And when the Romans destoyed Jerusalem in 70 AD you have to wonder what happeend to any possible records of a Roman/Judean census that happened over 70 years earlier, and over 90 years after Josephus started to write his Antiquities. Don't you think it just might be possible that the non-Christian Josephus (who did not have access to the oral Christian tradition of that period 90 years earlier) just might not of had any written records of what happened in Judea over 90 years earlier and after Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD.
So you're going from "the evidence of a Herodean census may have been destroyed" to "the census might have happened" to "the census happened". What's the name of that fallacy? And are you somehow arguing that only Christians had oral traditions?
Then you would think there would be a lot of signatures of Julius Caesar (the most powerful man in the world) around, but there are none.
Silly argument. Authenticating documents with a signature is a modern invention. Ancients and medieval people used
signet rings.
And what do you want to argue with that? We have ample evidence that Caesar existed. His own writings, to begin with, about the Gallic and the Civil Wars. Corroborating
archaeological evidence (but not Alesia -
I don't know where Alesia is! 
). Writings of contemporaries, like Cicero, which mention Caesar. Writings of later historians. The conquest of Gaul - why does France now speak a Romance language? Coins of Caesar. And so on and so forth.
Nobody at all, except for the author of the gospel attributed to Sir Luke, recorded the census of which we speak.
Nobody at all, DOC.
Given that the whole idea of taking a census is to record stuff, and given that the Romans are noted as mad keen record keepers, the only logical conclusion is that the damned census didn't happen.
[...]
Don't try to obfuscate things, DOC, by trying to pretend that Sir Luke's census may have been a local Judean affair.
Well, there is evidence there was a census by Quirinius - at the time Luke mentions - but indeed, as you rightly note, not Empire-wide. Josephus writes about a census instituted by Quirinius in Syria and Judaea in 6/7 AD, and about the revolt of Judas the Galilean that was triggered by that. And it makes perfectly sense: Judaea was just incorporated into the Empire as part of the Syrian province, so the Romans had to conduct a local census for tax purposes.
So, Luke was probably right in describing a census by Quirinius - but he was wrong in describing it as Empire-wide, and contradicts Matthew in associating it with Jesus' birth.
In contrast, Matthew's census by Herod is made up out of whole cloth. He has Herod the Great undertake a census in Judaea. There is no corroborating evidence at all for that. And it runs counter to what we know about
Jewish culture at the time:
A pestilence appears to have occurred shortly after the census, and confirmed the people in the superstition, common among primitive nations, against being numbered. In the Biblical text David's action in ordering a census is regarded as sinful.
Herod was a smart ruler, who managed to regain nominal independence for all parts of the former Hasmonean kingdom. He was raised in the (Jewish) culture, so why would he antagonize his subjects with holding a census? He had other means of collecting taxes.
Quirinius, on the other hand, was a Roman career politician who spent 3 years here, 4 years there, and would have known much less about local culture, and just followed Roman ways of administration.
Now you've got me wondering about Bathsheba. Maybe Solomon was adopted.
No, he was brought to the mountains to be killed, then found and raised by a shepherd. As an adult, he came back to court, killed his father and married his mother.
Oh sorry, wrong myth.
