The oft-repeated claim that there would *never* be a Roman census in a "client state," used to discredit Luke's mention of a census in the Christmas story, is an example of a priori history. Those who insist on this claim have only the thinnest justification for it--namely, the fact that client states under Rome had *some* measure of independence in matters of taxation. They also ignore or fumble to dismiss the explicit non-biblical example from Tacitus of Roman-style census-based taxation in the client state of Cilicia, during the reign of Tiberius. (So there isn't even the bad excuse of an argument from silence-outside-of-Luke.) To hear them talk, you'd think we had some document that says, "Rules for the Roman Empire: You're never supposed to do a census and taxation, enforced by Rome, in a client state." But we have nothing like that at all.
But more: Even if we *did* have such a document, we know that historically governments do things that they aren't "supposed" to do, if they stuck to founding documents. So that still wouldn't be a sufficient argument to dismiss Luke's report. I give a recent example in American history as a cautionary tale against a priori history.
Here is my post from several years ago on the census:
https://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2020/12/some-more-notes-on-census-in-luke.html
Here is my video on the census:
https://youtu.be/ZIpi5-pQSVk
Here is my debate in 2020 with Jonathan Pearce on the nativity:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PloRcUHBMU
Here is Pearce's postmortem in which he claims that there was no Roman-style census/taxation in a client state, as reported by Tacitus. (As I explain in my post linked above, the blunder is Pearce's, not that of the Biblical Archaeology Review. Apparently he didn't realize that there was more than one Archelaus in the region and that Tacitus is talking about Cilicia, not Cappadocia, at a time when Cilicia was indeed a client kingdom.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220121135953/https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2020/12/14/my-nativity-debate-with-lydia-mcgrew-post-match-analysis/
