<html>
Dear Pat,<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 <i>The Rise of Christianity
</i>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."<br><br>
Just another Moscow Banshee luxuriating in his little box of
intelligibility,<br><br>
Nick Gier<br>
</html>