The Case For Christ

it in very small writing, or what we call 'micrographic' letters.
This Places him as proconsul of Syria and Cilicia from 11 B.C.
until after the death of Herod."
I was confused. "What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means that there were apparently two Quiriniuses," he
replied. "It's not uncommon to have lots of people with the same
Roman names, so there's no reason to doubt that there were two
people by the name of Quirinius. The census would have taken
place under the reign of the earlier Quirinius. Given the cycle
of a census every fourteen years, that would work out quite
well."
This sounded a bit speculative to me, but rather than bog down
this conversation, I decided to mentally file this issue away for
further analysis later.
When I did some additional research, I found that Sir William
Ramsay, the late archaeologist and professor at both Oxford and
Cambridge Universities in England, had come up with a similar
theory. He concluded from various inscriptions that while there
was only one Quirinius, he ruled Syria on two separate occasions,
which would cover the time period of the earlier census.
Other scholars have pointed out that Luke's text can be
translated, "This census took place before Quirinius was
governing Syria," which would also resolve the problem.
The matter was not as precisely pinned down as I would like.
However, I had to admit that McRay and others had offered some
plausible explanations. I could conclude with confidence that
censuses were held during the time frame of Jesus' birth and
that there is evidence people were indeed required to return to
their hometowns-which I still thought was odd!
PUZZLE 2: EXISTENCE OF NAZARETH
Many Christians are unaware that skeptics have been asserting for
a long time that Nazareth never existed during the time when the
New Testament says Jesus spent his childhood there.
n an article called "Where Jesus Never Walked," atheist Frank
Zindler noted that Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old
Testament, by the apostle Paul, by the Talmud (although sixtythree
other Galilean towns are cited), or by Josephus (who listed
forty-five other villages and cities of Galilee, including Japha,
which was located just over a mile from present-day Nazareth). No