Record few Americans believe in Biblical inerrancy.

[John V]

If it was so absurd, why did people bother copying it and passing it around?

We see it as absurd. Christians, at the time, did not. But that's to be expected, given that it was hard to verify/falsify the contents of the manuscripts (especially in the absence of today's technology) since they were written decades after the fact, being circulated to people separated from the events described in the Gospels due to geographical and/or time distances.

So people 80 - 100 years from the supposed events thought the census details were plausible, but after 1,900 years of lost records, we now know better. Got it.