The census in Luke 2: using Josephus to make sense of Luke’s irreconcilable chronology.

Luke’s reference to the census administered by Quirinius presents a difficulty to historians, as it places Jesus’s birth ten years later than the synchronisms in Luke 1 and 3 indicate. Because the Lukan narratives sometimes exhibit flexibility with respect to historical chronology (e.g., Acts 5:35–37), it is possible to read the census as signaling something other than the date of Jesus’s birth. I argue that, for an audience familiar with Josephus’s treatment of Judas the Galilean in book 18 of Jewish Antiquities, the alignment of Jesus’s birth with Quirinius’s census can be understood as signaling the Lukan Jesus’s association with the destruction of Jerusalem.