Why did Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem?

What Luke says

Luke packs the reason into a single long sentence.

Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to David’s city, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to enroll himself with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him as wife, being pregnant.

Two reasons sit in that sentence: a Roman order and a family tree. The order is the decree of Caesar Augustus “that all the world should be enrolled” (Luke 2:1), and “all went to enroll themselves, everyone to his own city” (Luke 2:3). The family tree is David’s.

Why David’s town?

Bethlehem was where David grew up and where Samuel anointed him, the youngest son of “Jesse the Bethlehemite” (1 Samuel 16:1). Luke calls it “David’s city,” a title the Hebrew Bible gives to the fortress of Zion in Jerusalem (2 Samuel 5:7). Luke hands it to the shepherd king’s village instead. And Bethlehem carried a promise.

But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, being small among the clans of Judah, out of you one will come out to me who is to be ruler in Israel.

By Jesus’s day many expected the Messiah to come from David’s family and David’s village. John records a Jerusalem crowd saying exactly that: “Hasn’t the Scripture said that the Christ comes of the offspring of David, and from Bethlehem, the village where David was?” (John 7:42). In Luke, the census is how a family from Nazareth ends up there.

Did a census really send people home?

This is the part historians struggle with. Rome counted people where they lived and owned property, and no known Roman census sent anyone to an ancestor’s hometown. The closest parallel is an edict of Gaius Vibius Maximus, prefect of Egypt, in AD 104, ordering everyone living away from home to return to their own district for a household census. That is a return to one’s residence, not to a forefather’s town. Some readers suggest Joseph owned family land in Bethlehem; Luke doesn’t say. There is a dating problem as well: Josephus puts the census of Quirinius in AD 6, years after Herod’s death, a puzzle laid out on the December 25 page.

The road from Nazareth

From Nazareth to Bethlehem is about 150 kilometers (93 miles), five days or more on foot. Luke never says which way they went. Galileans going up to the festivals usually took the hill road through Samaria (Antiquities 20.118), three days to Jerusalem for a fast traveler, Josephus says (Life 269). Others went down the Jordan valley past Jericho and climbed to Jerusalem. Bethlehem lies 9 kilometers beyond it. Families usually walked in company with relatives and neighbors, as this one does later on its way home from Passover (Luke 2:44).

Two favorite details are not in the text. There is no donkey: Luke never says how Mary traveled, and the animal comes from later art and Christmas cards. And there is no race against the clock. Luke says only, “While they were there, the day had come for her to give birth” (Luke 2:6). They may have been in Bethlehem for days.

Matthew’s different picture

Matthew never mentions a census or a journey south. In his Gospel, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, the magi find the family in a house there (Matthew 2:11), and only after the flight to Egypt does Joseph take them to Nazareth, because Herod’s son Archelaus rules Judea (Matthew 2:22–23). Luke starts the family in Nazareth and brings them to Bethlehem. Matthew starts them in Bethlehem and brings them to Nazareth. Both agree on the two places that matter: Bethlehem for the birth, Nazareth for the childhood.