In my defense, the link I posted does contain mention of the rebuttal to the mainstream scholarship: "some conservative scholars have argued that Quirinius may have had an earlier and historically unattested term as governor of Syria, or that he previously held other senior positions which may have led him to be involved in the affairs of Judea during Herod's reign, or that the passage should be interpreted in some other fashion." Neither the Wikipedia entry nor the Come Reason Ministries article, however, offers an explanation of why everyone would've been made to physically return to their town of ancestral origin for the census, as Luke contends.
I am sympathetic to Professor Ehrman's stance, but I also find Marcion's excision of the Lucan infancy narrative interesting. Marcion's gospel was either a judicious editing of Luke or a proto-Luke. Marcionite Christianity is the form of Christianity I presently find most plausible. However, it is also
improbable, being a dead religion. Of course the same might be said for orthodox Early Christianity.
A month or so ago I watched a movie called
The Case for Christ, which is a dramatization of Lee Strobel's apologetic book documenting his conversion from atheism to Evangelical Protestantism. He makes some good points, but he also makes some bad ones, and even lets himself be convinced by poor explanations. There's one scene where he calls up William Lane Craig and confronts him with the inconsistencies between the four gospels. Dr. Craig tells him that it's like if you had four separate witnesses to a car accident, you would get four accounts that differed and even contradicted each other. And that, he says, is how we can trust the gospel as eyewitness accounts. Unfortunately, this seems like it would only work if the bible was purely a human record and not said to be divinely inspired and inerrant. Yet in the movie, Lee Strobel accepted this explanation seemingly without issue. It's available for streaming on Netflix.
Whether it's fulfilled prophecies or biblical inerrancy, it all ends up as a Rorschach test where people will see what they want to see. Atheists working from the starting point of skepticism and hostility will see only discrepancies, and believers working from the starting point of inerrancy will see only the perfect elegance of the explanations that resolve these issues. Then there is a middle ground of people who can be persuaded and / or attain faith. There are Jews who convert to Christianity. The number is surely smaller, but there are also Christians who convert to Judaism. And Muslim converts to Christianity and vice versa, and so forth and so on.
