“The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic; it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true. Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of someone homeless should be celebrated in every home.”
G.K. Chesterton
So that’s where the ‘Jesus was homeless’ meme came from.
“In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. And everyone went to their own town to register.
So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.”
No such decree was ever issued. No census was ever taken.
In 6 CE Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, the newly-appointed Imperial Legate of the province of Roman Syria, was tasked to carry out a tax census of the new province of Judea, one of the three territories into which the kingdom of Herod the Great had been divided on his death in 4 BCE.
The date seems to be the variable, not the census itself.