Quote Originally Posted by HoreTore View Post
It's more trickier than that, Sigurd. Augustus did hold a census before year 0, but not in Judea. The Romans did not order a census of citizens of client states; that's not Roman territory proper. Citizens of client states were not taxed by Rome, thus no reason to hold a census.

And Galilea was never a Roman province; Joseph as a citizen of Galilea would thus never be subject to a census.

And it wasn't standard practice for people to travel to the censor either; it was the censor who travelled to the citizen.
Ah, but you see. Josephus does record that a census for tax purposes was conducted by Quirinius for the area of Syria and Judea in 6-7 AD. And it was not only for tax purposes that Octavius conducted his world wide census. He was genuinely interested in how the population of the world increased. I am not entirely confident on the sources here, but he made legislation to ensure faster growth of the population and used the three world wide censuses mentioned in his Res Gestae to check if it worked. He even proudly numbers the total population of the world for each census.

If a province was taxed based on how many originated from that province - then people would have to travel from all over to their home province for registry. A slimy way to increase taxes though.

Not many censuses survived, but there are records from a few (e.g. 104 AD & 119 AD) where one of the entries is current living location. Where one can clearly see that people traveled from all over to come and register at the census.
It could be that a province didn't like to be taxed based on the many immigrants staying there, which ultimately was the purpose of such censuses. Go home to where you belong and register there.