Shawn Ryan

It's pretty elastic in the Greek, and it could very well mean procurator.

And so what apparently happened is that this guy, Quirinius, when he was procurator, was assigned to run a census to have all people return to their hometown to be counted.

And so Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem.

And then later, he was elevated to governor.

And then he did another census in 6 AD, and that's the one that got all the publicity.

So they went to Bethlehem because Quirinius, the procurator, issued a decree saying that everyone had to go to their hometown.

Now, you may think that's weird.

Everybody's got to go to their hometown to be counted.

And yet we have documents from other censuses that say the same thing.

I guess this is pre-internet.

It was pre-internet.

That's right.

That's right.

So we have a document from the year 108 all the way over in Egypt.

And it talks about, hey, you got to go to your hometown to be counted.

And this would make sense that this would have a census at that time because Herod was having some conflict with his higher-ups.

And it would have been a good time.

And Herod was sick.

He was having health problems.

Would have been a good time to get a good census before he passed away.