Flight into Egypt
Soon after the visit by the Magi, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream telling him to flee to Egypt with Mary and the infant Jesus since King Herod would seek the child to kill him.
Herod is believed to have died in 4 BC, and while Matthew does not mention how, the Jewish historian Josephus vividly relates a gory death.
Historically, Archelaus was such a violent and aggressive king that in the year 6 AD he was deposed by the Romans, in response to complaints from the population.
Thus according to the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, "Hosea 11.1 points back to the Exodus, where God's 'first-born son' (Ex 4:22), Israel, was delivered from slavery under the oppressive Pharaoh.
Matthew sees this text also pointing forward, when Jesus, the eternal first-born Son (Rom 8:29), is delivered from the tyrant Herod and later brought out of Egypt (2:21).
The flight of the Holy Family to nearby Egypt until after Herod's death, and the reason for their settling in Galilee on their return, apart altogether from Luke's information that Nazareth was their home, are also circumstantially probable.
"[11] In their commentary on Matthew in the Anchor Bible Series, W. F. Albright and C. S. Mann state that "there is no reason to doubt the historicity of the story of the family's flight into Egypt.
The Old Testament abounds in references to individuals and families taking refuge in Egypt, in flight either from persecution or revenge, or in the face of economic pressure.
"[Joseph's] choice of Egypt as a place of exile ... was in line with the practice of other Palestinians who feared reprisals from the government; as a neighbouring country with a sizeable Jewish population it was an obvious refuge.
One of the most extensive and, in Eastern Christianity, influential accounts of the Flight appears in the perhaps seventh-century Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, in which Mary, tired by the heat of the sun, rested beneath a palm tree.
The Flight into Egypt was a popular subject in art, showing Mary with the baby on a donkey, led by Joseph, borrowing the older iconography of the rare Byzantine Journey to Bethlehem.
The family were often accompanied by angels, and in earlier images sometimes an older boy who may represent James the Brother of the Lord, interpreted as a son of Joseph, by a previous marriage.
[23] The background to these scenes usually (until the Council of Trent tightened up on such additions to scripture) included a number of apocryphal miracles, and gave an opportunity for the emerging genre of landscape painting.
In the Miracle of the idol a pagan statue fell from its plinth as the infant Jesus passed by, and a spring gushed up from the desert (originally separate, these are often combined).
In other less commonly seen legends, a group of robbers abandoned their plan to rob the travelers, and a date palm tree bent down to allow them to pluck the fruit.
Unusually, the 18th century artist Gianbattista Tiepolo produced a whole series of etchings with 24 scenes from the flight, most just showing different views of the Holy Family travelling.
The "Flight into Egypt" was a favorite theme of Henry Ossawa Tanner, depicting the Holy Family's clandestine evasion of King Herod's assassins (Matthew 2:12–14).
In it Tanner expresses his sensitivity to issues of personal freedom, escape from persecution, and migrations of African-Americans from the South to the North.
The oratorio L'enfance du Christ (1854) by French composer Hector Berlioz relates the events from Herod's dream and his meeting with the Magi through the angels' warning and the flight into Egypt until the Holy Family arrive at Sais.
Nazareth, now a town, is not mentioned by the Old Testament, Josephus or rabbinical sources,[32] though many Christian Bible archaeologists, such as the evangelical and egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen, state that they are fairly sure that a village existed in the area at the time of Jesus.
[35] In Coptic Christianity, it is also held that the Holy family visited many areas in Egypt, including Musturud (where there is now the Church of the Virgin Mary), Wadi El Natrun (which has four large monasteries), and Old Cairo,[36] along with Farama, Tel Basta, Samanoud, Bilbais, Samalout, Maadi, Al-Maṭariyyah,[37] Arganus[38] and Asiut among others.
Thus Socrates, when he was asked what countryman he was, replied, “A citizen of the world.”[42] Justus Knecht notes that the flight shows The Omniscience of God, writing, "God knew that in the morning Herod would send soldiers to Bethlehem, to slay the little boys under two years old; therefore He ordered St. Joseph to flee in the middle of the night.
