Shawn Ryan

Herod died in 4 BC.

So that's a 10-year gap.

Herod died, and then 10 years later, Quirinius becomes governor, and the census brings Mary and Joseph to Beth.

It doesn't make sense.

It doesn't add up.

Something's wrong.

And people would criticize Luke and said, you don't know what you're talking about.

Well, turns out, as usual, Luke was right in the first place.

Because the verse can be translated, the census took place before Quirinius was governor.

So that would account for an earlier census.

There were two censuses.

The one when he became governor became famous.

It was written by a lot of historians because the Jewish people rebelled against it.

And there were a lot of conflicts and so forth.

And so that census became famous.

But there was apparently an earlier census

that didn't get that much, nobody cared about it because nobody rebelled, and that was the one that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.

But there was a recent discovery by a Swiss scholar where she found that a guy named Justin Martyr, who was a very early Christian defender of the faith, who said that Quirinius was the procurator at the time of the census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.

A procurator is someone under the governor who would actually run a census.

What's interesting is, in the Gospel of Luke, where it says that the census took place when Quirinius was governor, the word governor there is not the typical word you would use for governor.