Word: augustus
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Exegetes like Eden Theological Seminary's Patterson think the angel's birth announcement embodies the hope that Jesus' coming kingdom will turn political as well as religious worlds upside down. "Luke can't be saying anything other than 'You think you have a son of God in Augustus?'" he says. "'You think you have a savior in the Emperor? It's all foolishness. If you want to know the peace of God, not the Pax Romana, you have to look somewhere else.'" Since the '60s, such readings have inspired Christian social activists from civil rights preachers to Catholic liberation theologians...
...Jesus' later youth in the great Jewish temple. But by the time Luke wrote, says John Dominic Crossan, author of The Birth of Christianity, "Christians are competing in a bigger world now, not just a Jewish world ... And in this wider world, Alexander the Great is the model for Augustus and Augustus often becomes the model for Jesus...
...impossible novelty but as a theme borrowed from the literature of the non-Jewish world. Stephen Patterson of Eden Theological Seminary lists divinely irregular conceptions in stories about not only mythic heroes such as Perseus and Romulus and Remus but also flesh-and-blood figures like Plato, Alexander and Augustus, whose hagiographers reported he was fathered by the god Apollo while his mother slept. "Virgin births were a rather Gentile thing," says the Very Rev. John Drury, chaplain of All Souls' College at Oxford University. "You get it in a lot of the legends in Ovid where the god impregnates...
...Jews. None of that gripping story, however, can be found in Luke. According to Luke, Joseph and Mary, Nazarenes, are on a brief if inconvenient visit to Joseph's ancestral home of Bethlehem, complying with a vast census ("All the world should be enrolled") ordered by the Roman Emperor Augustus. Meanwhile, Mark, written closer to Jesus' actual lifetime, omits Bethlehem and refers to Nazareth as Jesus' patrida, or hometown...
...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...