The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2 – Christogenea on Talkshoe, June 1st, 2012
Over the last two weeks, we elucidated the exclusivity of Luke's gospel, and also showed that Luke's gospel was indeed the gospel of Paul as well. This must be remembered wherever Paul's epistles are considered. We also saw that claims of the scoffers, those who say that a virgin birth occurred in many ancient religions long before the time of the Hebrew promise of such a thing , and furthermore that Christianity had borrowed the idea, those claims are fully discredited by any serious and honest scholarship. Among other things, one more important aspect of this gospel that was attested here last week, is how the accounts in Luke of the promises for the people of Israel which were being fulfilled in Christ actually fit in perfectly with the teachings of Paul in his epistles, which were all written to dispersed Israelites. This will be the primary subject of a talk I shall give this Sunday at the Fellowship of God's Covenant People here in Kentucky.
1 And it happened in those days that there came out a decree from Caesar Augustus to register the whole inhabited world.
Caesar Augustus here is Gaius Octavius, a nephew of Julius Caesar who adopted him, making him his heir. He then became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. He ruled Rome as part of a triumvirate from 43 B.C., which ended in the civil war with Marcus Antonius (Marc Antony) culminating at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. From 27 B.C., Octavian was sole emperor of Rome, and adopted the title Augustus, by which he is popularly known as Augustus Caesar. Subsequent emperors also adopted the name Caesar as a title, which was actually Julius Caesar's personal name, and they also adopted the use of Augustus as a title, as it is seen later in the New Testament where its Greek equivalent, Σεβαστός, 4575, is used to refer to Nero Caesar ...