richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

ARGUMENTS F O R GOD'S E X I S T E N C E 93
accounts of what happened in the history of the real world. All
were written long after the death of Jesus, and also after the epistles
of Paul, which mention almost none of the alleged facts of
Jesus' life. All were then copied and recopied, through many
different 'Chinese Whispers generations' (see Chapter 5) by fallible
scribes who, in any case, had their own religious agendas.
A good example of the colouring by religious agendas is the
whole heart-warming legend of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, followed
by Herod's massacre of the innocents. When the gospels were
written, many years after Jesus' death, nobody knew where he was
born. But an Old Testament prophecy (Micah 5:2) had led Jews to
expect that the long-awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.
In the light of this prophecy, John's gospel specifically remarks that
his followers were surprised that he was not born in Bethlehem:
'Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come
out of Galilee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of
the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David
was?'
Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding
that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get
him there by different routes. Matthew has Mary and Joseph in
Bethlehem all along, moving to Nazareth only long after the birth
of Jesus, on their return from Egypt where they fled from King
Herod and the massacre of the innocents. Luke, by contrast,
acknowledges that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth before Jesus
was born. So how to get them to Bethlehem at the crucial moment,
in order to fulfil the prophecy? Luke says that, in the time when
Cyrenius (Quirinius) was governor of Syria, Caesar Augustus
decreed a census for taxation purposes, and everybody had to go 'to
his own city'. Joseph was 'of the house and lineage of David' and
therefore he had to go to 'the city of David, which is called
Bethlehem'. That must have seemed like a good solution. Except
that historically it is complete nonsense, as A. N. Wilson in Jesus
and Robin Lane Fox in The Unauthorized Version (among others)
have pointed out. David, if he existed, lived nearly a thousand years
before Mary and Joseph. Why on earth would the Romans have
required Joseph to go to the city where a remote ancestor had lived
a millennium earlier? It is as though I were required to specify, say,