Book Review:
Caesar’s Census, God’s Jubilee
by W. Scott McAndless
If we’re honest, Advent and Christmas in most of our churches are caught up in traditionalism. Even churches that are very flexible about congregational life can be very stuck in their ways at Christmastime, for a variety of reasons. With this in mind, it might seem a significant challenge to tinker with the Christmas story.
Scott McAndless does not tinker with the Christmas story as it’s found in scripture; instead, he is seeking to clarify what the biblical account is really saying. It is we who have tinkered with the Christmas story, creating pageant after pageant that harmonizes the accounts in Matthew and Luke that depict how Jesus was born.
If you read Matthew 1 – 2 and Luke 1 – 2—the only accounts of the nativity that we have in the Bible—you will find two renderings of the story that, short of Jesus being born, have almost nothing in common. What McAndless attempts to do with Caesar’s Census, God’s Jubilee is to determine why this is the case, and what may have been going on in the background that led to Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth.
The author writes well and accessibly; you don’t have to be a theologian to understand what McAndless is writing. What you do have to be is open – minded. What he suggests challenges traditional thinking. Yet people seeking to remain biblically faithful will welcome this challenge.
The main idea of the book is that Luke’s rendering of the story in the context of a census had less to do with a Roman head – counting exercise and more to do with a call to return to the biblical concept of jubilee, wherein loans were to be forgiven after seven “sabbath cycles,” or 49 years. The rules had changed over the years, and a group of faithful Jews were seeking to have the law of jubilee restored. Joseph, wishing to get his ancestral land in Bethlehem returned to his family, went in obedience to God, not Rome, since he would not have had to go to his ancestral home for a census. The “inn” in which there was no room was probably his ancestral property.
McAndless writes several “interludes” between chapters which retell the story as it might have been told in a “purer” sense. He makes good use of the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Among his sources are some which may raise a few eyebrows, but the way McAndless integrates what he has learned from them is positive and encouraging for the believer who wants to know what the Bible really means in its depiction of the nativity.
If I had one criticism of this book, it would be that it could have been longer. I would have enjoyed reading more from him!
