasting over 400 years, leaving the mark of its influence for the next millennium. In 63 B.C., Palestine was conquered by the Romans under Pompey. Antipater, a descendant of Esau, was appointed ruler of Judea. He was succeeded by his son Herod the Great, King of Judea during the time of Jesus' birth. Herod rebuilt the Temple with great splendor to gain favor with the Jews. He was also merciless and, as Matthew records in his Gospel, slew all the male children of Bethlehem two years old and under, believing them to have been born at or around the time of Jesus' birth.

The pictures that both Matthew and Luke present surrounding the birth of Jesus make clear that each individual world leader had a part to play in God's divine comedy. The Greeks gave the world one language. Rome gave the world a unified empire, and Roman roads made this empire accessible. So where does Luke himself fit into this drama? When he writes in Luke 2 that Caesar Augustus ordered that all the world should be taxed, he is supposedly wrong because Caesar's first census has never been found. He is also supposedly wrong to link this census with the timing of Jesus' birth. If censuses were carried out in fourteen-year cycles as archeological records suggest, this would place the first census at 8 B.C., which is too early for the birth of Jesus.

And if this "first census" was carried out when Quirinius was governor of Syria, this would place the first census at A.D. 6 or 7, which is too late for the birth of Jesus. The key which Ramsey found--which Robertson relays in all its intricate complexity--is that evidence points to Quirinius being twice governor of Syria, his first term beginning before 6 B.C., which connects with the timing of Jesus' birth. As for the date of the first census, Ramsey believes that evidence supports the census's delay for a couple of years, based on logical inference regarding Herod's delicate relationship with Caesar and on the Jewish rebellion as recorded by Luke in Acts 5:37, resulting from the second census. This set of facts connects both the first census and Quirinius's governance with the year of Jesus' birth at 6 B.C.

It would be impossible to describe Ramsey's research or Robertson's merging of Ramsey's findings with other Jewish historians, but one conclusion is clear: being alone does not make one wrong, and Luke stands head and shoulders over every other historian of his time for the accuracy of his account and the integrity of his methods, not to mention the divine inspiration of his writing. It is believed that Luke spent time interviewing Mary herself while he stayed with Paul in Ephesus. Certainly, this would explain Luke's recording of Mary's Magnificat and also his detailed dialogue of the events surrounding John the Baptist's birth.

As Luke himself says in the introduction to his Gospel, he devoted the greatest pains to providing an accurate history of events. He writes, "Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed" (Luke 1:1-4). He reiterates his authorial purpose in his opening to The Acts of the Apostles, saying of the resurrected Christ, "To whom also he showed Himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs" (Acts 1:3). If Luke is not certain of his sources, he is not certain of anything.

While it is true that Matthew records significant events surrounding Jesus' birth, saying, "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise" (Matthew 1:18), these events either precede or follow the actual silent night of our Lord's birth. Luke alone links the birth of Jesus with the first census ordered by Caesar Augustus--a census which has since been lost. This makes Luke's Gospel the only historical record not only of Jesus' birth in connection with the census but the only record of that census. Are we to doubt him simply because the census itself has been lost or because no other historian links these events? And are we to take Mary's word as fiction? If Luke is wrong here, then he is wrong on the entire narrative, for there would have been no other reason for Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem so close to her delivery, and there would have been no reason for the inns to have no occupancy unless other travelers, also, had found lodging for the same reason.

Unlike Caesar's census, Luke's Gospel has not only not been lost, it has been vindicated by the findings of some of the finest historians the modern world has to offer. Luke is, in fact, his own vindicator to the degree that other facts in his Gospel and in Acts have been corroborated without exception. Ramsey's decades-long research bears out Luke's ethos as a writer and confirms what Luke said of his own efforts to achieve accuracy of the first degree. Robertson says that Ramsey "could find no flaw in Luke's production" and that he concluded, "Luke was a scientifically trained historian" (Robertson 134). Luke would have no reason whatsoever to have made any claim to "having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first" if he had even the slightest doubt that he was conflating events that bore no connection.

Luke's account of Jesus' birth is not only historically true, it is spiritually true in a depth we can scarcely fathom. How beautifully did Isaiah the prophet foretell that our Lord would be "numbered with the transgressors" (Isaiah 53:2)! Jesus Christ identified with us from the very first moment He opened His infant eyes on the world. He not only bore our shame and our pain, He counted Himself as one of the milling throng so incensed by Roman rule, even though His kingdom was not of this world. All this Luke's narrative invites us to understand by telling the story as simply as it happened. As irony would have it, the unique details in Luke's account that Higher Critics attacked as farfetched and inaccurate have become the very proof of Luke's integrity as a journalist. Clearly, his account of the birth of Jesus was written from eyewitness testimonies, rather than from secondhand generalizations.

Robertson writes, "It is coolly assumed that Luke is of no value as a historian when he stands alone. As a matter of fact, it is precisely when the historian stands alone that his real worth as a writer is put to the test" (Robertson 119). He concludes his chapter on the census in Luke's Gospel by saying, "There is a veritable romance in the discovery of scraps of papyri in Egypt that confirm Luke concerning the census system of Augustus, which is ignored by all the ancient historians except Luke, the greatest of them all" (Robertson 129). How appropriate that Luke's name means "light-giving" or "bright." Not only did Luke shed light on the most significant birth of history, his Christmas lesson is an eloquent reminder that one individual can make all the difference in the world. After all, isn't that what Christmas is all about?