Tom Wright (3:33)

Tom Holland has done a great deal, and as I think you. I'm not sure if you explained this time around, but this Tom Holland is Tom Holland the historian.

Mike Bird (3:41)

No, Spider Man.

Tom Wright (3:42)

Yes, not Spider Man. This is the Tom Holland who's written books about the Roman Empire and about the rise of Islam and all sorts of other things. He's an amazing historian and a delightful man. I've met him on numerous occasions. Indeed, in a previous version of this show, he and I once did a dialogue which was very exciting. And he's a good conversation partner. And I, I think, deeply sympathetic to practicing Christianity, though I think. I think he holds off from being too explicit about it. I don't think he wants to become a Christian celebrity, which. There's a danger of people being sort of taken over. Oh, look, we've got a. A new sort of a new symbol. And I don't think he wants that.

Mike Bird (4:24)

I call that Cliff Richard syndrome.

Tom Wright (4:26)

Well, yeah, yeah, possibly, possibly. But, yeah. So I have that same great respect for him. And particularly he knows what the first century Roman Empire was like and the first three centuries of Roman Empire. And it's a pretty ugly, murky world.

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Tom Wright (4:43)

And it's not difficult for him to contrast that with what happens when Christian civilization actually takes over and says, do you know what? The death penalty isn't such a good idea after all. Do you know what we shouldn't be treating, after all, et cetera, et cetera. And how that then actually changes the way people think. Even if they reject the message of Jesus, there's nevertheless a kind of a moral climate change now that can change back, like the weather. But Tom Holland has tracked that. And like you, I'm very grateful, Tim, for doing that.

Mike Bird (5:17)

Yeah, it's great work. So we've got two questions about Tom Holland and his view on Jesus. And this is stuff he's mentioned in books or his own Podcast the Rest Is History Our first question is from Ben, as I mentioned, who says hi Tom, love the podcast. I recently listened back to the Rest Is History show on Jesus Christ in 22nd of December 2022. Tom Holland says it's very unlikely Jesus would have been born in Bethlehem. This is because his father was not a Roman subject and would not have needed to pay tax and that the Romans wouldn't care that he was descended from King David. And it's highly unlikely huge amounts of people would have been moving around from the census. He wants to know what is your response to this? And then our second question is from Sheila and this is similar in a YouTube series on Jesus. All the Rest Is History with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Tom claims it would have never have happened that a census would have required people to go back to their city of family origin. Therefore the part of the story requiring Joseph and Mary to journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem couldn't be true. If that's not true, then the escape to Egypt probably isn't. The shepherds hearing from the angels that visit the wise men. Herod killing the infant boys wouldn't be true either. Tom Holland claims Herod died four years before the birth of Jesus and Quirinius wasn't gava until eight years after his birth. So put these two figures in the story of the birth of Jesus just can't be possible. And Tom Holland says in the very beginning of his second YouTube talk about Jesus. And then she goes on to talk about, you know, how do we take other parts of the Bible seriously? And then finishes by saying, what do you think of Tom's perspective? And if those elements of the story of Jesus are not historically accurate and so why do you think they are in scripture? So somewhat elongated explanation, but two questions posed by Tom Holland who says there are some historical problems apparently with the birth story of Jesus. And Tom, you and I both know that many scholars would argue that the story of Jesus birth was fabricated just to put Jesus in Bethlehem so he can be the alleged fulfillment of prophecy where Micah says that, you know, a new son of David would be born in Bethlehem. Tom, what do you have to say? I mean, what would you say to Tom Holland on this in a way that would satisfy both Ben and Shelah?

Tom Wright (7:50)

Right. I think there's a big general point and then there's one very specific. The big general point is that as Tom Holland knows perfectly well and as you and I know in ancient history, we are actually quite short of hard facts of hard data. I often compare jokingly with my oldest son, who's a historian of 19th century France particularly, he has enough source material to spend his entire life studying. One year, say 1849 in Paris.

Mike Bird (8:19)

1848 would be better.

Tom Wright (8:21)

Age 48, 9. That whole period, you know what I mean? There's so many sources, you're drowning in material. Whereas you and I, as ancient historians, there are whole stretches of a decade maybe where we know almost nothing of what was going on in Turkey or Greece.

Mike Bird (8:38)

Like half an inscription available or something.

Tom Wright (8:40)

Exactly, exactly. And ancient history in general is full of such gaps. And historians have hypothesized that maybe this or possibly that, or it could be the other. And I remember when I was doing ancient Greek history where there was a question about the Messenian War, when the Sparta and Messenia, and was there a first Messenian war? Was there a second Messenian war? And the only evidence for that was one bronze water bucket which was found, which had a different uniform being worn by the soldiers. And they dated it and said, ah, this means that there was a second war where they wore this uniform rather than that. This is the sort of stock in trade for ancient history. And so I will say I don't think we know as much about how censuses were carried out in different parts of the empire as your two correspondents make out. It is possible that the evidence we currently have about censuses in the empire implied that people didn't have to move about. We don't know for sure that Joseph wouldn't have been classified in some sense as a Roman subject, and we don't know for sure that he wouldn't have been required to go back to his place of origin or whatever. Those are things which maybe the balance of probability currently goes one way, but it could shift easily. I have in mind, I mean, as an example of how this happens, for years and years people used to say confidently that we could tell that the book of Acts was unhistorical because for instance, In Acts chapter 18, verse 12, it says, When Gallio was pro consul of Achaea, people say, well, Gallio was never pro consul of Achaia. What a silly idea. Clearly Luke doesn't know what he's talking about. And guess what? An inscription turned up which has Gallio, relative of Seneca, as proconsul in Achaea. And what's more, we can date it so that suddenly the thing which was very dubious becomes one of the linchpins of New Testament chronology. And I've lived long enough as a New Testament scholar to see that happen again and again where people say, oh, Paul just got this wrong, or Paul just had hiccups when he was writing this bit. And then actually people realize there's something else going on and Paul has said exactly what he meant and it makes sense and those shifts have happened. So I'm not saying that I've got copper bottomed evidence that there was a traveling census, as it were, and people had to go to different places. I don't have that sort of evidence. But I want to say be careful with ancient history, cause it doesn't work like that. I remember one time being phoned up by a television station saying, coming up to Christmas, our producer wants to have a scholar come and say that probably the wise men didn't happen and probably the shepherds is fictitious and blah blah, blah. And I said to the researcher who'd phoned me, supposing I were to say that actually people in what we now call Iran or whatever did study the stars a lot and they did read into all sorts of things, interesting messages about royalty, et cetera, and it's perfectly plausible. And there was a pause and then the researcher said, I don't think that's what our producer wanted to hear. And I just put the phone down. Thank you very much, Goodbye. I mean, people love to tell them the story of how the things that.

Mike Bird (11:57)

You'Re liable, the real story of Christmas.

Tom Wright (11:59)

The things that you're liable to read in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so. And I want to say over my lifetime I've seen many people say that confidently and again and again proved wrong. Now so that's the general point which makes me anxious about being too secure, as though we can prove a negative. The much more specific point is about Quirinius being governor of Syria and how that relates to the date of the census. And here we're talking about the Jewish historian Josephus, from whom we have quite a lot of information about this period. Josephus seems to have had access to records from the court of Herod the Great, from Nicholas of Damascus. And so the question then is about a translation of Luke, chapter two, verse two. And this hinges on a Greek word, prote, the word from which we get protological. It's a Greek word which means first or before. And as an adjective it regularly means protos or Proteus. The feminine form means something before something else. In John 1, John the Baptist says this, Jesus is the one who ranks, who comes after me, because he was before me, and it's Protos Mu before me. In the Genitive there. And so the normal translation of Luke 2, 2 is this was the first census when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Reading that last phrase as an absolute phrase, giving you a. But that's not actually the natural meaning of the Greek. The natural meaning of the Greek is this census was before the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria. In other words, Luke knows perfectly well there was a big census under Quirinius. And the reason we know about that was there was a massive riot, there was a revolution and hundreds of young Judeans were crucified because they were rebelling against Rome.

Mike Bird (13:57)

Census is about. About taxation.

Tom Wright (13:59)

Exactly.

Mike Bird (13:59)

So they want to count the numbers so they can tax.

Tom Wright (14:01)

And taxation is also about symbolically, Rome is king here and your God isn't king. I mean, so this is very sensitive stuff, but I think Luke knows perfectly well that this census was before that big one that you've all heard of, so that it's then purely a matter of translation. And yes, the Greek could be read either way, but I think it's more plausible simply in terms of the Greek structure. I've actually slightly hedged my bets in my own translation, because I've got it both. I've said this was the first census before the one when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And it seems to me that's a perfectly plausible and I would argue, preferable reading of the Greek. Now, from the misreading of that verse, people have built out, as your correspondent. Our correspondent has to say, well, if Luke was wrong about the census, then presumably we lose the shepherds and presumably we don't get the flight into Egypt. That's Matthew, not Luke, by the way, and so on. I want to say most things in ancient history are things which are recorded in one source and one source only. If you take Herodotus away, we know almost nothing about Athens until the time of Thucydides. If you take Thucydides away, we don't know very much about the Peloponnesian War. You don't have to have three or four or five sources. It's nice if you do, but actually, most things in ancient history, there is one mention. And a lot of what happens in history was unpredictable and unlikely. If you'd said, would something like this happen, Debussy? That sort of thing doesn't happen. But then in history, often things that are unlikely do happen. And so I want to say just back off. Let's not be too secure in our agnosticism at this point.

Mike Bird (15:51)

Yeah, I mean, that's great. Tom and I think that those translation issues definitely need more attention than what people realize. I do kind of acknowledge the questions that people are raising, like a worldwide census. When exactly was Quirinius governor, you know, would Joseph had to do this? But this is what swayed my thinking on this. First, that passage from Micah about the Messiah being or a new David being born in Bethlehem, that was not one of the main messianic texts. True, it wasn't. So if it was, everyone would have been bringing their son to be born in Bethlehem, so he might be the Messiah. So this was somewhat of an outlier. It wasn't the messianic text per excellence. There were others in Genesis like one from Judah will rise over to rule the nations, another text from Numbers, the star of David. Those were the big messianic texts. The passage in Micah was not the one. So there was no need to have Jesus born in Bethlehem.

Tom Wright (16:57)

That's very similar to the point which is often made about the text from Isaiah 7 about the young woman or the virgin, which, I mean, you can search through Qumran and elsewhere in the Messianic texts and nobody is saying, by the way, when the Messiah comes, you'll have to be born of a virgin. This is quite a new thing. Likewise with the text from 2 Samuel 7 about I will raise up your seed after you. The early Christians say, there you are. Jesus, who we believe to be Messiah, was raised from the dead. But nobody prior to Jesus had read that text in that way. They weren't saying, well, when the Messiah comes, he will of course be raised from the dead. Hebrew is I will resurrect your seed. But they hadn't read it that way. So when we see the early Christians then saying, oh my goodness, what about this? It's not that they're standing in a well marked tradition like that.

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Mike Bird (19:27)

The other thing I would add is we can question like a worldwide census, but it may have been a worldwide rolling census, because getting everyone in the world right now go back to where you were born might sound. That is a bit weird. That is a bit weird. But we know two things. Augustus the emperor did express a lot of zeal to fiscally reform the empire. Okay, so he did have a lot of people like procurators around the place and other, you know, representatives who were doing fiscal reforms. And the idea that you would need to return to your hometown to register your, you know, your kind of either claims on property or things you're going to inherit, that is known in antiquity. In fact, we. I think we have some papyri. I don't have the details, but there's papyri of people who had to go and register their ownership of certain properties for census or taxation purposes. So again, it's not like out of left field that someone would have to go to their hometown to register claims on property or some sort of, you know, body of land that they're going to inherit. They're the things I tend to think about when we come across. I mean, I admit it's a difficult passage. It's one of those things like, oh, if we just had one more piece of papyri or found some letter saying, gosh, I hate this stupid census. I wish I didn't have to pay it. That'd be great. So I'm a little bit more optimistic about the historical background on this. And when it comes to Herod's Massacre of the innocents, no, we don't have any external attestation. But there's an interesting story in Josephus, Herod the Great, when he died, he wanted a bunch of all the nobles brought to an Arena. And he wanted a bunch of them to be killed off just to make sure when he died, people really were mourning.

Tom Wright (21:30)

There was lots of weeping and wailing around the time. Funeral. Yeah. Fortunately, the order was rescinded after his death.

Mike Bird (21:36)

Exactly.

Tom Wright (21:36)

But in other words, the story about Herod and the babies is totally in character. This is a man who killed his own wives, his own sons, because he suspected them of plotting against.

Mike Bird (21:47)

Well, did you know the Roman joke about Herod?

Tom Wright (21:48)

The Roman joke that it was better to be a Herod's. Herod's pig than his son.

Mike Bird (21:53)

Yeah. Because you've got the. The word for hus. The word for pig is hus. And the Greek word for son is who he is.

Tom Wright (22:00)

Yes.

Mike Bird (22:00)

So better to be his husband, us than is Julios.

Tom Wright (22:03)

Yes.

Mike Bird (22:04)

Because he killed a bunch of his sons, but because he's Jewish, he wouldn't kill a pig and he'd eat pork. So it's. It's kind of. Again, that's the kind of guy he was. So the massacre of the incense, we don't have any external reports on it. It does make him look a bit as a. Like a new pharaoh, but, you know, it was. It was not out of character for him.

Tom Wright (22:25)

Thoroughly plausible. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Bird (22:26)

So, yeah, I would like to push back on this and a number of scholars have said we should maybe rethink the history of the birth narratives. And I think here of a German scholar, Sabine Huppter, she's a historian of antiquity, but I think she's run a few essays on the birth narratives. Again, I can't remember the precise details, but it was kind of like, you know, maybe you should rethink a few aspects. I mean, she wasn't doing like a New Testament apologetics thing, but she was just raising some questions about some of the standard ways of articulating.

Tom Wright (23:00)

I think there's another issue for you that certainly when I was growing up, so much was made when people were debating can we really believe the creed? It was all about the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection. Those were the two things. Can we really believe these? And if you can only believe one of them, are you still allowed to be a Christian? And all that sort of thing. So more attention was focused in the debates between sort of older liberals and nervous conservatives. In the days of my Youth, on Matthew 1 and 2 and Luke 1 and 2, than was really warranted. And often this was to the detriment of any focus on the rest of the Gospels. It was about the inauguration of the kingdom of God and it was as Though if you can only undermine this, the whole of creedal Christianity will fall down. And I've often pointed out to people, you can take away four chapters from the New Testament and there's nothing left about the virginal conception of Jesus. That's Matthew 1 and 2, Luke 1 and 2. But if you try to take the resurrection out of the New Testament, there is nothing left, period. That's all gone. So there's been an over concentration on the birth narratives simply because the virginal conception functioned as a test case of whether people really believed in the miraculous or not. And that got bundled up with older debates about deism and whether Jesus really was the divine Son of God and all that sort of thing. So I think, think the context within which the controversies about the birth narratives have happened has itself skewed the whole thing in favor of, oh, we'd better be skeptical about this because otherwise we'll look like silly fundamentalists.

Mike Bird (24:42)

Well, this is what I've tended to say, that the virgin conception is a clarification of Jesus's divine sonship. It's not the basis of divine sonship, which means that the virgin conception, virgin birth is a biblical doctrine, but it has relative importance compared to other doctrines like Jesus as the one who brings the kingdom and the resurrection. Just hear me. I said it's a biblical doctrine. I did not deny it. Just for the people in the YouTube comments section. Just please remember that this has been fun because I love Tom Holland. I love his books, Dominion, Rubicon packs and everything. So it's good to engage Tom Holland on this topic during Advent about the birth of Jesus. And Tom's a stimulating figure. He's wrestling with the sources, wrestling with the history in the New Testament. And I guess we've certainly had fun engaging him. I need to think. I wonder if there are any other things that Tom Holland or Dominic Sambrook has said on the Rest Is History that people may have questions about? Because a lot of my friends listen to this podcast, but they listen to several other ones as well, such as the Rest is History. So maybe, maybe we'll get some other questions generated by Tom in the future and you know, maybe, maybe it's even time we, we tried to pursue them in the podcast ratings. Tom, maybe we could climb our way up towards them. Who knows?

Tom Wright (26:08)

We'll see.

Mike Bird (26:09)

Anyway, well, it's goodbye from me, Mike.

Tom Wright (26:11)

Bird, and goodbye from me, Tom Wright.

Mike Bird (26:13)

And we'll see you on the next episode of Ask NT Wright. Anything.

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