And that’s the point. People are projecting their modern expectations and biases on Luke, who lived in a different time and culture than ours. It is very difficult to fix ancient dates for a number of reasons; one is because the ancient world did not have a uniform calendar, with the result that people express time periods in diverse ways. Take another example from Luke and Josephus (
Antiquities 17.481):
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
This calamity [Herod the Great’s capture of Jerusalem and execution of Antigonus] befell the city of Jerusalem during the consulship at Rome of Marcus Agrippa and Caninius Gallus, in the hundred and twenty-fifth Olympiad, in the third month, on the day of the Fast, as if it were a recurrence of the misfortune which came upon the Jews in the time of Pompey, for they were captured by Sossius on the very same day, twenty-seven years later.
It would have been easier for Luke or Josephus to just have said “In the year 29” or “around 37 BC” like we do, but ancient authors who wrote in Greek for an empire-wide audience did not have this option. They had to refer to several markers of time; the event in question happened when several events overlapped. It is hard enough as it is for us now, but the lack of a common calendar meant that ancient historians, who were accustomed to their own way of dating, had a harder time than we do in recording and remembering dates. They also had few ‘fallbacks’: they did not have newspapers or Wikipedia or Google.
Note that Luke speaks of “the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.” In reality, however, there could only be one high priest at a time, not to mention that at least three persons held the position in between the high priesthoods of Annas, aka Ananus (6-15) and Caiaphas (18-36): Ishmael ben Fabus (15-16), Eleazar ben Ananus (16-17), and Simon ben Camithus (17-18), according to Josephus. We can commend Luke in that at least he knows the names of the two most influential and longest-serving high priests of the period. Josephus’ quotation is even more problematic, and scholars have devoted equally long amounts of time in trying to resolve them (
Emil Schürer required at least two pages of fine print in his
History of the Jewish People on this issue alone!). The problem with Josephus, to summarize, is that a study of all the evidence about the conquests of Jerusalem by Pompey and Herod makes it virtually impossible to believe that Herod’s conquest took place twenty-seven years to the day after Pompey’s. It is much more easier to believe that Josephus simply liked dating calamities on the same day as some previous disaster (cf. also
War 6.250, where Josephus claims that the destruction of Jerusalem on 70 fell on the same day as the one in 587 BC! Note however that this literary license is not unique to Josephus).
I think sometimes that many scholars are themselves ‘inerrantists’: they pick on a passage in Josephus or the NT and assume it as a sort of a modern encyclopedia article, supposing that one got it totally right while the others are completely wrong. We cannot get at something by just deciding dogmatically that this sentence is telling the unvarnished truth while the following sentence is utter fiction: the ‘truth’ will usually lie somewhere in between. Ancient history is very difficult and is something that requires both common sense and a good feel for sources.
) The problem is, this could very well be an instance of Johannine dramatic irony, where the audience sees on two levels. First, the audience ‘knows’ that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but they also (and more importantly for John) ‘know’ that Jesus’ true origins do not lie in earthly places like the Galilee or Bethlehem, but in Heaven (cf. John 1:1).
