Jesus in Egypt

Magi Visit, Escape from Herod, Living in Egypt

When Was the Birth of Jesus? and When Did The Magi Come?

When Was Jesus Born? When Did the Magi Come? When Did Herod Die?

And what do all these questions have to do with one another? Quite a bit, it seems, according to the second chapter of Matthew. Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, as seen at Matthew 2:1. Herod the Great died in Jericho in 4 BC, according to the contemporary Jewish historian Yosef son of Matityahu, whose pen name was Flavius Josephus. This means that Jesus must have been born DURING OR BEFORE 4 BC.

The Bible is not incorrect on the issue of dates. Rather, it is our calendars that are incorrect. The system of dividing the years into AD and BC was invented in the year 525 by Dionysius Exiguus, a prominent monk in Rome. Using his calculations, he missed the supposed date of Jesus' birth by at least 5 years. AD (Anno Domino) stands for the "Years of Our Lord," which were to begin in AD 1 at Christ's birth. BC means the  years "Before Christ," which ended in 1 BC. By this system there is no zero year, either BC or AD. Across the non-Christian world, they use CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before the Common Era) as the politically correct replacement for the Christian AD and BC.

So the Magi, like Jesus, also had to arrive in Judea before Herod the Great died in 4 BC. But there is more. The Magi had seen a star appear, announcing the new King of the Jews. Herod took them aside in secret to find out the EXACT TIME (Matthew 2:7) that the star appeared, and instructed them to come back to him when they found this new king who would challenge Herod's rule.

But the Magi were warned in a dream from God not to return to Herod. When Herod saw that he had been tricked, in a rage he ordered the killing of the male children in and around Bethlehem. But Joseph had also been warned, and had already escaped for Egypt with Mary and Jesus. And here's a clue: Herod killed all the male children two years old and younger, according to the EXACT TIME (Matthew 2:16) that he had extracted from the Magi.

Does this mean that Jesus was two years old when the Magi appeared? Herod wasn't taking any chances, and killed them all. But if Jesus was two, that means he may have been born 6 BC or sooner, rather than 5 BC. This would make Jesus at least 32 (about 30 years old, Luke 33:2) when he began his ministry in AD 27, and at least 35 years old at the crucifixion in AD 30.

The Traditional Flight to Egypt

The image above has bought into the two-year-old Jesus theory, for there he is, on Mary's back being carried to Egypt. I would think that he could do much of the walking himself, but you probably know what two-year-olds are like.  But what about Joseph's other children: four boys and two or three girls? It would have been quite dangerous to leave his other children behind, with a paranoid maniac on the throne in Jerusalem. Even if Joseph could squirrel them away in Nazareth, that would not be safe enough. And with the haste to get out of town, there would be little time for making other plans. No, Joseph needed to bring his whole clan along to keep them out of the clutches of King Herod.

Jesus and His Family in Egypt

I used this image to depict Joseph's move from Nazareth to Bethlehem, showing Joseph's youngest son Jude on the donkey with the pregnant Mary. But if this is Joseph's family on its way to Egypt, then there's a boy missing. The best explanation for that is that James, the oldest boy, is the one taking the picture. At least that's my experience with family photos. I was often missing from the family photo because, as the oldest boy, I was operating the Brownie camera. And James went on to write one of the most practical books in the New Testament.

On a more serious note, Joseph did not need to worry about his reception in Egypt. The Egyptian city Alexandria was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, which included a population of Jews that outnumbered even the inhabitants of Jerusalem. There would be no problem finding someone willing to take in a refugee from Herod the Great, famous for his ferocity. They would probably settle in for a two-year stay, at least, until the political situation in Judea and Galilee settled down a bit.

For the boy Jesus, this would  present his first solid contact with Greek-speaking Jews. Jews in Egypt did not speak Aramaic, and their scrolls of scripture were written in Greek rather than Hebrew. Such encounters would go double for the older children. Turned out on the street to play, they would immediately be immersed in a 100 percent Greek language milieu.

I found evidence for such an encounter in the book of Jude in the Bible, when I was preparing my master's thesis, Jude and the Scoffers (2006). Although Jude's birth language was clearly Aramaic, his writing shows an extensive Greek vocabulary unsurpassed by any of the other writers of the New Testament. In the short span of 25 verses, he makes use of no less than 22 words or word usages not to be found elsewhere in the Greek Bible. Yet his use of Greek is unsophisticated, learned on the street rather than in the academy. There isn't a bit of complex sentence structure in the Book of Jude, not even so much as an "if...then" clause.

The friendships that Jude and his brothers acquired in Egypt no doubt extended into adulthood, with an occasional reunion with old friends, for Alexandria was one of the greatest sources of Jewish visitors to the Holy Land for great feasts such as the Passover. The occasion for the Book of Jude is a contact from the Holy Land to a Jewish church in Egypt that was struggling to take in some of its first non-Jewish Christians, who had very different ideas on how to relate to a supreme deity.

Next week we will take on the exploits of the 12-year-old boy Jesus.

Mary and the Manger

Jesus Appears on the Planet

But for this post, we'll see what that was like for Joseph and Mary.

Early Spring, 5 BC

Ah, Mary.
What do we know about Mary?
Mary was a young girl--a virgin--who had been betrothed to a man named Joseph.

She had been found to be "with child" even though she had never "known a man." Today's popular Christianity looks upon Joseph as a young single man getting married for the first time ever. But Christians of the first and second centuries knew of Joseph as a middle-aged or elderly man who was entering his second marriage, and already had four sons and two or three daughters. That's what we know from some of the earliest non-biblical writings of Christians.

From the tribal culture, some of which still existed among these descendants of a wandering Aramean people, we know that a second wife was customary for men who had become wealthy. A second home was constructed for the second  wife, who would start a second family for the wealthy man. But we see no indication of this among the available evidence.

Popular Christianity today looks upon Joseph as a poverty-stricken peasant. But Joseph was a carpenter by trade, who also owned a thirty-acre tract outside of Nazareth, which was dry-farmed by the family to bring in extra income. In this case we should probably assign Joseph and his family as part of the lower-middle class, just above the poverty level of non-landed peasants. If Joseph's first wife had died, perhaps in childbirth, Joseph would need a new wife to help him raise his many children.

Which brings us to the picture above. Here is Joseph with four sons and two daughters, on their way to Bethlehem to look for a place to stay for the eight of them while they register for the Roman tax rolls and pay their taxes. No wonder the inn-keeper had no room for them!

Angels and Announcements

Along with Mary, this ordinary family experienced some astounding events. The Archangel Gabriel had appeared to Mary to tell her that she would bear a son born of God. Joseph had a dream telling him to accept Mary and her child rather than to quietly divorce her. Shepherd boys showed up at Jesus' birth telling of a whole nighttime chorus of angels announcing that the Messiah -- the Lord -- had been born in Bethlehem. 

Shepherds of that time would watch their sheep by night in the early spring when lambs were being born. And Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod the Great, who died early in the year 4 BC. From these facts I propose that Jesus was born in the early Spring of 5 BC. (6 BC is also a possibility) His actual birthday is unknown, and December 25 is an unlikely date for his birth. But we as the church picked the 25th to celebrate his coming, in part to destroy an ancient pagan festival on that day.

On the eighth day after his birth, Jesus was circumcised in accordance with the Old Testament commandment. The painting below shows some unlikely growth for a baby less than eight days old. But it does show Joseph as an elderly man, which would be more correct. The other man in the painting may be the person appointed to perform ritual circumcision.

Forty days after his birth, Jesus was presented in the temple, as the first male to open the womb of Mary. Catholic and Orthodox belief is that Mary had no more children, and in fact no sexual relations with her husband Joseph. But the Bible is silent on this. Many Protestants believe that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were sons and daughters of Mary. But early church tradition places these as the offspring of Joseph's first wife. For further study, I recommend the book Jude and the Relatives of Jesus by Professor Richard Bauckham.

The Gospels Are Not History Books

The Gospels Aren't History Books!

Wait! ... What?  If the Gospels aren't history books, what good are they?
And what are they, anyway?

This seems a strange way to begin a blog series on the Life of Jesus. We were expecting a manger scene with the infant Jesus! But since this blog series will be primarily sourced from information found in the Gospels, it will be good to know exactly what the Gospels are. For that answer, we will sneak a peek into the back of the book. From John 20:30-31, we find this information:

Jesus did many miraculous signs which are not recorded in the Gospels. But those things that are recorded in them have been written in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Anointed One, the Son of God, and that through believing, you may have eternal life in the name of Jesus.

There it is. The Gospels are teaching instruments, to introduce you to Jesus the Anointed One (e.g., the Christ) and to show that he is the Son of God. They may contain much history about Jesus and his disciples, but their purpose is not to teach history, but to lead you into eternal life.

The Gospels do not necessarily tell their stories in direct chronological format. In fact, they tend to gather the teachings of Jesus into topics or subjects. In other words, the Gospels are not optimized to teach a linear account of what historically happened. Instead, they are optimized in a fashion that will lead you to believe. The four Gospels are also optimized to be understood by four discrete audiences living in the first century AD. But that is beyond our scope here.

A primary tool for this retelling of the story of Jesus will be a Harmony of the Gospels, an instrument which attempts to arrange the Gospel texts in chronological order. In very old Bibles, a harmony of the Gospels was often found in the back material after Revelation, alongside other helps such as topic indexes, money and weight and other measurements, a concordance showing  where to find certain words, and maps of ancient Bible lands.

My retelling is based on such a harmony, which I have expanded into a harmony of the entire Bible, both Old Testament and New, to enable readers to study the Bible in chronological order. I hope some day to publish this as a Chronological Study Guide to the Bible.

Other helpful sources are synoptic studies of the Gospels, which endeavor to compare texts from three or four Gospels which cover the same material. In these, the readings of the several Gospels are presented side by side so that the whole picture of the teaching or event can be appreciated. The sources available to me include Gospel Parallels by Burton Throckmorton, Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum (Synopsis of four Gospels in the original Greek) edited by Kurt Aland, and The Horizontal Line Synopsis of the Gospels, by Reuben Swanson.

Boring? Perhaps, but in these sources lie an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the Gospels. And next week, I promise that we'll start with that manger in the stable that you were expecting here.