The confusion of dates, as given in Luke, proves that the writer was ignorant of the internal history of Judaea and the neighbouring provinces.  The birth of Jesus, according to Luke, must have taken place six months after the birth of John Baptist, and as John was born during the reign of Herod, Jesus must also have been born under the same King, or else at the commencement of the reign of Archelaus.  Yet Luke says that he was born during the census in Judaea, which, as we have seen just above, took place ten years later.  “The Evangelist, therefore, in order to get a census, must have conceived the condition of things such as they were after the deposition of Archelaus; but in order to get a census extending to Galilee, he must have imagined the kingdom to have continued undivided, as in the time of Herod the Great. [Strauss had explained that the reduction of the kingdom of Archelaus into a Roman province did not affect Galilee, which was still ruled by Herod Antipas as an allied prince, and that a census taken by the Roman Governor would, therefore, not extend to Galilee, and could not affect Joseph, who, living at Nazareth, would be the subject of Herod.  See, as illustrative of this, Luke xxiii. 6, 7.] Thus he deals in manifest contradictions; or, rather, he has an exceedingly sorry acquaintance with the political relations of that period; for he extends the census not only to the whole of Palestine, but also (which we must not forget) to the whole Roman world” (Strauss’s “Life of Jesus,” vol. i., p. 206).

After quoting one of the passages of Josephus referred to above, Dr. Giles says:  “There can be little doubt that this is the mission of Cyrenius which the Evangelist supposed to be the occasion of the visit of Christ’s parents to Bethlehem.  But such an error betrays on the part of the writer a great ignorance of the Jewish history, and of Jewish politics; for, if Christ was born in the reign of Herod the Great, no Roman census or enrolment could have taken place in the dominions of an independent King.  If, however, Christ was born in the year of the census, not only Herod the Great, but Archelaus, also, his son, was dead.  Nay, by no possibility can the two events be brought together; for even after the death of Archelaus, Judaea alone became a Roman province; Galilee was still governed by Herod Antipas as an independent prince, and Christ’s parents would not have been required to go out of their own country to Jerusalem, for the purpose of a census which did not comprise their own country, Galilee.  Besides which, it is notorious that the Roman census was taken from house to house, at the residence of each, and not at the birth-place or family rendezvous of each tribe” ("Christian Records,” pp. 120, 121).  Another “striking witness to the late composition of the Gospels is furnished by expressions, denoting ideas that could not have had any being in the time of Christ and his disciples, but must have been developed afterwards, at a time when the Christian religion