Various translations of the New Testament’s Book of Luke have it that in the days of the birth of Jesus, the great Caesar Augustus gave the order that there was to be a census for the dominions of Rome. As an example, the New International Version has it this way: “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.”
The King James Version is a little more stringent in its diction and much more direct on the object of the census: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.” The point of the census is thus made plain: count ’em and get their coin would be the colloquial rendering. Citizens, and in the case of empire, dependents, too, must be counted, for taxes to be raised.
I learn from the higher scholarship of Google that there is some problem with the date here, the gospel claiming it took place during the reign of Herod the Great, when in fact more mundane sources establish that the census in question took place nine years after victims of the great infanticide crossed the grim Styx into the underworld. But we may leave that quarrel as it is.
Forgive this little introductory saunter but I thought it very mildly worth noting that census-taking seems to have always called up aspects of contention. Far from biblical times you may recall that in the reign of Emperor Harper — Harper the Mild and Scrupulous as the history books will record him — it stirred the anger of Liberals when his government proposed the abandonment of the long-form census. Such was the fondness of Canadians for inquisitive surveys of their habits and loves, and their regard for the bureaucrats who assembled them, that it may well have been this issue alone that brought Justin Trudeau and his Liberals to power. In any case, it was reinstated by them, and the waters of the Rideau have flowed ever so smoothly from that moment on, and Canada remains the peaceful kingdom it has always been as a consequence. Go near the census at your peril, is the motto to be derived.
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See Also:
(1) Liberalism’s Ethical Morass Makes the Deplorables Seem Not So Bad After All
(2) Joe Biden’s electability is a myth
(3) President Trump is Growing While Democrats are Shrinking
(4) Biden and wife made more than $15 million in last two years
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