Record few Americans believe in Biblical inerrancy.

[Minimalist]

Fair enough. So, let's note that a record of a Roman census in Egypt ~100 AD has been found which required people to go to their homes to register:

Oh, the Egypt canard.

A- You do understand that Egypt represented a special case in the entire Roman Imperial System, right?  Having been personally conquered by Octavius the entire province was considered the personal estate of the emperor.  Further, there is evidence of a Roman census taking there back as far as 33-34 AD and the speculation is that the Romans inherited the Ptolemaic census system.  Egypt, uniquely, had been taking a census of one sort or another since the Middle Kingdom which far predates your godboy.

Paul Cartledge,Peter Garnsey,Erich S. Gruen Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography (footnoted in Wiki.... it does not seem to be online.

B- In the Res Gestae Divi Augustus he specifically lists the lustra he has taken.  These were counts of Roman citizens (only).

8. When I was consul the fifth time (29 B.C.E.), I increased the number of patricians by order of the people and senate. I read the roll of the senate three times, and in my sixth consulate (28 B.C.E.) I made a census of the people with Marcus Agrippa as my colleague. I conducted a lustrum, after a forty-one year gap, in which lustrum were counted 4,063,000 heads of Roman citizens. Then again, with consular imperium I conducted a lustrum alone when Gaius Censorinus and Gaius Asinius were consuls (8 B.C.E.), in which lustrum were counted 4,233,000 heads of Roman citizens. And the third time, with consular imperium, I conducted a lustrum with my son Tiberius Caesar as colleague, when Sextus Pompeius and Sextus Appuleius were consuls (14 A.C.E.), in which lustrum were counted 4,937,000 of the heads of Roman citizens. By new laws passed with my sponsorship, I restored many traditions of the ancestors, which were falling into disuse in our age, and myself I handed on precedents of many things to be imitated in later generations.



http://classics.mit.edu/Augustus/deeds.html

C- When Vespasian and Titus conducted a lustrum in 73-74 it was still a count of Roman citizens.... in the aftermath of the Civil War useful information but not necessarily about taxation.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ui4lDw...20&f=false

D- Once again I have to remind you of your own fairy tales.  The author of "luke" (whoever it was) seems to have forgotten that Galilee at the alleged time of the nativity was under the rule of the client-king Herod Antipas.  Antipas paid tribute to Rome based on treaty obligations not direct taxation from Rome.  The notion that someone could be ordered to go from his home in the non-existent city of Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judaea which was then part of the newly-created Prefecture of Judaea is ludicrous.  The notion that the entire fucking world could be so ordered to journey to their home towns is preposterous!  Only some jackass who thinks these gospel stories are real could fall for it!


Now we do have some indications of "provincial" census-taking at scattered times, not the least of which was the order for Quirinius to undertake an accounting of Judaea upon its addition to the Province of Syria.  But a world-wide census?  Absurd.