One of the most insurmountable errors in the Bible, being both a historical inaccuracy and a contradiction, is the conflicting dates given to the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. This goof is so terrifying to Christians they have destroyed hundreds of trees and gallons of ink desperately trying to escape it. I thoroughly survey their folly in Hitler Homer Bible Christ in a summary chapter addressing every argument ever attempted on this. A more detailed discussion (which may be out of date in particulars not included in the HHBC text) has been up at The Secular Web for twenty years. But Christian apologists never learn. Or don’t care to. If they can dupe the flock, and keep them from checking facts like that, they count that a win.

In my online course this month on New Testament Studies for beginners (my new course on Ancient Science and Christianity’s early abandonment of it starts tomorrow!), a student pointed me to a hilarious attempt to rebut this charge by confused nutter Mark Shea at Catholic Answers back in 2013, titled “It May Interest You to Know.” Now, the bulk of that preening diatribe I won’t bother with. It’s a straw man argument that misses the mark. People don’t argue the church is afraid of inconvenient facts they’ve begrudgingly accepted, in the sense of denying or suppressing them—they just don’t like them, and don’t make much of an effort to inform people of them. Which is why in actuality most people don’t know the things Shea thinks are common knowledge.

This being one of those things.

What makes this attempt so funny is Shea’s closing argument (emphasis mine):

We have only scratched the surface of the pseudo-knowledge rampant in our culture. The Church is an anvil that has worn out an awful lot of hammers. If somebody says, “It might interest you to know” and presents the latest fashionable dismissal of the Faith in that tone of voice meant to convey that you are a kindergartner, don’t get mad. Ask for documentation. Then check the documentation against the copious historical and theological resources readily available from such sources as, for instance, Catholic Answers.

The contradictions and historical error in the conflicting Nativity stories are “pseudo-knowledge,” the Church has hammered this dead with facts, and there is “documentation” that will confirm this. As, for instance, Shea’s article at Catholic answers. Oh dear.

Shea on December 25th

It’s not really important to the Biblical question, since no Gospel, nor any text in the New Testament, says or even implies Jesus was born on December 25th (and it’s doubtful a Roman census would be conducted in winter). But Shea’s attempt to prove the date accurate illustrates his confusion between superstitious speculation and documented factuality; as well as the fact that in none of what follows does Shea ever cite a source. He gives names and even quotes people…but never says where these quotes or arguments are, for us to check them. This is an odd way to sell the importance of “asking for documentation.” A backhanded hypocrisy that’s definitely signature Church behavior.

Overall, Shea’s point on this is correct: there isn’t any secure evidence for a December 25th birth festival for any god before the official Imperial creation of one in 274 A.D. We also can’t establish any celebration of the birth of Jesus existed before then either. We only know December 25th did not officially become a birthday for Jesus until almost a hundred years later, in the mid-4th century. And that that had long been widely regarded as the Winter Solstice, the date the sun stopped dying and lived again. As Pliny the Elder had already reported way back in the first century (in Natural History 18.59):

Immediately after the Winter Solstice the days begin to increase…and after [the Summer Solstice] they continue to decrease inversely to the nights until the Winter Solstice. … All these seasons, too, commence at the eighth degree of the signs of the Zodiac. The winter solstice begins at the eighth degree of Capricorn, the eighth day before the calends of January…and it is rarely that these days do not respectively give some indication of a change in the weather.

As Shea himself notes “eight days before the kalends of January” is December 25. So already that date was central to the Roman calendar and astrology, and everyone believed it was the day of the restoration of the sun, when it begins to wax again after months of waning. Long before any Christians started trying to sell that as the date Jesus was born. And this was likely the reason Aurelian put the Roman state holiday of the Birth of the Invincible Sun on that date in 274 AD. It was not borrowed from Christianity as Shea seems to imply. That would have been absurd.

But Shea is right there was likely another reason to select that date for the birth of Jesus: the astronomical fact that the Winter Solstice is nine months after the Vernal Equinox when (roughly) legend implausibly imagined Jesus killed. Nine months is of course a standard pregnancy duration—if you are willing to fudge a few days or weeks here and there. And there were (as Shea notes) some Jewish superstitions that prophets always died the same day they were conceived—thus getting us to nine months before their birthdays. Not the logic of a historian. But when you don’t have data, Christians always just made stuff up. Usually based on superstitious nonsense like this. And when this also lines up with the birthday of suns and sun-gods, its attractiveness would be all the greater.

Of course the Gospels don’t even agree on the day Jesus died. The Synoptics put it either on 11 April AD 27 or 23 April AD 34; John places it either on 7 April AD 30 or 3 April AD 33 (see the calculations in Finegan, 2.II.B.3). None of which really work out to exactly nine months before December 25. So why was that specific day chosen? Well, guess what. The ancient Christians mistakenly located the death of Jesus to exactly the Vernal Equinox on Roman calendars: March 25 (e.g. Tertullian, Against the Jews 8; like the Winter Solstice, which actually occurs the 21st of December, the VE actually occurs the 20th of March, but the “observed” day for both then was the 25th). And March 25 to December 25 is exactly nine months, if you count each month as exactly 30 days (rather than according to the then-Julian calendar, which adds five days into that span to force 12 months to equal 1 solar year). Thus illustrating how they were using superstitious math, not historical records, to place these dates. And “conveniently” landing on key astronomical dates.

In the fourth century several Christian sources do declare this their reason for placing their Lord’s birth on December 25: its being exactly nine months after the date of his conception, which was assumed to be the exact same date of his death. Based on no sources. Just superstitious legend. And neither being correct—no March date is possible for the crucifixion as told in the Gospels; almost no pregnancy ever lasts exactly nine months; and there are conveniently only exactly nine months between March 25 and December 25 if you ignore calendars. Notably, Eastern Churches placed the birth of Jesus on January 6. Why? Because they also figured his death to be exactly nine months before that, but placed his death on April 6 (which more closely but still not exactly fits the Gospel accounts). Thus confirming this was the logic Christians were using. The West simply preferred to add in the astrological alignment, getting the undying sun metaphor in there to boot.

The fact that the Western method got exactly the same date as the birthday of many pagan sun-gods of the era is therefore because they were dating the death astronomically to the Vernal Equinox. Which is always nine months from the Winter Solstice. Notably the Vernal Equinox had long been associated with the resurrection of other deities in the Near East (such as Marduk and likely Baal and Tammuz, as documented in Mettinger’s Riddle of Resurrection). So it’s just as significant Christians tried pegging that as the date of Jesus’s death, rather than any date that could actually be reconciled with the Gospels and the Jewish festival calendar.

But contrary to Shea, not many Christians were proposing December 25th as the date of Jesus’s birth in the early 3rd century. From exactly that period Clement of Alexandria wrote (in Stromata 1.21.145):

There are those who have determined not only the year of our Lord’s birth, but also the day; and they say that it took place in the 28th year of Augustus, and in the 25th day of [the Egyptian month] Pachon [= May 20] … [while] others say that He was born on the 24th or 25th of Pharmuthi [= April 20 or 21].

He evidently had never even heard of a 25th of December proposal. Shea conceals this data from his readers. An example of the very thing he claims Catholics don’t do. We only have some Medieval manuscripts of Hippolytus and Africanus that indicate possibly they were entertaining such a date—indirectly, by setting the conception at March 25, but not dating the birth. If the passages in question are authentic and not “enhanced” by Medieval editors—the textual tradition is a mess, so it would be a chore to verify. (Meanwhile, I could find no evidence that Irenaeus also did this calculation, despite that often being claimed.)

This is all moot of course, since everything distinctive of Christmas is pagan or secular. And the date isn’t Biblical. So Shea’s kind of kicking against the goad here.

Now to the Main Course

The rest of Shea’s article is representative of stock Christian fundamentalist claptrap. Shea is technically a Catholic rather than a fundamentalist in the strictest sense—but he also appears to be a biblical literalist, which makes him essentially indistinguishable from a fundamentalist. Here is what goes wrong with his hackneyed attempt to rescue the Bible from contradicting itself on the year of the Nativity.

The Argument from “You Can’t Make Things Up”

First Shea tries the lame “But how could they make that up?” argument. Evidently not noticing how readily even the most absurd things get made up even today and still widely believed—and this is an age of universal literacy and ready access to sources and archives. What Shea gullibly can’t grasp is how Luke could claim a past emperor two lifetimes ago decreed a census of the whole world when no such thing happened (and it didn’t: we have a ton of evidence regarding when and how censuses occurred, including papyri documents from actual censuses, and not a peep about this).

As Shea puts it:

[Luke] invites not just somebody to refute it but everybody in his entire audience. That’s an awfully strange thing to do if the enrollment never happened and an awfully odd way to establish the bona fides of your main character.

But Shea is the gullible one here. Most people didn’t have this kind of knowledge or access to it back then. So lies like this were easy to pull off. Not difficult. Luke wouldn’t even think twice about it. Least of all as Luke is vague as to what he even means, so refuting him is impossible, if one is intent on reinterpreting the text any way one needs to evade criticism.

We can look to an even more obvious lie, Mark’s invention (and Luke’s repetition) of a darkness covering the whole earth—which Luke even specifies as a solar eclipse, despite that being astronomically impossible—and yet not attested for the time and region in question in any sources, not even extensive astronomical records referenced and cited at the time (see Proving History, pp. 41-45 & 54-60; and my peer reviewed article on Thallus reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ). Since they clearly got away with that, they could far more easily have gotten away with making something up about census practice that happened a hundred years ago, which would be extremely tedious at that time to disprove—even if one wished to fact-check the Gospels at all, and the evidence shows no one ever did, at least no one who would have cared.

Because honestly, Christians became Christians precisely because they were the people who didn’t fact-check anything they were told (as I extensively document in Not the Impossible Faith, chs. 7, 13, and 17). By the time anyone else even noticed Christianity enough to bother debunking it, it was already 150 years old, and state archives had burned to the ground several times. Our first known example of a critic even bothering to care was Celsus, c. 160 AD…whose critique Christians destroyed; all we have is Origen’s rebuttal. And there is no indication Celsus was or knew anyone who was an expert in what was then ancient administrative history.

Luke didn’t, after all, invent the census. He read about it in the Antiquities of Josephus. What Luke does is exaggerate the mundane fact that only Syria was registered in the year 6 upon Judea’s accession to it, converting it into a marvelous census of “the whole earth.” Just as Luke exaggerates nearly everything in his texts—from unintelligible glossolalia becoming actually speaking real languages and mystical visions becoming a handling of risen corpses, to a darkness becoming an actual solar eclipse when the moon is on the wrong side of the earth; and so on. The reason Luke invents this census decree (other than just being lazy with his language—a lot) is to carry a consistent theme in his version of the Nativity that deliberately undermines Matthew’s version: whereas Matthew has the family of Jesus become outlaws, shirking Jewish and Judean law to run from the authorities, Luke has the family of Jesus obedient to even Roman law, even faithfully attending the temple every year according to Jewish custom, in no fear of the authorities. See: Robert Smith, “Caesar’s Decree (Luke 2:1-2): Puzzle or Key?” Currents in Theology and Mission 7:6 (December 1980), pp. 343-51; and Brad McAdon, Rhetorical Mimesis and the Mitigation of Early Christian Conflicts, Chapter 5.

Only the gullible don’t know when they are being played by a tale spinner. Which is why so many of the gullible are Christians. Like Shea.

Argument from “4 Out of 5 Unqualified Propagandists Say”

Shea then tries to recruit the authority of a bunch of scholars he names but never cites any work from:

…respected Scripture scholars such as Scott Hahn, Curtis Mitch, and Michael Barber…

By which he means: Catholic fundamentalist apologists. Hahn is a Catholic theologian, and wackadoo biblical literalist, with no degrees in history; his Ph.D. is in theology. Mitch is Hahn’s assistant at the same institute for biblical literalism, and he has no Ph.D. at all, just a masters, and only in theology. He has no degrees in history. Barber (surprise!) works for the exact same institute! Another Catholic literalist theologian with no degrees in history—though he at least developed a historical topic in his dissertation, so he’s sort of almost there. This prompted me to check Shea…yeah…he has no credentials whatever.

What I’d like to know, from the very guy pushing the importance of asking for documentation, is what peer reviewed publications is Shea referencing by Hahn et al.? God only knows. Or maybe Shea knows. I can’t tell.

Dropping these unqualified propagandists’ names, Shea then claims “new scholarship suggests there was indeed an enrollment around 2 or 3 B.C.,” and therefore the “census” Luke references, which all sources and evidence confirm happened in 6 A.D., must have instead happened in “2 or 3 B.C.” Shea also has to argue that Herod the Great, which all sources and evidence confirm died in 4 B.C., really died several years later, to get Matthew’s claim to still be true, that Jesus was born one to two years before that Herod died. But not only does Shea have to revise well-established historical fact twice, he also has to completely change the history of how Roman rank, status, governance, and administration worked.

Which starts to look fantastically pathetic.

But let’s get back to the specific con Shea tries to pull here. By “new scholarship,” he means new, made-up attempts by Christian fundamentalists to get around the facts. Shea’s argument from “wrong eclipse” is already refuted in HHBC, pp. 223-24 (section 1.6 of Ch. 13). It simply isn’t possible: all the evidence makes undeniably clear Herod was not alive during any eclipse after the year 4; and he definitely was alive right when the eclipse Josephus clearly means occurred. Which fixes his death to the year 4. Shea simply doesn’t mention any of this evidence refuting his claimed “new scholarship.” Likewise, the argument from “Luke confused a census with a fealty oath” is already refuted in HHBC, pp. 228-29 (section 1.7.5). It simply isn’t possible: Luke clearly did not say a fealty oath, but census; no fealty oath would have required travel, only a census sometimes could; and no fealty oath was conducted in that region then. Shea has confused completely unrelated events. Because he’s a gullible amateur who doesn’t check any facts.

Argument from “Medieval Doofs Say”

Shea’s attempt to lean on the testimony of Orosius is a classic example of doing really bad history: Orosius is a medieval, not ancient, historian; and he’s a fawning, gullible Christian apologist whose account of these events is garbled, anachronistic, full of implausible legends, and nearly ignorant of every relevant particular. He also cites no sources. You can see all this for yourself: just read Orosius, VI.22 and VII.2. (And that right there? That’s what citing sources looks like; you know, just FYI, Mr. “Ask for Documentation” Shea.)

Worse, though, Shea has misrepresented his source. Because Orosius does not quite say what Shea claims. This is the relevant passage in Orosius:

It was also in this year when God had deigned to assume the appearance and nature of man, that this same Caesar [i.e. Augustus], whom God had predestined for this great mystery, for the first time ordered a census to be taken of each and every province and that all men should be enrolled. In these days, then, Christ was born and His name was entered in the Roman census list immediately after His birth.

Total fiction, of course. There is no evidence Jesus was ever registered in any census, or even that anyone who cared to test that ever had access to check those records, much less in the 5th century. But the principal point here is: this is not an oath. Orosius very clearly means a census, one even a newborn baby would be registered in. (In case you didn’t know, babies can’t swear oaths.) And Orosius’s only source here is clearly…Luke! He’s just gullibly repeating what Luke says, indeed even further exaggerating Luke. He’s not fact-checking this in any fashion.

Orosius is such a doof, in fact, that he declares this made “it certain that [Jesus] was entitled to be called a Roman citizen according to the declaration made in the Roman census list,” not knowing that provincials were not given the citizenship back then. That innovation was instituted two hundred years later, by Caracalla in 212 A.D. By Orosius’s time two hundred years after that, it was just taken for granted that anyone born in the Empire was a citizen. But that actually was never the case before 212. And thus definitely not the case when Jesus was born. So Orosius foolishly, anachronistically assumes that this must have been true of Jesus. This tells you what an unreliable source he is. And also how easy it was for even a literate historian back then to totally fuck up the administrative history of Roman censuses.

But where does Shea get this nonsense about Orosius mentioning an oath? That’s in the entirely next chapter. Where Orosius says:

In the seven hundred and fifty-second year of the City [i.e. 2 B.C.], Christ was born and brought the religion that gives salvation to the world. He is in truth the rock, placed in the center of things. … He began His own sufferings as soon as He was brought into the world by the Virgin’s travail. For no sooner had Herod, king of Judea, learned of His birth than he resolved to slay Him and, while he was seeking out this one infant, had a great many infants put to death. … And after the Lord Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the world, had come to earth and had been enrolled in Caesar’s census as a Roman citizen, the gates of war were kept closed twelve years, as I have said, in the happy serenity of peace.

Note Orosius is just making all this up. He has no sources and doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. As even Wikipedia puts it:

The exact date of the third closure remains a matter of scholarly debate. The only ancient author to date it was Orosius,who associates the event with the birth of Christ, c. 1 BC. However, modern scholars almost universally reject Orosius because Roman armies were campaigning in Germany and/or the Far East elsewhere by 2 BC.

Indeed, there is no possible period of “twelve years of peace” Orosius can mean. Rome fought wars numerous times between the years 3 BC and 9 AD. But note again, Orosius clearly says Jesus was registered as a citizen in the census. Not an oath.

It’s in the paragraph just before that one where Orosius says this:

Toward the close of the forty-second year of [Augustus’s] imperial rule, I say, Christ was born, … [and] One peace reigned over the whole earth as a result of the fact that wars had not merely ceased but had been totally abolished. After the causes of war had been wholly removed rather than merely checked, the twin gates of Janus were closed. The first and greatest census was then made. The great nations of the whole world took an oath in the one name of Caesar and were joined into one fellowship through their participation in the census.

Note Orosius is once again just making stuff up. War was not abolished. Worse even, as Josephus records, the very attempt to conduct a census of Judea started a war! And Orosius clearly doesn’t know that censuses aren’t the same things as oaths, or that this wasn’t the first census—even of a province, much less at all. So we have no evidence here. Just a medieval Christian apologist making up anachronistic coincidences to glorify Jesus based on no sources. But once again, he still means a census. That he confusedly thought this census came with an oath does not change the fact that he is saying this was a census. And that’s what makes it impossible to get this to be an event in Judea or Galilee in 2 B.C. when neither was under Roman control at the time and thus neither would be taking Roman censuses or oaths. Orosius doesn’t even know that.

Agument from Maybe President Obama Became a Shift Manager at McDonalds

Shea then, having confused oaths with censuses and relied on hacks and amateurs who demonstrably don’t know jack about the historical facts, tries to argue that maybe Quirinius took a demotion, and Luke dated the census by naming a lowly governor’s property manager rather than the actual governor of Syria. Because that makes sense. Shea declares, “Luke does not call Quirinius a ‘governor’. He calls him hegemon or regional procurator (the same term he uses for Pontius Pilate).”

This is grossly erroneous.

First of all, procurator isn’t a government office at all (see Chapters 6-8 of HHBC). A procurator is a private business manager. And definitely not a position any Senator, much less a Proconsular Senator like Quirinius, would ever assume. Because it was so substantially beneath his social class. Only freedmen and equestrians took such positions—like, indeed, Pilate. But even if Shea has confused himself here and meant “Prefect,” which is at least an actual government office, that was also an office no Senator would ever take, as it was also far beneath their social station—akin to a Colonel just “deciding” to become a Sergeant; it’s not even possible.

Secondly, hegemon does not mean Prefect (and certainly not “regional procurator”). It simply means “ruler,” without respect to office. So no conclusions can be reached like this from that verb or noun. We know Pilate was not of Senatorial class and was not of sufficient rank to govern a province, hence he was governor of a district within a province, a subordinate to the provincial governor. Whereas Quirinius is stated to be ruling a province. Only men of Senatorial rank could do that; in fact, only a Senator of the highest achievable rank—which meant a Senator who had served as a Consul and thus could act in place of a current Consul as a Proconsul. Which rank we know from inscriptions Quirinius had been since 12 B.C. Hence the only position Luke could mean is Proconsul, what we mean by “governor” when we say Quirinius was a governor. Pilate was a Prefect, equivalent to a Sheriff with respect to a Governor in the American political system—except in the Roman system only upper class men could serve as Governors and only lower class men could serve as Sheriffs. Never the other way around.

Shea goes on to claim “Justin Martyr corroborates” what Shea is insisting on, “by noting that Quirinius was ‘procurator’ in Judea at the time of the enrollment mentioned in Luke 2 (First Apology, 34).” But this simply demonstrates Justin was ignorant, had no reliable sources, and didn’t understand even basic facts of Roman provincial government. Quirinius literally could not have been an epitropos. That Justin thinks he was, means Justin is unreliable, not a citeable source in the matter. Because, again, an epitropos was a private business manager, a lower-class position no Senator would ever hold. Foreign client kings could hold it, by virtue of being Roman citizens but not actually being of the Senatorial class; but Roman Senators, never. And Proconsular Senators, absolutely never.

So Shea is just ignorant when he tries to weasel out of the facts with statements like “it is entirely possible Luke is indicating Quirinius had some role as administrator of the Augustan census prior to his appointment as governor.” No. It is not possible at all. Any more than President Obama would become a shift manager at McDonalds. Besides being a thing Shea just totally made up based on no evidence whatever, this new speculation is again literally impossible. No such role would have been available to a man of Quirinius’s rank. He would only be conducting a census if he was a Proconsul, the governor of a province. And that is exactly what Luke says: he was governor of Syria. Not some assistant to someone else. And think this through. Please. Luke would not name the assistant anyway. He would name the governor.

Basically, what Shea is attempting here is a garbled conflation of the “sub-commander” and “co-commander” arguments refuted in HHBC, pp. 221-21 and pp. 222-23 (Sections 1.5.5 and 1.5.6). Quirinius cannot have been either. And Luke would mention neither.

The Argument from First Means Second

Shea then tries to argue Luke surely meant a census before 6 A.D. because he “specifically says that the Augustan enrollment was the ‘first’ enrollment, suggesting he is aware of Quirinius’ second census in A.D. 6.” But censuses had happened a dozen times before this one and after. Luke more likely means this was the first in Judea, which it was. This would have no relevance to whether Quirinius had before conducted censuses in other regions, but even if that’s what Luke meant, that would just mean Quirinius had previously or subsequently run a census in another province. How does that get us a different date for when Quirinius did this in Judea? It doesn’t. And even if somehow it could mean he conducted a census of Syria twice, and that’s extremely unlikely (no proconsul would ever have done so, nor ever did), that still doesn’t tell us the other census wasn’t in a later year.

This seems to be a garbled attempt at the argument from Lapis Venetus (HHBC, p. 220, Section 1.5.2), where an inscription confirming Quirinius took a census of Syria is mistaken as saying he did so in some other year.

Conclusion

That’s it. That’s the sum of Shea’s argument at Catholic Answers. Thus demonstrating that when you actually do what he asks, and actually check sources and documentation, you expose Christian apologetics for the fraud that it is. This is embarrassing. Christian organizations really ought to be policing this garbage. Because by revealing how arrogantly gullible its defenders are, they are making the faith look like a con. The fact is, Matthew and Luke place the year of Jesus’s birth ten years apart. They simply contradict each other. And no solution to this is possible, that doesn’t make a mockery of factual history.