Dan McClellan's "Unanswerable Contradictions" - Part 1.2 - The Timing and Details of the Nativity

In the second installment of his series on alleged irreconcilable discrepancies, Dan McClellan targets the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, declaring them an insurmountable historical and literary contradiction that cannot be harmonized without abandoning textual integrity.

McClellan articulates the standard historical-critical challenge across two primary hubs:

• The Chronological Clash: Matthew dates Jesus's birth to the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC (Matt 2:1). Luke mentions Herod (Luke 1:5), but grounds the journey to Bethlehem in a worldwide Roman census conducted while Quirinius was governor of Syria (Luke 2:1–2). In Antiquities of the Jews (17.13.5; 18.1.1), Flavius Josephus dates the provincial census of Quirinius to AD 6—a full decade after Herod’s death.

• The Geographic and Narrative Divergence: Matthew depicts Joseph and Mary as settled residents of Bethlehem dwelling in a house (Matt 2:11), fleeing to Egypt after the Magi's visit to escape Herod’s slaughter (Matt 2:13–18), and relocating to Nazareth only upon returning from Egypt to avoid Archelaus (Matt 2:22–23). Conversely, Luke presents Nazareth as their original hometown (Luke 1:26; 2:4), brings them to Bethlehem temporarily because of the census, depicts them presenting Jesus at the Temple on the fortieth day (Luke 2:22–38), and has them return directly to Nazareth (Luke 2:39), leaving no narrative space for an escape to Egypt or the murder of Bethlehem’s children.

McClellan frames this divergence under his trademark banner of "Data over Dogma" as an objective historical fact: the texts are mutually exclusive, proving that canonical univocality is untenable and that Luke fabricated historical scaffolding to place Jesus in Bethlehem.

However, evaluated through the epistemology of biblical criticism, this verdict is not raw, presuppositionless data. It represents the inevitable output of historical criticism’s own foundational axioms: Troeltschian historicism, methodological naturalism, and an atomizing hermeneutic of suspicion.

1. Troeltschian Historicism and the Quirinius Problem

McClellan’s treatment of the Lukan census relies on Ernst Troeltsch’s classical principles of historiography - specifically the Principle of Analogy and the Principle of Correlation. Under Troeltsch’s framework, critical scholarship treats external, secular historiography (primarily Flavius Josephus) as an unimpeachable baseline while placing Luke under an immediate, asymmetric suspicion. Because Josephus dates a Roman provincial census under Publius Sulpicius Quirinius to AD 6 following the deposition of Herod Archelaus (Antiquities 17.13.5; 18.1.1), historical critics automatically deduce that Luke committed a clumsy, apologetic anachronism in placing Jesus's birth both during the reign of Herod the Great (c. 5–4 BC) and under Quirinius's administration.

However, when examined across comparative historiography and ancient administrative practice, this critical consensus exposes several profound epistemological vulnerabilities.

The Epistemic Asymmetry of Defaulting to Josephus

Treating Josephus as an infallible chronological anchor while treating Luke as an error-prone fabricator is a methodological choice rooted in historical skepticism, not an objective evidentiary demand. While Josephus is an indispensable witness for broad historical trajectories, classicists and historians have long documented his chronic susceptibility to chronological dislocation, compressed timelines, and narrative duplication:

• Gross Chronological Errors: In Antiquities (12.154–236), Josephus misdates the Tobiad tax-farming saga under Ptolemy V instead of Ptolemy III - a massive chronological displacement of roughly sixty years. Similarly, he conflates the Persian monarch Xerxes with Artaxerxes I, distorting the biblical timeline of Nehemiah's governorship.

• Internal Chronological Contradictions: Josephus cannot keep his own math straight regarding the reign of Herod the Great. In Antiquities (17.190–191), he calculates Herod’s reign as thirty-seven years from his Roman appointment (yielding a death date of 4–3 BC), whereas in The Jewish War (1.665), he counts thirty-seven years from the conquest of Jerusalem, pushing the terminus toward 1 BC or 1 AD.

• Theological Grouping Over Chronology: Josephus links the execution of John the Baptist directly to Herod Antipas's catastrophic military defeat by the Nabataean king Aretas IV in AD 36 (Antiquities 18.116–119), organizing events around theological retribution (viewing the defeat as divine punishment for John's murder) rather than strict chronological sequence.

In contrast, classical historian A.N. Sherwin-White (Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, 1963) and Colin J. Hemer (The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, 1989) have demonstrated that the author of Luke-Acts exhibits extraordinary, documented precision regarding Roman civic nomenclature, provincial administrative titles (e.g., politarchs in Thessalonica, asiarchs in Ephesus), and imperial legal procedures. To presume that an author of Luke's proven administrative accuracy wholly manufactured a world-altering census - while granting Josephus an unearned benefit of the doubt despite his known timeline scrambles - exemplifies the arbitrary double standard of Troeltschian historicism.

Historical Duplication: Did Josephus Misdate the Census?

A compelling resolution recognized in contemporary historiography (notably articulated by John H. Rhoads, "Josephus Misdated the Census of Quirinius," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 2011) suggests that the historical error lies not with Luke, but with Josephus accidentally double-counting a single 4 BC event and projecting it a second time into AD 6:

1. The "Three Judases" Doublet: Josephus records three separate insurgent leaders named Judas operating in Judea around this immediate era who each come into conflict with the exact same High Priest, Joazar: Judas son of Sepphoris (4 BC; Antiquities 17.271–272), Judas son of Saripheus (4 BC; Antiquities 17.149–167), and Judas the Galilean (AD 6; Antiquities 18.1–10). As Rhoads demonstrates, it is historically improbable that three different revolutionaries named Judas arose across a ten-year span in identical regions to clash with the identical high priest over taxation; these represent duplicate accounts of a single 4 BC tax rebellion following Herod's death.

2. The High Priest Joazar Paradox: Josephus states that High Priest Joazar was deposed by Quirinius in AD 6 (Antiquities 18.26). Yet elsewhere, Josephus records that Joazar had already been deposed a decade earlier by Herod Archelaus immediately after Herod the Great died in 4 BC (Antiquities 17.339). If the census occurred in 4 BC, these two removals coalesce into one coherent historical event.

3. Quirinius as Sabinus: In 4 BC, Caesar Augustus dispatched an official named Sabinus into Judea to secure Herod’s estate and conduct a strict financial inventory of the realm (Antiquities 17.221–223). Quirinius hailed from Lanuvium, an ancient Sabine municipality, and held the regional cognomen/nickname "The Sabine" (Sabinus). Josephus’s record of Sabinus executing a fiscal registration in 4 BC aligns directly with Luke's testimony of an initial census under Quirinius during Herod’s final days.

4. The Early Presence of Coponius: While standard reconstructions place Coponius arriving as prefect alongside Quirinius in AD 6, manuscript traditions and historical reconstructions of Herod the Great's treason trial of his son Antipater place Coponius in Judea managing Roman legal affairs as early as 5 BC (Antiquities 17.134). If Coponius was already active in Judea in 5–4 BC, the Quirinius-Coponius administrative pairing was operational prior to Herod’s death, precisely as Luke records.

Philological and Grammatical Viability in Luke 2:2

Even within the internal syntax of Luke 2:2 (αὕτη ἀπογραφὴ πρώτη ἐγένετο ἡγεμονεύοντος τῆς Συρίας Κυρηνίου), multiple standard grammatical solutions render a contradiction unnecessary:

• Comparative Adverbial Construction: In Syntax (Vol. 3 of Moulton’s A Grammar of New Testament Greek, 1963), Nigel Turner, followed by N.T. Wright (The New Testament and the People of God, 1992), observes that πρῶτος followed by the genitive can function comparatively to mean "prior to" or "before" (identical to the construction in John 1:15, 15:18). Luke 2:2 can thus translate: "This census took place before [the one when] Quirinius was governor of Syria." Luke would be intentionally clarifying for his readers that Jesus’s birth registration was distinct from the notorious AD 6 census that ignited Judas the Galilean’s revolt.

• Administrative Staging: John Nolland (Word Biblical Commentary: Luke 1:1–9:20, 1989) notes that πρώτη can designate an initial phase of enrollment begun under Herod the Great, which was only finalized and assessed years later under direct provincial administration.

• Extraordinary Roman Legation: Epigraphic evidence from the Titulus Tiburtinus (CIL XIV.3613), examined by Colin Hemsterhuys ("The Titulus Tiburtinus and the Census of Quirinius," ZPE 1989) and F.F. Bruce (Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament, 1974), establishes that imperial commanders could hold special Syrian administrative commands (legatus pro praetore) on multiple occasions. This allowed for Quirinius's active oversight in the region during the Homonadensian War around 4 BC.

By insisting that Josephus’s AD 6 dating is an unimpeachable empirical fact while disregarding Josephus’s documented chronological blunders, ignoring duplicate administrative events, and dismissing viable Greek syntax, McClellan does not offer unvarnished "data." He enforces a Troeltschian historicist axiom that assumes biblical testimony is anachronistic until proven otherwise by a pagan contemporary.

2. Double Agency vs. The Atomizing Hermeneutic of Suspicion

Historical criticism operates under Peter Berger’s socioreligious axiom of methodological atheism (The Sacred Canopy, 1967), evaluating texts strictly as products of human factional polemics. Under this lens, Matthew and Luke are assumed to be rival mythmakers inventing narratives to resolve the "scandal" of a Galilean Messiah.

In contrast, classical theological hermeneutics and speech-act philosophy demonstrate that multi-perspective reporting is characteristic of reliable, situated human testimony. Kevin Vanhoozer’s framework of double agency (First Theology: God, Scripture & Hermeneutics, 2002) articulates how divine communicative action appropriates the diverse illocutionary stances of distinct human authors without flattening their individual perspectives:

Narrative Dimension	Matthew’s Horizon & Illocutionary Intent	Luke’s Horizon & Illocutionary Intent
Typological Focus	Mosaic and Royal Christology: Jesus as the New Moses and true King escaping a tyrant (Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 1993).	Universal, Prophetic, and Temple-Centered: The Gospel reaching the lowly, outcasts, and Gentiles (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 1981).
Primary Eyewitness Tradition	Patriarchal tradition focused on Joseph's lineage, legal paternity, dreams, and public actions.	Domestic, maternal tradition centered on Mary's perspective, personal memories, and Temple rites.
Narrative Ellipsis	Omits the circumcision, purification rites, and presentation at the Temple; focuses on the Magi and flight to Egypt.	Omits the visit of the Magi and flight to Egypt; focuses on legal Torah compliance in Jerusalem.

The Conflation of Omission with Denial

McClellan commits the logical error of treating omission as contradiction. In historiography, silence is not negation. Luke 2:39 states: "When they had finished everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth." Luke's syntax does not require an immediate departure from the Temple steps to Nazareth.

Ancient biographical genre (bios) regularly deployed narrative telescoping. In the Book of Acts, Luke famously collapses time, omitting Paul’s three-year journey to Arabia mentioned in Galatians 1:17–18 and moving narratively from Paul’s Damascus conversion straight to his arrival in Jerusalem (Acts 9:19–26; see F.F. Bruce, The Acts of the Apostles, 1990). An author omitting intermediate events to maintain thematic pacing cannot be construed as logically denying those events.

A coherent chronology accounts for both perspectives without textual distortion:

1. Birth in Bethlehem; visit of the local shepherds (Luke 2:1–20).

2. Circumcision on the eighth day; presentation at the Temple on the fortieth day (Luke 2:21–38).

3. Temporary stay in a house in Bethlehem (Matt 2:11), during which the Magi arrive up to two years later, prompting Herod's decree targeting children two years old and under (Matt 2:16).

4. Flight to Egypt to escape Herod’s decree (Matt 2:13–15).

5. Return from Egypt following Herod’s death, relocating to Nazareth to avoid Archelaus (Matt 2:19–23; Luke 2:39).

Matthew and Luke preserve distinct, authentic branches of early familial tradition (likely descending through circles associated with Joseph and Mary, respectively). That Matthew and Luke operate with different narrative emphases confirms their independence; it does not demonstrate historical incompatibility.

3. Epistemic Parity and Explanatory Power

As demonstrated in our epistemological analysis, neither the historical-critical naturalist nor the confessional theologian can demonstrate their starting axioms using unmediated textual data alone:

• McClellan's Presuppositional Axioms: Troeltschian naturalism (excluding divine guidance and predictive prophecy), methodological atheism (reducing canonical authors to sociopolitical manipulators), and an atomizing hermeneutic of suspicion that mandates that literary variation equals ideological hostility (Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 1992).

• The Classical Confessional Axioms: Theistic realism (affirming God’s real action in history), divine accommodation (God communicating through finite, historically conditioned human witnesses; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.13.1), and charitable canonical coherence.

When evaluated using Alasdair MacIntyre’s criteria for adjudicating rival intellectual traditions—internal coherence, explanatory scope, and the ability to explain the competitor (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 1988)—the confessional hermeneutic demonstrates greater explanatory power:

1. Explaining the Phenomena: The confessional model naturally explains why the Gospels contain distinct theological emphases, stylistic vocabularies, and independent narratives. The doctrine of accommodation holds that God revealed truth through situated human writers rather than dictating a mechanical, uniform script. The critical scholar's observation of human particularity is already accounted for within mature theological bibliology.

2. The Naturalist Collapse: McClellan’s model requires that early Christian communities independently invented two completely different, geographically complex fictions to place a known Nazarene in Bethlehem. They must simultaneously convince immediate first-century contemporaries and eyewitnesses who were personally acquainted with Jesus's immediate family (such as James and Jude) to receive both documents as authoritative.

Conclusion

Dan McClellan’s claim of an "unanswerable contradiction" in the Nativity narratives ultimately rests on an unexamined philosophical commitments rather than neutral historical data. 

By 1) elevating Josephus's notoriously fluid chronology to an absolute baseline, 2) enforcing Troeltschian skepticism on the evangelists, and 3) equating narrative omission with factual denial, historical-critical orthodoxy constructs the very impasse it claims to discover. 

When read with philological rigor, administrative historical plausibility, and an understanding of situated, multi-perspective testimony, Matthew and Luke remain coherent witnesses to a shared event rather than mutually destructive fabrications. McClellan's verdict does not expose a fatal flaw in the biblical text; it exposes the interpretive limitations of a methodological framework engineered to guarantee fracture.

Other entries in this series:

• Dan McClellan and the Epistemology of Biblical Criticism
• Dan McClellan's "Unanswerable Contradictions" - Part 1- Intro
• The Order of Creation - Genesis 1:1–2:4a vs. Genesis 2:4b–3:24
• The Timing and Details of the Nativity - Matthew 1–2 vs. Luke 2 - This article
• The Fate of Judas Iscariot and the Field of Blood - Matthew 27:3–10 vs. Acts 1:18–19
• The Death of King Ahaziah - 2 Kings 9:27–28 vs. 2 Chronicles 22:8–9
• Who Killed Goliath? - 1 Samuel 17 vs. 2 Samuel 21:19 (and 1 Chronicles 20:5

Note: Unlinked articles are not available at the moment. 

See Also: 

• Historical Critical Method vs Historical Grammatical Method
• The Presuppositions of the Historical-Critical Method - Sources