Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

account of Jesus’s flight into Egypt, ostensibly
     to escape Herod’s massacre of all the sons born in and around Bethlehem in a fruitless
     search for the baby Jesus, an event for which there exists not a shred of corroborating
     evidence in any chronicle or history of the time whether Jewish, Christian, or Roman—a
     remarkable fact considering the many chronicles and narratives written about Herod
     the Great, who was, after all, the most famous Jew in the whole of the Roman Empire
     (the King of the Jews, no less!).
    As with Luke’s account of Quirinius’s census, Matthew’s account of Herod’s massacre
     was not intended to be read as what we would now consider
history
, certainly not by his own community, who would surely have remembered an event as
     unforgettable as the massacre of its own sons. Matthew needs Jesus to come out of
     Egypt for the same reason he needs him to be born in Bethlehem: to fulfill the scattered
     prophecies left behind by his ancestors for him and his fellow Jews to decipher, to
     place Jesus in the footsteps of the kings and prophets who came before him, and, most
     of all, to answer the challenge made by Jesus’s detractors that this simple peasant
     who died without fulfilling the single most important of the messianic prophecies—the
     restoration of Israel—was in fact the “anointed one.”
    The problem faced by Matthew and Luke is that there is simplyno single, cohesive prophetic narrative concerning the messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures.
     The passage from the gospel of John quoted above is a perfect example of the general
     confusion that existed among the Jews when it came to the messianic prophecies. For
     even as the scribes and teachers of the law confidently proclaim that Jesus could
     not be the messiah because he is not, as the prophecies demand, from Bethlehem, others
     in the crowd argue that the Nazarean could not be the messiah because the prophecies
     say “When the messiah comes, no one will know where he is from” (John 7:27).
    The truth is that the prophecies say
both
things. In fact, were one to take the advice given to the festival crowd by the skeptical
     Pharisee and “look into it,” one would discover a host of contradictory prophecies
     about the messiah, collected over hundreds of years by dozens of different hands.
     A great many of these prophecies are not even actually prophecies. Prophets such as
     Micah, Amos, and Jeremiah, who appear to be predicting the coming of a future salvific
     character from the line of King David that would one day restore Israel to its former
     glory, are in fact making veiled criticisms of their
current
king and the
present
order, which the prophets imply have fallen short of the Davidic ideal. (There is,
     however, one thing about which all the prophecies seem to agree: the messiah is a
     human being, not divine. Belief in a divine messiah would have been anathema to everything
     Judaism represents, which is why, without exception, every text in the Hebrew Bible
     dealing with the messiah presents him as performing his messianic functions on earth,
     not in heaven.) So then, if you wish to fit your preferred messianic candidate into
     this jumbled prophetic tradition, you must first decide which of the many texts, oral
     traditions, popular stories, and folktales you want to consider. How you answer that
     question depends largely on what it is you want to say about your messiah.
    Matthew has Jesus flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre not because it happened,
     but because it fulfills the words of the prophetHosea: “Out of Egypt I have called my son” (Hosea 11:1). The story is not meant to
     reveal any fact about Jesus; it is meant to reveal this truth: that Jesus is the new
     Moses, who survived Pharaoh’s massacre of the Israelites’ sons, and emerged from Egypt
     with a new law from God (Exodus 1:22).
    Luke places Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem not because it took place there, but because
     of the words of the prophet Micah: “And you Bethlehem … from you shall come to me
     a ruler in Israel” (Micah 5:2). Luke means that Jesus is the new David, the King of
     the Jews, placed on God’s throne to rule over the Promised Land. Simply put, the infancy
     narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read
     as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus’s status as the anointed of God.
     The descendant of King David. The promised