Flight into Egypt
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
The flight into Egypt describes an event in the Gospel of Matthew, in which Joseph fled to Egypt with his wife Mary and Jesus, after the visit of the magi, having been warned by an angel that Herod had planned a massacre in order to kill Jesus, because a prophesy seemed to say that Jesus may grow up to be a threat to Herod's throne. Matthew is repeatedly careful to describe Joseph only as the husband of Jesus's mother, rather than as Jesus's father. Egypt was the logical place to seek refuge, as it was outside the dominions of King Herod, and throughout the Old Testament it was the standard place of exile for those unsafe in Palestine. At the time in which the story of the flight is set, both Egypt and Palestine were part of the Roman Empire, making travel between them easy and relatively safe.
Matthew 2:13–23 is the only biblical reference to this flight, although there are many traditions about it reported in the New Testament apocrypha. These later works have a number of miraculous stories occurring on the voyage, with, for example, palm trees bowing before the infant Jesus, the beasts of the desert paying him homage, and an encounter with the two thieves that would later be crucified alongside Jesus; the story of the palm trees is also recounted in the Quran (Sura 19:24). In these later tales the family are joined by Salome as Jesus' nurse. Matthew gives little detail about Jesus' family's time in Egypt, but there are a number of apocryphal tales filling in this period. These stories of the time in Egypt have been especially important to the Coptic Church, which is based in Egypt.
Throughout Egypt there are a number of churches and shrines that claim to mark an area where the family stayed. The most important of these is the church of Abu Serghis that claims to be built on the place the family had its home.
[edit] Textual criticism
That the Gospel of Luke does not mention this sojourn at all and rather has Jesus in a town named Nazareth has inspired a number of attempts to reconcile the two gospels. At the time, Egypt included Gaza, only a few miles from Bethlehem, and some evangelicals view the passage as only describing an unremarkable journey to Gaza. Some speculate that the journey was only to El Arish, which was then called Rhinokoloura in Greek. However, at the time "Egypt" generally referred to the Nile Valley, and most readers of the time would have interpreted the term much the same way most modern scholars read it — that the family are described as going to the Nile.
Why Matthew includes this journey to Egypt has been debated by scholars. Stendhal's interpretation of the passage is that it is a lengthy justification for how Jesus could have grown up in a minor and little known town in Galilee, and still have been born in Bethlehem, a town of great religious importance. However, travelling via Egypt does little to advance this justification, and so many scholars see Matthew as inventing the tale to spin Jesus as a second Moses, but in some ways reversed, so that while a young Moses flees Egypt to sojourn in Judah until his enemies have died and then returning, Jesus flees Judah for Egypt until his enemies have died, and then return. Amongst those who seek to uphold the passage as historical, France feels that the trip to Egypt is part of Matthew's greater interest in geography — while the magi cover the eastern world, Egypt is required to cover the remainder.
[edit] The prophecy of Hosea
That the flight will eventually result in return to Judah is described as fulfilling the enigmatic prophecy that Out of Egypt I called my son. This is a quote from Hosea (11:1), although it is not a direct quote as it is taken completely out of context and Hosea actually writes Out of Egypt I called my children. Rather than a prophecy, Hosea is simply describing the events of the Exodus, which had already happened; but many prophecies are hold to have more than one application. However, amongst the fundamentalists, those who support the doctrine of sensus plenior have argued that the traditional view of Hosea must be wrong, and that the piece must actually a prophecy, with the author of Hosea not necessarily having been aware that he was writing a prophecy, but divine spirit ensuring that this secondary meaning was included.
[edit] The return
After a while, Joseph and the others are described as returning to Egypt, their enemies having died. Herod is believed to have died in 4 BC, and while Matthew doesn't mention how, the Jewish historian Josephus vividly relates the gory death. The main point of contention with this passage is why it refers to multiple people being dead when the only one of the figures, previously identified as an enemy, to have died was Herod. While in earlier passages Herod colludes with the Jewish leaders to kill Jesus, it is very unlikely that all the leaders would died in such a brief period, and historical records of the time are quite adamant that the leaders did not die in this period, and continued to hold office, quite definitely as living people. A number of explanations have been advanced to explain this problem, with some proposing that there was a secondary figure that was the other enemy, and that this other figure died at the time.
Most scholars believe that Matthew deliberately portrays Jesus as a second Moses, paralleling the events of Moses' life, and hence the passage derives from Exodus 4:19, where there the enemies which have died are plural. Brown however, seeking to hold Matthew as a more accurate record, sees such copying as an unlikely explanation, instead arguing that the author of Matthew would be competent enough to change to the singular if he had so desired. Brown instead argues that the should be translated as the plot by those who wanted to kill the child is dead, referring to the plot as being dead, rather than those who plotted to kill the child are dead.
The land they return to is identified as Israel, the only place in the entire New Testament where Israel unambiguously acts as a geographic description of the whole of Judah and Galilee, rather than as referring to a collection of religious people or the Jewish people in general. It is however Judah that they are described as initially returning to, although upon discovering that Archelaus had become the new king of Judah, they fled to Galilee. Historically, Archelaus was such a violent and aggressive king that in year 6 he was deposed by the Romans, in response to complaints from the population. Galilee was ruled by a much calmer king, Herod Antipas, and there is historical evidence that Galilee had become a refuge for those fleeing the iron rule of Archelaus.
In the passage in Matthew Archelaus is described as if he were a king, but unlike Herod, his father, Archelaus was only an ethnarch, and so most scholars, even fundamentalist ones, consider this to be clear-cut factual inaccuracy. There have, however, also been several attempts to explain this discrepancy, with Jones proposing that since the position of ethnarch was only given to Archelaus six months after he had come into power, he may have referred to himself as a king before this point.
While Matthew spends a great deal of effort explaining why Jesus grows up in central Galilee, when he was born in central Judah, Luke behaves the opposite, offering no account of any flight via Egypt, but giving a complicated explanation of why the family were in Bethlehem when Jesus was born. To justify the discrepancy, particularly to explain how Matthew could appear to present Joseph as being from Bethlehem, when Luke clearly places him as coming from central Galilee, evangelicals such as France state that Matthew has chosen not to include an explanation due to typical avoidance of unnecessary detail.
[edit] Nazarenes, Nazareth, and Nazarites
While Luke places Jesus' family as being originally from the town of Nazareth, Matthew has the family moving there, though gives no specific reason for why they did so. Nazareth, now a town, was unmentioned in any writings before this time, 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[1], though their religious biases may have a large part to play in this certainty. Clarke notes that the location of Nazareth is just to the north of where the large town Sepphoris was located. At the time, Sepphoris had been largely destroyed in the violence following the death of Herod the Great, and was being rebuilt by Herod Antipas, hence Clarke speculates that this could have been seen as a good source of employment by Joseph, a carpenter.
The difficulty with the brief quote he will be called a Nazarene is that it occurs nowhere in the Old Testament, or any other extant source. At the time the canon was not firmly established and it is possible that Matthew is quoting some lost source, although all the other quotations in Matthew are from well known works and if a prophecy so closely pointing to the town that Jesus grew up in existed, it would be likely to have been preserved by Christianity.
The most similar known passage is Judges 13:5 where of Samson it says the child shall be a Nazirite, where a nazirite was a specific type of religious ascetic. That the Nazirite and Nazareth are so similar in name, while Nazareth isn't mentioned in any other source until after the Gospels have been written, and that the passage almost parallels one about the birth of a hero that was a Nazarite, has lead many to propose that Matthew originally had Jesus being a Nazarite, but it was changed to Nazarene, inventing a location named Nazareth, when the ascetic requirements fell foul of later religious practices. Other scholars such as France reject this explanation, stating that Jesus was not a nazirite and claiming that he is never described as one.
Another theory is that it is based on a prophecy at Isaiah 53:2, which states that he grew up before him like a tender shoot — the Hebrew for shoot is nasir. While this piece of wordplay is meaningless in Greek, Hebrew wordplay is not unknown in Matthew, and so Goulder has proposed that the author of Matthew felt a need to justify as much as possible by prophecy, so looked for the closest thing he could find, which was this verse.
[edit] See also
[edit] Children's misunderstandings
Here, the word "flight" means "act of fleeing". But countless modern younger English-speaking children know the word "flight" only as "act of flying", and as a result, when asked to make a drawing or painting of the Flight into Egypt, some of them show the journey as being anachronistically by airplane. This misunderstanding is a major problem in school religion classes. This error is encouraged by the usual English-speakers' habit of spelling Pontius Pilatus's surname as "Pilate", pronounced the same as "pilot".
[edit] External links
- The use of Hosea 11:1 in [http://php.ug.cs.usyd.edu.au/~jnot4610/bibref.php?book=%20Matthew&verse=2:15&src=31 Matthew 2:15 (warning - pdf)]
- John Calvin's commentary on Matthew 2:19
[edit] References
- Albright, W.F. and C.S. Mann. "Matthew." The Anchor Bible Series. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1971.
- Brown, Raymond E. The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke. London: G. Chapman, 1977.
- Clarke, Howard W. The Gospel of Matthew and its Readers: A Historical Introduction to the First Gospel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
- France, R.T. The Gospel According to Matthew: an Introduction and Commentary. Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1985.
- France, R.T. "The Formula Quotations of Matthew 2 and the Problem of Communications." New Testament Studies. Vol. 27, 1981.
- Goulder, M.D. Midrash and Lection in Matthew. London: SPCK, 1974.
- Gundry, Robert H. Matthew a Commentary on his Literary and Theological Art. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982.
- Jones, Alexander. The Gospel According to St. Matthew. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1965.
- Schweizer, Eduard. The Good News According to Matthew. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975
