Next it will be noticed that St. Luke says that this was the _first_ enrolment, implying that he knew of others; and discoveries in Egypt have confirmed this in a remarkable manner. For they have shown that it was the custom of the Romans to have a _periodical_ enrolment of that country (and therefore presumably of the adjacent country of Syria) every fourteen years. Some of the actual census papers have been found for A.D. 20, 48, 62, 76, etc., and it is extremely probable that the system started in B.C. 9-8, though the first enrolment may have been delayed a few years in Palestine, which was partly independent. And St. Luke's statement that everyone had to go to _his own city_, which was long thought to be a difficulty, has been partly confirmed as well. For a decree has been discovered in Egypt, dated in the seventh year of Trajan (A.D. 104), ordering all persons to return to their own districts before the approaching census,[198] which is worded as if it were the usual custom. The next census in A.D. 6, which is the one referred to by Josephus, is also mentioned by St. Luke;[199] but he knew, what his critics did not, that it was only one of a series, and that the _first_ of the series took place at an earlier date. [Footnote 198: Ramsay, p. 259.] [Footnote 199: Acts. 5. 37.] Curiously enough, there used to be a very similar error, charged against St. Luke, in regard to Lysanias; whom he says was tetrarch of Abilene, a district near Damascus, in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, about A.D. 27.[200] Yet the only ruler of this name known to history in those parts was a king, who was killed in B.C. 34. But inscriptions found at Baalbec, and Abila (the latter dating somewhere between A.D. 14-29) show that there was a second Lysanias, hitherto unknown, who is expressly called the _tetrarch_ and who is now admitted to be the one referred to by St. Luke.[201] On the whole then, these Gospels, wherever we have any means of testing them by secular history, appear to be substantially accurate. [Footnote 200: Luke 3. 1.] [Footnote 201: Boeckh's Corp. Ins. Gr., No. 4523; Ramsay, 'Bearing of Recent Discovery on New Testament.' 1915, p. 298.]