For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[EGross]

Plus, depending on how you get the census working, it doesn't let the birth happen at 1CE, but a few years earlier or later. Here's a quote about that:

So why was this census even taken according to Matthew? Well, for one thing, Archelaus was so terrible, that even the Romans deposed him after two years of his reign in 6 CE, during the reign of Quirinius. Quirinius then decided to take an accounting of the Jews in his land. However, Luke, in verse 2:2, created a problem by asserting that the reason that Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem was because of the census commanded by Governor Quirinius. And if Governor Quirinius asked for that census in the year 6 CE, then how could Joseph and Mary be there for the census and the birth of their son? The result is that this contradiction provides us with a 12-year discrepancy. The discrepancy goes further since Matthew states that Jesus and his family moved to Egypt and spent some time there until Herod was dead and his son was the new ruler. So Jesus would have had to been born even earlier than 6 CE. This means that if Joseph and Mary were in town for the census, then Herod had already been dead for 10 years.

History gets messy in the gospels.

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So there is no history of Herod wiping out baby boys because he wasn't around at the time he was supposed to have killed them!