Debunking the Nativity: Ancestral Maths

As I have pointed out numerous times, the census as claimed in the Gospel of Luke, is simply incoherent.  I have given out a challenge to one of the commenters here. Here is my challenge in the form of statements that the apologist has to address:

1. A client kingdom has never been taxed directly or had such censuses in the history of the Roman Empire.
2. When Herod was alive it was a client kingdom.
3. When he died, his son took over for 10 years, made a mess, and Romans took back direct control.
4. When they did, they held a census for tax reasons due to having a newly added directly ruled region.
5. There is no example in the history of censuses in the entire world of people returning to their ancestral home.
6. There is no need for anyone to return to their ancestral home for reasons of tax since this defeat the entire reason for having a census for tax purposes. People would necessarily move out of tax regions to other areas and so you would have no idea of the taxable value of a given region.
7. One Egyptian census required ITINERANT/MIGRANT workers to return to their ACTUAL homes for reasons of tax pragmatism. This is in no way analogous to the Lukan census. Going back to my actual home is different to going back to where an ancestor lived 41 generations past, no matter where it was.
8. The Lukan census required Joseph to return to his ancestral home of 41 generations past, no more, no less.
9. This would have been impossible and utterly arbitrary for everyone to know their 41 generations past ancestors (I don’t know 3 past).
10. This would also mean the whole of Judea could connect themselves to David.
11. Not one single human being in the world of apologetics, or the world, has provided a reason, let alone a good one, why people should return to their ancestral homes for a tax census (let alone at 41 generations past).
12. There would be a month where virtually no one would be able to work. Who would be looking after households as the whole country moved around to their ancestral homes? This would be economic suicide thus negating the whole point of a tax census, losing Romans valuable taxable money.
13. Women were not required at censuses.
14. Bethlehem is a different tax area to Nazareth.

I could go on. You get the idea.

The thing is, no apologist has actually ever explained the census satisfactorily, so the apologist, and the Christian commenters here, has his work cut out for them.

All this and more is discussed in my book The Nativity: A Critical Examination.

JohnM, a creationist commenter, has been involved in a thread where he has scatter-gunned lots of attempted harmonisations. The biggest problem is that he is simply regurgitating a huge amount of long-debunked claims. It's annoying because I have to spend a lot of time dealing with them so he doesn't think that he is actually right. He is very wrong, but refuses to do any background reading to find out why he his wrong. He will happily shove out apologist points that do not stand.

One of the problems with trying to claim Luke's census works is the simple point that it is utterly implausible, nay, impossible (or just totally nonsensical, mayhap).

Luke said:

Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, ⁵ in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child.

Forgetting the whole issue with the fact that women were not required to register for Roman tax censuses (see my comment here), we have the house and family of David.

Now, according to Luke, Joseph is 41 generations removed from David, to whose town he supposedly must return. JohnM tries to claim that the two genealogical discrepancies (that Luke provides a different and wildly longer lineage than Matthew) by claiming that the Lukan lineage is matrilineal, through Mary. He tried this a couple of years ago but seems to forget I thoroughly debunked this here. There's one thing that annoys me here at ATP and it is people who bang on about a point without recourse to already provided refutations - not even with reference in any way. It wastes my time. This is an example. Anyway, Luke, who has the census, has a 41 generational line from David to Joseph. Matthew, nearly half as much.

For the main purposes of this piece, I will grant JohnM's attempted harmonisation of the genealogies - it doesn't work and I do not ordinarily grant it. But I don't want him to be able to sidetrack this point, so he can have 20, as he claims. Even though he can't count his own source, and it is about 27/28 generations (and includes a childless passing of title, and so it's not even a bloodline according to his own source!!). Check his source here.

My point is this: the number of ancestors doubles as you go back each generation. So, in 20 generations, you will have some 2 million ancestors. 40 odd generations insanely more. Now, relatives will crossover to cut this number down in real terms. But that is neither here nor there. If any Israelite was to track their bloodline (which, according to the Matthean genealogy, fails to be a bloodline at Salathiel, as mentioned) back this many generations, several things are apparent:

1. All Israelites would be able to track themselves back to David. Literally the whole of Judea would be going to Bethlehem.
2. The choice of 41/20/27 generations is arbitrary and looks like a retrofitting of allowing Joseph to be connected to David. Why not 19, so he would have to go somewhere else? Or 4? Or 36? The choice is arbitrary (or highly contrived!).
3. Not only is the generational number arbitrary, but the choice of ancestor is. And this is even more forceful than the previous terminal point. In strict mathematical terms, in 20 generations, Joseph would have 2 million ancestors. Let's assume crossover brings it down to something I am randomly choosing - 100,000. Anything over 1 makes exactly the same point about arbitrariness. What, in reality, allows Joseph to either:
   1. know that many ancestors? I know you can track back your bloodline 20 generations, but this usually arbitrarily chooses one particular parent at any given level (or several) to get to a rather arbitrary starting point.
   2. choose David over and above 99,999 other ancestors. Okay, so he's related to David. But also 99,999 other people at the same generational level. So what is the criterion for choosing which ancestor's hometown you go to?

These two points about arbitrary choices - generational choice and ancestral choice - are, for me, terminal for the whole census case. Not only is it impossible to fathom a meaningful choice for any individual going to the census, but it offers absolutely no pragmatic value to the people giving the census.

Complete and utter nonsense that JohnM and any other apologist must deal with. There is no point in dealing with the plethora of other attempted defences he has scattered about until he deals with these. He can't because absolutely no sense can be made of it. Luke was shoehorning a way of getting Jesus of Nazareth to be born in Bethlehem to fulfil a misinterpreted prophecy.

Maths + Bible = problem.