Governing Syria's A Tough Job

(This taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)

NOT the Syria you find on a modern map, the Syria Cyrenius -- depending on the Bible translation you read, his name's also rendered Quirinius -- was governor of at the time Jesus was born encompassed the area of modern-day Israel (rendered under Roman rule as Judaea) as well. We will see later on from verse two rendered here that the taxing was not only collecting revenue to maintain the running of a smooth occupied province but also to know just how many people and family units there were. Again, depending on the Bible translation you have, "taxing" can also be translated as "registration" or "census", close enough to our modern meaning. We wanted to know who was there, and whether Luke from whose gospel this comes knew he'd still be read in two thousand years or not, he knew his then-audience could identify the time Jesus was born by Cyrenius' administration.

Essentially, Cyrenius (full name: Publius Sulpicius Quirinius) was in his fifties when Jesus was born and already had quite a successful career. From his hometown near Rome, he became governor of Crete and Cyrene (the former a Mediterranean island, the latter present-day eastern Libya, incorporated into a Roman province) and led the defeat of a tribe of desert bandits in his late thirties, two years later he was named a consul under Augustus, followed by a decade-long campaign against another tribe in present-day southern Turkey, and was awarded a triumph -- essentially with a victory parade through Rome, from which we get our modern English word triumph. Then he became a senator, where to serve military experience was REQUIRED, and as a result of repeated mismanagement of Judaea by Herod the Great ... well, having died and then his son Archelaus being banished, Cyrenius took the top spot.

And THIS is where some historians will tells you the accounts get thorny, citing how no recorded Roman censuses of that time -- three from Augustus' reign in 28 BC, 8 BC, and AD 14 -- take place during the probable birth of Jesus Himself. Quirinius is cited in another account as having conducted a census of the province of Syria during AD 6 and 7, but that's a decade after Herod the Great's historical death in 4 BC. (If you recall Matthew's account, Herod's decree to kill all the children under two years old is the reason Joseph, Mary, and Jesus had to get out of town.) So there's either an earlier provincial census that didn't get recorded, which necessitates an earlier governorship, or Jesus was born later or earlier than we thought. Our own Gregorian calendar being off by six or seven years already due to a sixth-century monk's calculation errors already determining AD and BC years, I don't think we need to know so much when it happened so much as what did happen. And still does.