Word: luke
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...anointed one" (or "Messiah") provided a potent precedent of divinely sanctioned kingship. Binding Jesus to him by family (through Joseph) and birthplace consolidated that definition, which then matured into Christianity's far grander messiahship. Says White: "No Bethlehem, no David. No David, no messianic prototype. Matthew and Luke both understood that." The way each Gospel writer got the Holy Family there, by contrast, reflected his particular preoccupations...
...Luke, of course, once again had his eye on the pagan world. His key term is the census. In Jesus' time, the immensely popular Emperor Augustus was setting himself up not just as the ruler but also as the semidivine savior of the world. Wherever his censuses reached, his aggressive version of the Roman civic faith followed (along with his tax collectors...
...Luke's description of an empire-wide census at the time of Jesus' birth, with Palestine's part conducted by the Syrian governor Quirinius, seems inaccurate. There is no other record of a census in Palestine at the time, and Quirinius was not yet governor. But he did administer an infamous census on Augustus' behalf some 12 years later, in A.D. 6. Resentment over it sparked a rebellion by Jewish messianic zealots that seethed for decades and finally backfired horribly in the Romans' razing of Jewish Jerusalem...
...Luke would have remembered that slaughter. By documenting Joseph and Mary's compliance with Quirinius' census, he was broadcasting to Roman readers that his fellow Christians were not that kind of messianists, intent on armed revolt. But by framing Christ's birth in the context of that empire-wide tally, he was also suggesting that not just Jewish Palestine but also the entire known world was a possible horizon for Christ's kingdom. It was a delicate line. The adult Jesus would later put it nicely (although Luke may have inherited this particular phrase from the earlier-written Mark): "Render...
...mind a verse from the Old Testament book Numbers alluding to David's messianic status--"A star shall come out of Jacob and a [king] shall rise out of Israel." By making the star the object of the non-Jewish Magi's curiosity, Matthew showed that if he lacked Luke's detailed pagan background, he at least had some knowledge that stellar displays had meaning to non-Jews as well. In fact, stars were associated with the founding of Rome and the fall of Jerusalem, plus the birth of the usual suspects: Alexander the Great and Julius and Augustus Caesar...