This cannot be accepted as historical for the following reasons:
1. Caesar Augustus never issued a decree that all the world should be taxed, nor even one that all the Roman world should be taxed.
2. If he had issued such a decree Joseph and Mary would not have been subject to taxation, because they lived in Galilee, an independent province.
3. Had they been subject to taxation they would have been enrolled in their own country and not in some distant kingdom.
4. Cyrenius did not become governor of Syria until nearly ten years after the death of Herod, and Jesus was born, it is claimed, in the days of Herod.
10.
“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under” (Matt. ii, 16).
The statement that Herod the Great, who was firmly established in his government, and who had full-grown male heirs to succeed him, was afraid that the babe of an obscure Nazareth carpenter would supplant him in his kingdom, is enough to cause a Covenanter to laugh on Sunday. Had Herod issued such a decree his friends, instead of executing it, would have had him confined in a madhouse. The fact that the Roman and Jewish historians of that age—one of whom, an enemy, gives a full and complete record of his life—know nothing of this awful tragedy, that an anonymous author writing nearly two centuries afterward is the only one who mentions it, is of itself sufficient to brand it as an atrocious falsehood.