Luke starts off his Christmas narrative by locating it quite precisely in time and space: 'it happened in those days that there came a decree from Caesar Augustus to make a census of all the inhabited world'. This was, as Luke explains, the first census during the time that Quirinius was governor of Syria.
Why do governors make censuses? I suppose in the democratic-bureaucratic states in which most of us live, the act of census making appears perfectly innocent - it allows the government to better allocate resources for health care and policing and roads, for example. Or at least we are able to overlook its more sinister possibilities because of the benefits we receive. But for the ancient world the act of making a census was not for the benefit of the ruled so much as for the ruler. An accurate census meant more effective and lucrative taxation. It meant quite clearly that the known world was under the Roman thumb. It was an act of peace-making, in a way: because it meant the subduing and ordering of the peoples of the earth. It was surveillance as best the ancient world could do it. This was the mighty and divine Augustus, declaring that the pax Romanum had come upon the earth.
And, as governmental decrees tend to, it meant a bureaucratic inconvenience for the little person on the fringe. Even heavily pregnant women had to make a journey in order to fall in with the Roman programme.
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