Augustus as Censor and Luke’s Worldwide Enrollment: Roman Propaganda and Lukan Theology from the Margins

Anthony Giambrone, O.P.

École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem

anthony.giambrone@opeast.org

Abstract: The commonly repeated assertion that the worldwide census recorded in Luke 2:1 finds no extra-biblical support is both factually and methodologically misinformed. The present study exposes the problematic pedigree of this claim and proposes an alternative, “imperial reading”, endorsing both the historical and the literary dimensions of Luke’s text and sensitive to official Augustan propaganda.

Keywords: Provincial Census. Res Gestae. Infancy Narrative. Hyginus. Luke’s Gospel.

Augusto como censor y la inscripción mundial según Lucas: propaganda romana y teología lucana desde los márgenes

Resumen: La afirmación que se repite comúnmente es que el censo mundial registrado en Lucas 2,1 no encuentra apoyo extrabíblico, por lo tanto, es fáctica y metodológicamente mal informada. El presente estudio expone el problemático pedigrí de esta afirmación y propone una “lectura imperial” alternativa que respalda las dimensiones históricas y literarias del texto de Lucas, y es sensible a la propaganda oficial de Augusto.

Palabras clave: Censo provincial. Res Gestae. Narrativas de la infancia. Higinio. Evangelio de Lucas.

Introduction

The census recounted in Luke 2:1-5 is one of the most infamous and intractable cruxes in New Testament study. Despite immense energy and ingenuity spent on the problem and to the dismay of many students of the Gospels, no satisfactory solution has been forthcoming. After several centuries of scholarship, however, one modest gain has at least been the formulation of a stable, accepted presentation of the difficulties: a list of what precisely demands or defies historical explanation in Luke’s narrative of the census. It will appear deflating, therefore, for the confidence of Bibelwissenschaft as a consolidated, positive science, if I announce an intention here to problematize this handbook tradition of problematizing Luke’s Gospel.

A remark made several decades ago nicely reveals either the interest or the regressive character of the present project. Citing Emil Schürer’s enumeration of the five specific challenges facing the Lucan account – (i) the lack of a worldwide census, (ii) Joseph’s implausible journey to be registered in Bethlehem, (iii) Rome’s doubtful meddling in Herod’s internal affairs, (iv) Josephus’ alternative, conflicting account, and (v) the problematic date of Quirinius’ tenure as Syrian legate – Horst Rudolph Moehring commented with easy conviction, “This is a formidable list of problems, and no one has ever come close to solving them all”. He then continued:

The idea of a general census throughout the Roman Empire under Augustus has generally been given up – we know too much about the census pattern at that time for this idea to carry any more than rhetorical force. The other four points, however, are still defended today¹.

Whether, in fact, we ever actually “know too much”, as Moehring in full positivistic fashion pretends, may be seriously doubted. In any case, the purpose of this short study, admittedly pert, is very simply to reconsider the abandoned idea of a worldwide census. One might on this account construe my approach as yet another “defense” of Luke (or, worse, a defense of the “indefensible”) and thus suspect some dubious apologetic enterprise (a thing haughtily disdained by Moehring); and it is true that Luke’s credibility will emerge, in the end, less tarnished. Still, as Schürer’s lists implies, the Lukan puzzle is much more intricate than this one isolated point and I wish to intone above all the more basic break this study attempts to make with a superannuated, hyper-skeptical, historicist paradigm. Whether or not in a less rigid, academic frame of mind a divide and conquer line of attack can finally clear Luke of all the various objections brought against him is a question that other studies must seek to answer. The point of this investigation is limited to exposing that the most global of all the misconceptions attributed to Luke is in fact an inherited misperception on the part of modern critical scholarship: a striking lack of nuance in handling no only Luke but the Roman sources.

My analysis progresses in three steps. First, I provide a measure of historiographical perspective, not trudging through the endless, highly repetitive literature on this question, but rather highlighting a significant but forgotten 19^th century exchange between David Friedrich Strauss and Philip Eduard Huschke that calls acutely into question the repeated scholarly assertion no evidence or positive memory of a census of the orbis romanum is found in Roman sources. Next, building upon the distinct Roman-vs­-Lukan perspectives brought to light through Huschke’s retrieval of Hyginus’ testimony to the census (apud Cassiodorus), I take a different route than Huschke and suggest an alternative interpretation of Luke 2:1 informed by the latest papyrological investigations and reconstructions of the provincial census. Finally, informed by the carefully crafted imperial ideology of Augustus’ supposedly strictly conservative activities as censor, notably in the Res Gestae, I situate this adjusted, perspectival manner of reading Luke’s account of the census within its larger narrative context, i.e. the recognized Augustan (goldene Zeit) rhetoric and synkrisis of the infancy narrative. A brief conclusion will then identify some methodological implications.

1. Historiographical Orientation

The roots of Schürer’s list of five formal objections to the historical accuracy of Luke’s census account, a list adopted without demur by Moehring and the broader New Testament guild, can be easily traced back, in nearly the identical five-point form, to Philipp Eduard Huschke’s monograph, Ueber den zur Zeit der Geburt Jesu Christi gehaltenen Census². In this long-forgotten 125-page treatise, written in 1840 and rejected by Schürer a generation later, Huschke conveniently itemized and sought to answer the five critical objections found in §32 of the third edition of David Friedrich Strauss’ Leben Jesu³. Strauss himself had actually offered a much less systematic presentation of the various issues; yet the first and most distinctly enumerated problem is clearly stated: the lack of external evidence attesting a general census in the time of Augustus.

The first difficulty is that the ἀπογραφὴ (namely, the inscription of the name and amount of property in order to facilitate the taxation) commanded by Augustus, is extended to all the world πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην. This expression, in its common acceptation at that time, would denote the orbis Romanus. But ancient authors mention no such general census decreed by Augustus; they speak only of the assessment of single provinces decreed at different times⁴.

Strauss’ foregrounding of a conflict in the source material, diametrically opposing Luke’s bold affirmation and the concerted (negative) witness of all ancient authors, is a less tangled point than the subsequent chronological and juridical objections and it carries an obvious rhetorical force – the manifest vulnerability of this first objection as an argument ex silentio notwithstanding. As the preface to his further discussion of the census, Strauss’ opening move positions Luke immediately on the defensive as suspect of a colossal error, made party to the presumptively losing side in the ongoing Bible vs. profane history topos.

Strauss was obviously not the first to address the census question and his compressed interaction with earlier apologetic authors (e.g. Olshausen, Paulus, Kuinöl, Tholuck, Hoffmann) indicates the preexistence of a developed debate and tradition of scholarship around this point. Academic engagement with the subject of the census can, as a matter of fact, be pushed back at least as far as humanist authors like Erasmus and Calvin, while the learned treatises of baroque-era antiquarians, such as the illustrious Jakob (Voorbroek) Perizonius, whose erudite Dissertatio de Augustea orbis terrarium descriptione et loco Lucae eam memorantis in 1682 warrant special mention⁵. Of particular interest in Perizonius’ treatment is the attempt to connect Luke’s census and the so-called breviarium totius imperii (Suet. Aug. 101.4; cf. Dio Cassius 53.30), a kind of comprehensive statement of the resources in each of the provinces of the empire: a document reputedly written in Augustus’ own hand as a sort of account of the family fortune made by the dying paterfamilias and -patriae. This older line of argument championed by Perizonius was not directly addressed by Strauss. It was accordingly taken up anew and pushed by Huschke, before being scuttled by Schürer with the succinct claim that the breviarium demonstrates only an orderly imperial administration and does not demand or prove a census⁶. Interestingly, the idea has quite recently been resurrected by two Roman historians, Claude Nicolet and Béatrice Le Teuff, who, in different ways, both (unaware, it seems, of Huschke or Perizonius’ work) argue, partly on the basis of the breviarium, for the existence “un projet d’ensemble visant à connaitre l’intégralité des territoires sous domination romaine” under Augustus, enacted through a coherent policy of census-taking⁷. Le Teuf, indeed, identifies the abundant indications of a “nouvelle fiscalité” as part of the Augustan reforms and thus declares quite clearly: “Il nous paraît indispensable de rouvrir la discussion et de poser à nouveaux frais la question d’un census général au tournant de l’ère augustéenne”⁸.

If this is the reopened, present-day state of the question, as Strauss himself conducted the conversation – with important, lingering consequences for subsequent New Testament scholarship – two main apologetic lines of defense are identified and answered. First is the question whether Luke’s phrase pasan tēn oikoumenēn can, on the basis of certain passages drawn from various ancient sources, be convincingly interpreted as meaning only the land of Judea. This improbable lexical proposal is rejected – as Huschke himself, and later Schürer as well, agreed was right. The second, alternative apologetic approach countered by Strauss, accepts, by contrast, the notion of a worldwide census in the proper sense, arguing for its reality especially upon the witness of three ancient Christian authorities: Cassiodorus, Isidore, and the Suda.

Strauss found little in this second proposal to wrestle with in any detail, but Huschke’s energetic post-Straussian attempt to rehabilitate the data forms a direct challenge to the conventional and categorical claim that no positive evidence whatsoever of the census exists for scholars so much as to consider. While not all of the data is of equal importance, Huschke’s effort is not simply a risible exercise. Most significantly, he highlights that the context of the relevant passage in Cassidorus’s Variae 3.52.6 has nothing whatsoever to do with Luke or the birth of Jesus and never employs any exclusive terminology from the Gospel (as does the much later Greek Suda, for instance). The text is rather embedded in a short letter of King Theodoric to Consularis concerning a property dispute (cf. Variae 1.45; 2.40; 3.53). The key passage in question speaks openly of an Augustan census of the orbis romanus for the purposes of tax-collection.

Augusti siquidem temporibus orbis romanus agris divisus, censusque descriptus est, ut possessio sua nulli haberetur incerta quam pro tributorum susceperat quantitate solvenda.

Indeed, in the time of Augustus, the Roman world was divided into properties and delineated according to the census, so that property of no man should be considered unclear with respect to the amount that he would assume for paying taxes⁹.

To follow Huschke, Cassiodorus (or rather Theodoric) in the following sentence of the same letter even explicitly names his source as being “the author and scholar of measurements, Heron”. The manuscripts are corrupt here and evidently Hyginus [Gromaticus] is intended, one of one of the Latin agrimensores and authors from the time of Trajan; or, as more recent scholars suppose, perhaps two distinct authors sharing the same name and writing on the same subject of land surveying¹⁰.

The methodological issue that arises through appeal to these sort of sources is obvious and clearly stated by Huschke.

All diese Stellen sind nun allerdings aus später Zeit; aber dies hebt ihre Glaubwürdigkeit nicht auf, da nicht abzusehen ist, warum wir von ihnen eben so gut, wie von tausend andern Notizen, die wir über viel frühere Zeiten später Autoren verdanken, annehmen sollen, dass sie aus ältern guten Quellen geschöpft seyen¹¹.

Fair-minded observers will acknowledge that Huschke’s point and perspective is sound and the matter deserves at least a hearing. Cassiodorus, a senior administrator of the Gothic kings of the sixth century and major source for Ostrogothic Italy, complied his Variae – a twelve-volume scrap-book-like compendium of papers gathered from his long career in civil service, including letters, proclamations, judicial decisions, formulae for appointments, administrative orders, edicts and the like – in order, as he says, to “educate uncultivated men who must be trained for the service of the state”¹². An apologetic, propagandistic purpose clearly shapes the broad literary framing of the text, yet it is an apologetic purpose located largely in the prefaces and the manner of the materials’ arrangement, thus essentially extraneous to the embedded, administrative matter. The apology is aimed, moreover, at defending the Gothic regime in Italy in the light of Justinian’s reconquest. The Variae betray no interest in scoring theological points or addressing questions about the interpretation of the Christian scriptures. Indeed, the latest letters in the collection date from 537 and thus belong to the initial, secular phase of the statesman’s career; while the De Anima, Cassiodorus’ first explicit religious work, dated a year or two later, mentions the completion of the Variae in the preface. The composition of the De Anima itself traditionally marks a significant turn in Cassiodorus’ occupations, a kind of “conversion” from public life into monastic retirement and the pursuit of Christian learning¹³. Prior to this turn, however, Cassiodorus is noted for being extraordinarily discrete, even silent, on matters of religion: a point of diplomatic skill in an age of high Arian-Orthodox tensions and an obvious strike against any too easy a dismissal of Cas­siodorus’ testimony to Augustus’ census as a simple pious fraud.

Hyginus, for his part, belongs to a Roman imperial context that by the first decade of the second century faced the challenge of governing what was possibly the largest continuous geographical area ever to have been ruled by one central administration. The systematic gathering and recording of information required to maintain control over such a vast domain catalyzed the development of a significant Roman cartographic and land-surveying tradition that employed the professional services not only of Hyginus 1 and 2, but that likewise engaged other specialists, including his near contemporaries Julius Frontinus and Siculus Flaccus, all of whose writings were ultimately incorporated into the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum¹⁴. Hyginus 1 (Gromaticus) himself is of special importance for he “cites the views of distinguished legal experts, refers to edicts of Augustus and the Flavian emperors, and mentions a previous work in which he had collected imperial decisions”¹⁵. Such recourse to official decrees resonates with the repeated advice of all the agrimensores that a surveyor should ever consult existing documentary evidence and archival records in order to register land distribution and limes with legal precision¹⁶. Appeal to an Augustan census’ would thus be perfectly suited to Hyginus’ professional expertise and general working methods, and the particular citation in question can hardly be suspected to be Cassiodorus’ (or Theodoric’s) interpolating addition. The explicit connection between land holdings and tax registration, finally, which is made in Variae 3.52.6, is a perfectly natural context for an appeal to an imperial census.

A close engagement with the gritty details of Roman administration is of manifest interest for handling the census question correctly. Here Le Teuff’s attempt to insert the census within a larger view of Augustan fiscal and infrastructural reforms abroad is a step of major importance. This perspective plots the matter within its most obvious and original, juridical Sitz im Leben. Though Le Teuff’s interest is not at all focused upon Luke, Husch­ke, whose focus was on Luke, was prepared to offer a similarly informed approach. Though openly confessing his Christian faith, he himself was not a theologian, but rather a student of Roman law, whose erudite work was patient and detailed. Among Huschke’s many published titles we find no other religious themes, only high specialized subjects such as the following: De privilegiis Feceniae Hispala senatusconsulto concessis (Liv. XXXIX.19) dissertatio [1822]; Ueber das Recht des Nexum und das alte römische Schuldrecht: Ein rechtshistorische Untrsuchung [1846]; Gaius: Betrag zur Kritik und zum Verständnis seiner Institutionen, mit einer zugabe über die klagformeln in der Lex Rubria [1855]; Iurisprudentiae anteiustinianae quae supersunt [1867]; Die Lehre des römischen Rechts vom Darlehn und den dazu gehzörigen Materien: eine civilistische Monographie [1880]; and so on. Huschke’s original intention, in fact, was, as he says, to write an extended monograph on Roman census procedures as such (which in 1847 he ultimately did, i.e. Ueber den Census und die Steuerverfassung der Frühern römischen Kaiserzeit: Ein beitrag zur römischen Staatswissenschaft). He reckoned that such an arcane work’s pointed relevance for Gospel exegesis would simply be lost, however. This judgment was undoubtedly correct. Even so, his one focused attempt to influence exegesis did not get far, for the very generic problems that Strauss already raised are essentially the same that Schürer succinctly later repeats – as though Huschke’s entire intervening contribution to the discussion was effectively null. The data is late and dependent upon Luke, Schürer blithely repeats¹⁷. It is impossible to say what if any role it might play, but it is worth at least observing in connection with this brusque dismissal of the historicity of the census Schürer’s complete theological and professional investment in Jewish rather than Greco-­Roman history¹⁸.

Schürer’s role as referee in judging Huschke’s arguments and declaring them “unfortunate” (unglücklich) and all-around void of merit (mangendle Beweiskraft) has been adopted as the definitive decision and become the handbook position on the question. Moehring’s appeal to the authority of Schürer is characteristic in this regard. There is, from this widely accepted perspective, nothing more to say about the Luke’s established error of imagining a worldwide census. Once the Third Gospel’s historical claim is thus presented as a demonstrable dead end, moreover, scholarship must inevitably turn to alternative orders of analysis to explain Luke’s story. Moehring, for instance, is very clear about the need for an analytic change of gears: “The historical inaccuracy of the passage which claims to be historical and stands so isolated in the midst of legendary materials demands”, he says, “a concrete and specific reason for its inclusion in the Gospel”¹⁹. His answer is to cast the census as a Lukan apologetic device. Joseph Fitzmyer’s commentary similarly makes the jump to a non-historical motivation: “It is clear that the census is a purely literary device used by him [Luke] to associate Mary and Joseph, residents of Nazareth, with Bethlehem”²⁰. Many similar judgments could be cited.

The contemporary interpretative reorientation towards Luke’s literary aims opens up important new perspectives; yet claims of simple Lukan fabrication and an exaggerated exclusivity about this literary approach are problematic. If any interest is accorded to the evidence and views of forgotten but highly informed authors like Huschke and a crack is allowed to open again in the door slammed-shut by Schürer, interpretative attention to Luke’s editorial and theological interests need not simply displace all historical questions. We might ask, for instance, if it is possible to reconcile Augustus’ census as Luke paints it – with its massive event character that sets the whole world in motion (a depiction that already touches Objection #2 of the five objections, Joseph’s implausible journey to Bethlehem) – with the census such as we find it in the isolated testimony of Variae 3.52.6, where it appears in the form of a career administrator’s almost off-handed allusion: one more element in the complex, many-jointed apparatus of Roman civil administration. Huschke’s effort to bring these (and many other) materials into harmony was perhaps a bit inflexible in bending the data to fit a particular, punctual understanding of Luke’s report. The following two sections will propose a somewhat different and more flexible manner of addressing the question and bringing our sources into some form of convincing accord. Ultimately, the no-nonsense, bureaucratic perspective of Cassiodorus-­Hyginus supplies not only a fascinating, if isolated Roman memory of the census. It provides a kind of neutral metric and modest middle term between more inflated and contrasting rhetorical treatments of the subject: Luke’s formulation and the alternative imperial discourse we will confront in Augustus’ own census propaganda.

2. Viewing the Provincial Census(es) from the Periphery

Egeneto de en tais hēmerais ekeinais exēlthen dogma para Kaisaros Augoustou apographesthai pasan tēn oikoumenēn (Luke 2:1)

If the assumption is not simply accepted that Luke 2:1 recounts an absolute fiction, what historical sense might be made of what the evangelist says? An integration of Luke’s succinct report into the complex fabric of Augustus’ imperial administration as we know it from a huge number of sources is not actually so difficult to imagine. Specifically, deepening awareness of the significance and character of the provincial census system allows us to consider Luke’s seemingly inflated claim in a rather new light.

Augustus is known to have not only recommenced with the Roman census after the termination of the Civil Wars, an act hearkening back to Republican times. He also began the entirely new practice of taking a census of all the provinces, a bold gesture towards Rome’s imperial future²¹. The dean of egyptolgist-papyrologists, Roger Bagnall, together with W. Graham Claytor, comments in a very important recent article on “The Beginnings of the Roman Provincial Census”:

The provincial census was one of the most durable and pervasive institutions of the Roman Empire. Although organized at the provincial level and marked by local variation, the institution was an emblem of imperial rule. Luke’s famous narrative of the nativity census, while problematic in detail, is important evidence for the provincial impression of the census as universal stemming from the direct command of the emperor. The census reinforced imperial ideals, strengthening the notion that the emperor could “see everything and hear everything”, even when ruling from the Palace in Rome. It also of course aided imperial interests, such as the collection of revenue and the maintenance of social hierarchy. For most provincials, on the other hand, the census and closely related poll-tax were simply facts of life and burdens from which there was little chance of escape; for some the imposition of a poll-tax and regular censuses could have become a “potent symbol of subjection to Rome”. In short, the census was a common feature of the imperial experience and a key component of Rome’s control over provincial society²².

The acceptance of Luke’s account as representing a simplified, but not simply misguided provincial perception of a multi-hinged imperial policy carries a convincing and elegant explanatory power. Luke views a locally administered census, loosely aligned with similar initiatives in other regions, through the lens of a vast and unified imperial ideal. An intrusive innovation in south Syria is thus freighted with an exaggerated ecumenical importance and heightened attention to Augustus’ imperium – a view that is hardly a complete creation of Luke’s fantasy.

Centralized imperial supervision of the growing Roman state, like the building of Rome, was obviously not accomplished in a day, any more than the provinces themselves were all acquired or annexed at once or under identical conditions. In Egypt, the system of the provincial census appears to have started in 3 BCE, as attested by the papyri newly analyzed by Bagnall and Clayton. In Gaul it was much earlier, in 27 BCE, followed shortly thereafter by Spain, as Cassio Dio reports (53.22.5) and Livy confirms (Periochae 134, 138; cf. Tacitus, Ann. 1.31; 14.46; Cassius Dio 59.22.3)²³. In Nabatea the census was in place at the latest by 1 BCE, as we know from the Babatha archives (CIS II,1 198)²⁴. Despite these many scattered witnesses, the full extent and regularity of these censuses in the provinces unfortunately remains unclear²⁵. When precisely and under what conditions the census was first introduced in Judea is also an intricate question that requires further study. Given the data from the neighboring regions of Egypt and Nabatea, however, it is not unreasonable to suspect a time around the end of Herod the Great’s reign, as Luke suggests. Nabatea’s particular status as a client kingdom, moreover, places it in a juridical condition very similar to Herodean Judea, which immediately disarms nearly the whole force of Objection #3 in Schürer’s list.

Clusters of local ordinances and edicts in the different geographical regions will have set these various census operations in motion, cascading down through the organs of government and the imperial chains of command. While Augustus himself evidently oversaw the first census in Gaul, for instance, he later commissioned Germanicus to conduct the next enrollment of the Gallic population, a job he in turn passed on to Publius Vitellius and Gaius Antius Restio (Tacitus, Ann. 2.6). The famous Syrian census in 6 CE, similarly, was carried out in the polis of Apamea by a military prefect and “on the orders of Quirinius” as we know from a preserved inscription (iussu Quirini censum egi Apamenae civitatis millium homin(um) civium CXVII [CIL III 6687; ILS 2683]). “In Egypt, by comparison, the phrase κατὰ τὰ κελευσθέντα ὑπὸ ΝΝ τοῦ κρατίστου ἡγεμόνος (vel sim.) in census declarations submitted to local officials becomes common from 89 on, although the earlier censuses were probably likewise set in motion by prefectural edict”²⁶. That Luke, who does not simply forget administrative middlemen like the Syrian hēgemonos, should nonetheless posit Augustus himself as the ultimate commander sitting atop of this enormous hierarchical machine is the most natural thing in the world. Figures like Quirinius, Herod, and the Egyptian prefects openly held their positions under direct imperial patronage, as the public representatives, administrators, and “friends” of Caesar. An inscription honoring the eques L. Volusenus Clemens mentions his part in the census of Sestinum, for example, making plain that he acted on Augustus’ direct authority: missus a divo Aug[usto] (CIL, XI, 6011; ILS, 2691). The same thing is found in another honorary inscription celebrating another knight, T. Claudius Proclus, for his part in the Iberian census: [ab imp(eratore)]/Caesare Aug[usto misso pro] /censore ad Lus[itanos] (CIL, X, 680). As attested by papyrological records, moreover, an oath sworn by Kaisar formed a specific part of the census registration ritual in the early decades of Roman rule (at least in Egypt where the records are, as always, best preserved). From monumental epigraphy to the common man’s concrete experience, the provincial census thus stood formally under the solemn auspices of the reigning Princeps in Rome²⁷.

If Caesar’s authority and presence made itself felt in everything from to oath-taking to the dates written on the census papers, there was also an important, but variable conjunction of these extra-Urban censuses with the local pre-Roman past. In Egypt, for instance, pre-existing Ptolemaic procedures of demographic registration were largely appropriated by the new Roman governors²⁸. In Gaul, by contrast, pre-existing “local methods of population registration” were hardly in place and had to be established as part of larger process of erecting a provincial infrastructure (formula provinciae)²⁹. The relative development, presence or absence, in the diverse provinces of a functional, pre-existing apparatus of demographic information-gathering will have thus strongly conditioned local perceptions of the Roman census, either as an invasive novelty (i.e. opus novum et inadsuetum, as we read of the census in Gaul on the so-called Claudian/Lyon Tablet [CIL, XIII, 1668, l. 77-78]) or as ultimately just “more of the same”. The comparative smoothness of the transition in Egypt, for instance, where we hear of no special disturbances during the introduction of the Roman system in 3 BCE, may be contrasted with the famously violent reception that the provincial census received in both Syria and Gaul, where the population was evidently less accustomed and dutifully submissive to a regular, compulsory appearance before the laographoi³⁰. Small wonder, then, if the perception of the provincial census as an extraordinary event is registered precisely in a Syrian source like Luke, while leaving little trace in, say, Roman or Egyptian sources.

All in all, Augustus’ census of the orbis romanum was a highly diffused affair, but at the same time a conglomerate event and a striking novum – though admittedly more striking in some places than in others³¹. It is precisely the incipient imperial behavior involved, the sudden universal range of Augustus’ reach as a kind of self-appointed ecumenical censor, one part of the wider revolutionary development in Rome’s relation to the peripheries connected with Augustus’ rise to power, that Luke evidently appeals to and intones in his Gospel. Ad hoc as the imperial system was, certain patent and radical changes could be rightly globally comprehended as Augustan policy. While overly donnish objections continue unabated to insist that “contrairement à ce qu’affirmait l’évangéliste Luc, il n’y aurait pas eu de recensement global dans l’Empire”, it is also evidently (with proper qualifications, of course) “tout à fait possible a regrouper l’ensemble d’opérations [under Augustus] sous le terme unique de census général” ³². A more generous interpretation of Luke is, therefore, both possible and entirely fitting. Pedantic objections should accordingly be retired and the text of Luke 2:1 may be interpreted and paraphrased as follows.

en tais hēmerais ekeinais

“Gradually, during the reign of Herod the Great (cf. Luke 1:5)”

exēlthen dogma para Kaisaros Augoustou

“the complex administrative machine of Caesar Augustus initiated a policy of distinct but loosely coordinated decrees”

apographesthai pasan tēn oikoumenēn

“to undertake censuses in the far-flung provinces and allied states of the empire, not just Rome as was the tradition”

The elaborated sense suggested above conforms to what we historically know; it fits perfectly with the impact Augustus’ innovative policy certainly made on at least certain observers, and it puts no special strains upon the Greek, which even appeals to a quite vague chronological window. If such a reading appears to undermine the punctual sense of exēlthen dogma, the word dogma can easily carry the sense of a general “policy” and not simply a punctual proclamation (cf. Andocides, Against Alcibiades 4.6; Democritus 5.19; Xenophon, Ana. 3.3.5). Indeed, a dogma, from dokeō, is fundamentally “what seems good”.

If pasan tēn oikoumenēn still feels exaggerated and one doubts Luke’s information about the wider Roman world, a brief comparison with Luke’s notice of the famine in Acts 11 is salutary. “Agabus stood up and predicted by the Spirit that there would be a severe famine over all the world (eph’ holēn tēn oikoumenēn); and this took place during the reign of Claudius” (Acts 11:28). The formulation here is strikingly similar to the expression in Luke 2:1, while the absence of external confirmation for Luke’s claim of a worldwide famine presents more or less the identical historical problem. Yet, similar to the case of the provincial census, the papyrological evidence indicates that some such famine corresponding to what Luke describes, in fact, transpired, though not as a sudden simultaneous, universal catastrophe, but rather in a regionalized manner and in waves, with far reaching effects, however localized the original causes³³. So, while Lukan discourse about the whole oikoumenē must be intelligently heard as a manner of evoking events of empire-wide import, Luke’s statements about the Roman oikoumenē are by no means wild fantasies or unreliable fictions, but rather informed perceptions from a first-century observer on the ground in the eastern provinces of the empire³⁴.

3. Augustus and Christ

Luke is not alone in speaking about Augustus’ census-taking activities. The emperor himself was quite keen to boast about his deeds on this front. What is remarkable is how the same historical critics, so unconditionally distrusting of Luke, so blindly swallow everything Augustus both says and, more significantly, does not say when it comes to his own self-reporting on his career as censor. Once a monumental text like the Res Gestae is appreciated for the immense and highly selective propagandistic construction that it is, however, a more generous assessment of Luke’s view of the matter comes quickly into focus. New interpretative leverage is also thereby found for an “imperial reading” of his theological perspective of the census in the Gospel.

3.1. Censorial Custodian of the Mos Maiorum

Luke’s provincial perception of Augustus’ census as a thing of immense, imperial magnitude is not at all outrageous. His view differs markedly, however, from the view of the Caesar-censor as he was seen and – more importantly – as he was made to be seen from the center in Rome. An uncomfortable tension, in fact, complicates Augustus’ assumption of the cura legum et morum proper to the office of the Roman censor, a tension that helps explain why Augustan propaganda did not trumpet the princep’s massive, novel expansions of his censorial power.

“L’importance de l’activité censoriale sous le règne du premier empereur ne fait pas débat.”³⁵ To appreciate this it is important that the status of the Roman censor not be underestimated. It was not the work of a middling functionary or a clerical official stalled mid-career. The censor was a senior and sacred magistracy (sanctus magistratus), possessed of maxima auspicia and regarded as second only to the dictatorship³⁶. Accordingly, Augustus’ personal assumption of this office beginning in 19 BCE presents a calculated and very delicate political move; for the censorship

ne se présente pas comme un pouvoir secondaire. Ce qui la caractérise c’est son absolutisme : son contenu le plus évident, sinon le seul, est le pouvoir législatif. Elle dispense le prince de présenter ses lois au vote des assemblées populaires. Elle s’accorde mal avec le républicanisme, au moins apparent, de la constitution augustéenne. Elle s’accorde aussi peu avec la modération du nouveau régime qui a soin d’éviter tant les excès du césarisme que ceux du triumvirat reipublicae constituendae. Ce retour à l’absolutisme en 19 av. J.-C., moins de dix ans après l’abandon des pleins pouvoirs en 27 av. J.-C. est surprenant³⁷.

The office of censor was an absolute power, dangerously close to the fateful, dictatorial power that ultimately led to the fall of Augustus’ uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar (49-44 BCE). For this reason, it was a hardly an indifferent matter how Augustus spun his interest in the censor’s absolute power. In a real sense the censor’s office took the place for him of the dictatorship that he shrewdly refused.

Three times in his Res Gestae Augustus boasts of making a censum populi (tēn apoteimēsin tou dēmou) – in the years 28 and 8 BCE and 14 CE – ostentatiously noting also his dutiful performance of the ancient lustration rite, which the censor traditionally offered in the Campus Martius at the close of the census every fifth year. Nothing innovative or novel in his fulfillment of his role! This was a matter that exclusively concerned the Roman populus and their own immemorial customs. The sanctimonious notice of Augustus’ work as censor appears suggestively early in the excessively long inscription, just after his opening account of selflessly saving the people from tyranny (§1-7). This privileged placement is hardly accidental. Augustus repeatedly intones how he rejected the people’s offer of dictatorial power and this strategic boast of declining the people’s grateful will to make him “overseer of laws and morals without colleague and with the fullest power”, in order that he not accept thereby any power “contrary to the traditions of our ancestors” (§6) represents a rhetorically transparent move and a simultaneous obfuscation of his ultimate assumption (and massive, worldwide extension) of the Republic’s two traditional censors’ legitimate power. In this way Augustus’ publicly shapes his holding of censorial power as a civil service entirely free of ambition and thus posing no danger to the received social order.

In connection with Augustus’ carefully crafted self-presentation as the model citizen of the restored Republic and his option to present himself specifically as Rome’s highly conservative censor, it is important to note that the office of censor was traditionally responsible not only for registering the people in their proper classes, but also and especially for supervising public morality (regimen morum) (cf. Cic. De leg. 3.3). This role derived from the censors’ power to exclude persons from the lists of citizens and degrade the guilty as unworthy of various ranks. Among the sorts of crimes that might be censored (animadversio censoria) with a nota were private delicts like adultery and inordinate and luxurious living, as well as a whole range of public infractions (Valerius Maximus 2.9.2, 4). The censor it thus was who, at least notionally, watched over both the public and private life of all the people, charged not only to answer crime with official ignominia, but to actively maintain the mos maiorum.

In view of this expansive moral superintendence and given his much-advertised solicitude for a restoration of republican virtues, it is entirely correct to imagine that Augustus took very special interest in being identified with the office and activity of the censor, which entitled him to act in the guise of the moral guardian of the Roman people. Although Augustus first appointed two censors in 22 BCE – the first to hold the office since the time of the Civil Wars – the post was subsequently coopted personally by the princeps under his title praefectura morum. Playing censor clearly belonged to the very center of Augustus’ political program and propaganda.

Against this background, Augustus’ intrepid decision to extend his activity as censor out into the provinces must be reckoned as an imperial extension of the larger paternalistic and moralizing persona of the pater patriae (§35.24), yet an act of such immense innovation that it will have found no place in the official propagandistic transcript. The sensitive nature of the financial burdens associated with the provincial census triggered instead a different justification than appeal to Caesar’s absolute authority as censor: the contributed money served the pax romana³⁸. We thus find a response to the significant question: Why do we not find Roman court sources (in contrast to Roman administrators) celebrating the census that we find recorded in Luke’s Gospel? Simple: Besides being a diffuse affair, it was better kept quiet. Augustus strained to present his wielding of the censor’s auctoritas, not as a bold and ambitious activity extending far beyond that office’s traditional bounds, but as in every way a highly conservative exercise of selfless civil service.

3.2. Christ and Caesar

Once this ideological Roman construction of the empire’s censor is rightly appreciated it becomes possible to set Luke’s version of the census in fruitful conversation with the projected Augustan self-image. Imperial readings of the Third Gospel attuned to this wavelength of Roman self-projection have become increasingly common in recent years and a multi-faceted Lukan synkrisis comparing and contrasting Christ and Caesar has emerged. The infancy narrative yields particularly rich material in this connection³⁹. Building upon this useful body of work, I would here like to suggest very briefly two particular dimensions of a similar imperial reading of Luke 2:1. This exegetical angle of empire and the triangulation it affords allows us at once to valorize scholarship’s literary turn in approaching the census, without simply thereby surrendering a strong commitment to the census as a real constellation of facts open to diverse perspectival presentations.

(1) The conservatism of Augustus’ ideology of his activity as censor, with its strong undertone of a restoration of ancient republican virtue, strongly resonates with a notable feature of the nativity traditions as Luke presents them. We might designate this rhetorical-theological feature as a “Return to the Origins” motif⁴⁰. Just as Augustus was presented as the one who returned the Roman social order back to its republican foundations, particularly in and through his role as censor, so Jesus as the messianic Son of David, a participant in Caesar’s great census, was associated with an idealized Davidic past.

Luke 2 deploys this motif of return to an earlier social order in close connection with Augustus’ decree. A prime illustration is evoked by Fitzmyer’s statement, cited above, that the census is a Lukan literary mechanism for ensuring that Jesus is born in Bethlehem. The evangelist himself would undoubtedly have preferred to call the census God’s mechanism to achieve the same end through providential, historical means; but regardless, the interest in Bethlehem must be seen as a response to the prophecy of Micah: “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days” (Mic 5:2). As Raymond Brown rightly recognized failure of this text to be cited in Luke (in contrast to Matt 2:6) is not an argument against its influence here⁴¹. The text from Micah, moreover, activates a logic much deeper than moving the protagonists from point A to point B. It signals a kind of “rebooting” of the Davidic line, a return directly to the source, similar to the “fresh start” pictured in another messianic nativity text like Isa 11:1, where the growth of a shoot from the stump of Jesse pictures a new royal growth springing up from the roots. In accord with these perspectives, rather than being born in Jerusalem, metropolitan city of the line of Judean kings, the census brings Jesus to the place where it all began: “Bethlehem symbolically, spatially signals a kind of idyllic Davidic Urzeit”⁴².

Whether or not Joseph and Mary in fact traveled to Bethlehem as part of the provincial registration is a separate question and a topic for another day. If the recent work of Sabine Huebner is followed, Luke’s account enjoys a real verisimilitude and is arguably less problematic on this front than many pretend⁴³. Regardless, the exegetical observation here is merely that the evocation of Augustus’ census in Luke 2:1, with the “return to Roman origins” rhetoric that the census topos might evoke for ancient readers, leads in Luke’s rendition straight to Jesus’ return to the House of David’s origins. As such, through a subtle Lukan synkrisis, Jesus acquires some of the radiance of the Augustan age. Like Caesar in Rome, Jesus is the leader commissioned to restore the moral order and renew the foundations of the government of God’s people.

(2) In presenting Jesus as a sort of rider upon official Augustan propaganda, Luke is hardly underwriting the imperial line, of course. On contrary! The scandalous overreach that Augustus worked hard to conceal in an official text like the Res Gestae, but which Luke’s provincially oriented version of the census candidly unmasks, draws embarrassing attention to the implicit illegitimacy lurking in Caesar’s worldwide intervention as censor. As such Luke’s differential formulation relative to the official Roman report highlights a second, more contrasting and important element in the Lukan juxtaposition of Christ and the Caesar-censor.

That to Christ alone belongs universal lordship is a simple premise of the Gospel. Daniel’s Four Kingdoms prophecy and the implicit superseding of Rome hover palpably in the background of the Annunciation of Jesus’ royal destiny made by the Archangel Gabriel to Mary (Luke 1:26-38): “Of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:33; cf. Dan 2:44). The competitive resonance of the prophecy with Jupiter’s promise to Aeneas and Rome has not escaped notice: imperium sine fine dedi (Verg., Aeneid 1.179)⁴⁴. While the explicit language of the oikoumenē does not appear again in the Gospel after the report of the census in Luke 2:1, any number of clues point to Jesus’s appropriation of Augustus’ claims as universal sōtēr⁴⁵. In Acts, it finally becomes perfectly manifest that Christ’s universal reign carries an explicitly ecumenical and divinely authorized scope: just the legitimacy that Caesar’s worldwide pretensions was lacking. God “has fixed a day on which he will judge tēn oikoumenēn in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31). The worldwide mission in Acts provides a further evangelical counter-image to Augustus’ supposed claim upon the oikoumenē. This symbolically begins already at Pentecost, where the return of the representatives of worldwide Jewry to Jerusalem in Acts 2 – “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” – recalls the “rebooting” motif just discussed, rewinding the diaspora and resetting the worldwide community in Jerusalem, the original seat of universal messianic rule, rather than in the urbs aeterna of Rome. In the course of Luke’s two volumes, therefore, by the announcement of the εὐγγέλιον of “another king” named Jesus, the entire world is thus turned upside down (tēn oikoumenēn anastatōsantes) in a way “contrary to the decrees (dogmatōn) of Caesar” (Acts 17:6-7). The one who alone is “Kyrios of all” (Acts 10:36) represents an open challenge to Augustus’ ambitious decree positioning himself as absolute moral sovereign over all the peoples of the word⁴⁶.

The theology that Luke implies through this implicit greater-than-Caesar Christology is clearly open to development in various directions. As one trajectory worthy of mention, however, perhaps Origen’s ancient contrast of Augustus’ worldwide census with the registering of Christ’s disciples’ names in heaven is not in the end a silly homiletical fancy or irresponsible reading of Luke⁴⁷.

Conclusion

Although curiously little account is ever taken of the fact and the contrary is often asserted, the difficulties of Luke’s narrative of the census appear to have been recognized from a very early date – so early, in fact, that ancient solutions have now become a part of the problem⁴⁸. The issue raised for early readers evidently concerned the chronology surrounding Quirinius the Syrian legate, however, not Luke’s claim that Augustus’ registered pasan tēn oikoumenēn in a census. Positivistic modern scholars have, on the contrary, made a hardened dogma out of the historical misinformation supposedly expressed in Luke 2:1. “There was no worldwide census under Augustus!” At the end of this study, it appears quite clear that this constantly repeated formulation of the problem with Luke’s affirmation, a direct heir to the overly influential manualist judgment of Strauss-Schürer, is itself, in fact, very highly problematic in multiple ways.

The ancient world is transmitted to us in a lamentably fragmentary state, so that extreme caution is always required, particularly in drawing positive conclusions out of negative evidence. The blind privileging of certain types of highly ideological Roman sources (e.g. Res Gestae) and the unaccountable neglect of other compelling data points (e.g. Hyginus, the breviarium, etc.), a stiff paradigm insensitive to what has been learned of the provincial census, and, not least, a strikingly stubborn scholarly attachment to the conviction of Luke’s formal error, all lead to a lamentable interpretative cul-de-sac. A break with such outdated and unnecessary presuppositions and frank recognition, instead, of the inevitable perspectival distortions allows a sound and relatively simple historical synthesis of the sources as we have them. Indeed, accepting Luke’s Gospel as a particular perspective on the policy of the census as it was seen from Roman Syria allows us to coordinate the formulation of Luke 2:1 with the large deposit of papyrological, inscriptional, and historiographical sources and the mosaic picture that there emerges, while taking account as well of official Augustan discourse. What emerges is a richer, historically responsible reading of Luke’s theological and literary motifs.

If Luke 2:1 classically stands at the head of the historical-critical list of issues complicating the census, it is also a detachable issue. Without prejudging the more tangled chronological questions, then, which already troubled ancient readers, or the mechanics of the census’ concrete execution in Judea, a more generous and intelligent perception of Luke’s information and contextualized manner of expression, along with a less positivistic set of interpretative presuppositions, can only help ease what has been a long congested New Testament vs. “real history” knot. In this regard, for Lukan scholars who are keeping an eye upon recent work on Egyptian papyri, the advancing edge of scholarship is quite clear. An ongoing stream of newly published and analyzed texts is greatly enhancing our understanding of the Roman provincial census system, against which Luke’s report must resolutely be seen. The relevance of the special Egyptian material has, of course, been recognized for generations, but with the considerable accumulation of new data new perspectives are also enabled and encouraged. Reformulations of the questions and problems as traditionally posed, if not yielding prompt answers, at least promise the possibility of some movement in the long stalemate.

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[recibido: 05/08/21 – 28/08/21]

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