For a limited time, Caesar's Census, God's Jubilee, the book that will make you rethink Christmas, is absolutely free.
I am very excited to announce that starting on November15 for 5 days, the eBook version of my book, Caesar's Census, God's Jubilee, will be available for free on Amazon website. This is a wonderful book to read right now to get a fresh perspective on the Christmas Story in the Bible.
Follow these links to download your copy before this extraordinary opportunity is gone. Make sure you share this news with others too!
Here is some more information about what the book explores:
According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus
of Nazareth was born during a census that had been ordered by Caesar Augustus
and, because of this census, his parents made a journey from Nazareth to
Bethlehem, arriving just in time for his birth. It is a wonderful story that
has inspired millions down through the ages, but it is also a story that has
left some very puzzled.
Questions abound for many readers of
the story who have any knowledge of the history of those times. Questions like:
- Did Caesar really conduct a census of the whole world at once?
- When did such a census take place?
- When is Luke saying that Jesus was born?
- Why does Luke say that all the people registered for the census in the places where their ancestors came from?
- Doesn’t it make more sense to register people where they actually live?
- What was the normal Roman procedure for taking censuses?
This book is an attempt to work through
questions like this is a way that takes the scriptural story seriously but that
also deals honestly and openly with what we know about the historical
situation. It does this in two ways.
Rethinking
This book suggests that we have simply
misunderstood some things about Luke’s nativity story. This is partly because
we have insisted on harmonizing his story with the nativity story in the Gospel
of Matthew. It also explores how the Old Testament notion of jubilee might
offer a better reason for the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
Reimagining
The nativity story has been painted and
drawn by some of the greatest artists who have ever lived, sung by some of the
greatest singers and told by some of the greatest storytellers. A whole rich
and well-populated world has grown up around the nativity story—a world so
detailed that it seems very real even if much of it has little connection with
the Biblical accounts. Because of this, it is not enough to just an attempt to
correct a few misunderstandings about the Christmas story. New ideas would seem
to attack that entire imaginative world that has grown up around the story over
the centuries and would be resisted for that reason alone.
Therefore this book also includes some
retelling of the Christmas story in short vignettes (called interludes) that
help us to imagine the journey of Mary and Joseph within a historical setting
that Luke would recognize.
Warning: if you read this book, you just might
not be able to see the old familiar Christmas story in the same way ever again.
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