Who is “Caesar Augustus” (Luke 2:1)?
Caesar Augustus was the first Roman emperor. Rome was still a republic when its dictator
Julius Caesar, whose will named his great-nephew Octavian as his heir,
was assassinated in 44 BC. Octavian won the ensuing power struggle
and in 27 BC
turned the republic into an empire, became its first emperor, and was
renamed “Augustus,” which means
“Revered One,” by the Roman senate. Caesar Augustus expanded and
ruled the Roman Empire, which doubled in size during his 40 year reign, until his death in 14 AD at 76 years of age.
The month of August is named after him.
Why did Caesar Augustus issue an order to “register” (Luke
2:1) the people in the Roman world?
Collecting taxes across the expanding empire had been a problem.
To create a more consistent and efficient way of taxation, Caesar Augustus decided to
tax each province based on their population, which would be
determined through “census”
(Luke 2:2).
According to Res Gestae ... Augusti (The Deeds of
...
Augustus), which he wrote, he ordered three
empire-wide censuses during his reign, in 28 BC (just before he turned
the Roman Republic officially into the Roman Empire), in 8 BC, and in 14
AD. There were also many provincial censuses, as well as censuses for
the purpose of having (newly-conquered) people declare their allegiance
to him. The census mentioned above was the empire-wide one in 8 BC.
The census of 8 BC covered just the Roman Empire, so
why does Luke 2:1 say that Caesar Augustus ordered “all the world” to be
registered?
To Romans, the Roman Empire was the world that mattered. What do
Americans today call their professional baseball championship series?