Luke2chapter 2

Rome counted people in order to tax them, and registrations really did require people to travel and could take years to complete across a province. The census Luke names raises a real historical question, since Josephus places Quirinius's well-known registration of Judea in AD 6, a decade after Herod's death. Proposals include an earlier term or commission for Quirinius, or reading Luke's phrase as before Quirinius's census. It is an honest difficulty, and it is worth saying so rather than papering it over.

The word translated inn is not the roadside inn Luke uses elsewhere; it is the ordinary word for a guest room. Village houses often had a family room where animals were brought in at night on a lower level, with a guest space above or alongside. The picture is most likely a crowded family home with no room in the upper space, not a hard-hearted innkeeper.

Shepherds were rough, mobile, and low in social standing, and their work made regular temple attendance difficult. They are the first people told.

The temple visits follow the Law precisely. Circumcision on the eighth day, and then, forty days after the birth, the mother's purification offering. Luke notes that the offering brought was a pair of birds — the provision the Law makes explicitly for a family that cannot afford a lamb. And the trip when Jesus is twelve is the ordinary Passover pilgrimage, with the boy found among the teachers in the temple courts, where public question-and-answer teaching went on during festivals.