Note 17 — Chapter IV · BIRTH AND EARLIEST EVENTS OF THE LIFE OF JESUS.

Yet commentators have supposed it possible to reconcile this apparently undeniable contradiction between Luke and history. The most dauntless explain the whole of the second verse as a gloss, which was early incorporated into the text.17 Some change the reading of the verse; either of the nomen proprium, by substituting the name of Saturninus or Quintilius,18 according to the example of Tertullian, who ascribed the census to the former19; or of the other words, by various additions and modifications. Paulus’s alteration is the most simple. He reads, instead of αὕτη, αὐτὴ, and concludes, from the reasons stated above, that Augustus actually gave orders for a census during the reign of Herod I., and that the order was so far carried out as to occasion the journey of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem; but that Augustus being afterwards conciliated, the measure was abandoned, and αὐτὴ ἡ ἀπογραφὴ was only carried into effect a considerable time later, by Quirinus. Trifling as this alteration, which leaves the letters unchanged, may appear, in order to render it admissible it must be supported by the context. The reverse, however, is the fact. For if one sentence narrates a command issued by a prince, and the very next sentence its execution, it is not probable that a space of ten years intervened. But chiefly, according to this view the Evangelist speaks, verse 1, of the decree of the emperor; verse 2, of the census made ten years later; but verse 3, without any remark, again of a journey performed at the time the command was issued; which, in a rational narrative, is impossible. Opposed to such arbitrary conjectures, and always to be ranked above them, are the attempts to solve a difficulty by legitimate methods of interpretation. Truly, however, to take πρώτη in this connexion for προτέρα, and ἡγεμονεύοντος Κ. not for a genitive absolute, but for a genitive governed by a comparative, and thus to understand an enrolment before that of Quirinus,20 is to do violence to grammatical construction; and to insert πρὸ τῆς after πρώτη21 is is no less uncritical. As little is it to be admitted that some preliminary measure, in which Quirinus was not employed, perhaps the already mentioned oath of allegiance, took place during the lifetime of Herod, in reference to the census subsequently made by Quirinus; and that this preliminary step and the census were afterwards comprised under the same name. In order in some degree to account for this appellation, Quirinus is said to have been sent into Judea, in Herod’s time, as an extraordinary tax-commissioner22; but this interpretation of the word ἡγεμονεύοντος is rendered impossible by the addition of the word Συρίας, in combination with which the expression can denote only the Præses Syriæ.