[Vision2020] Mary and her Donkey

[Nick Gier]

Dear Pat,

There they go again: Pat & Co. assuming that any criticism of conservative 
Christianity must be coming from evil atheists.  For the record I am a 
theist, not an orthodox one, primarily because heresy is always more fun, 
enlightening, and usually more true.  If we do theology and don't abide by 
the rules of logic and the canons of evidence, then gibberish is the 
result.  If that means we put God in a box, then so much the better for 
logical boxes.  For one, it would lead to better election results.

God did not have to put Mary on a donkey, Pat, Joseph could have easily 
done it himself.  But my point was that the trip was not necessary.  The 
Romans sent officials from village to village to make property tax 
assessments.  Joseph would have been required to stay in Nazareth or he 
would have faced severe penalties.  One in the crowd at the Feast of 
Tabernacles implies that Jesus cannot be the Messiah because he comes from 
Galilee and not Bethlehem (John 7.41), yet another Messianic expectation 
that Jesus did not meet. The deeper implication is that the authors of John 
either did not know of Luke's story or they rejected it as unhistorical.

Even if Joseph were somehow required to return to ancestral land in 
Bethlehem, it was not necessary to take Mary with him.  But the whole idea 
is a fantastic one.  In The Rise of Christianity the former Bishop E. W. 
Barnes remarks:  "The Romans were a practical race, skilled in the art of 
government.  It is incredible that they should have taken a census 
according to such a fantastic system. [returning everyone to their 
ancestral lands] If any such census had been taken, the dislocation to 
which it would have led would have been world-wide.  Roman historians would 
not have failed to record it."

Just another Moscow Banshee luxuriating in his little box of intelligibility,

Nick Gier
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