I. ADVENT.

The Christmas story begins with Caesar Augstus conducting a census.  Luke 2:1 mentions "all the world," something that might have come as a surprise to the Chinese emperor, or whatever chieftan ruled over the Mississippian tribes.

Was it any accident, dear reader, that a religious origin story would coincide with an attempt by a temporal leader to assert universal sovereignty?  Further, does the description of the assertion matter.  In the King James Bible, Caesar intends for all the world to be "taxed."  Did the compilers of that translation have something like the Domesday Book in the back of their mind?  The Revised Standard Version gives "enrolled."  Might that be a more accurate rendition, or might those compilers, working out of several Protestant traditions with links to Mayflower congregations, have the tradition of keeping good records that began with the Plymouth colonies in their minds?  Then, there's the Swedish translation, which gives "skattskrifvas" as the the objective of "kejsar Augustus's" order.  Google Translate doesn't like the spelling, but it offers "taxable" as the translation, and that's not inconsistent with the churches of Sweden having responsibility for the secular and sacred records, and those are pretty comprehensive back into the eighteenth century.

Now, if any fragments of that Roman census still exist, those would likely be of some interest to genealogists.