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The Flight into Egypt

After the departure of the Three Wise Men, Joseph is warned by an angel that he should take Mary and Jesus and flee into Egypt to escape the attentions of Herod. The Wise Men’s enquiries had alerted Herod to the birth of a ‘King of the Jews’ and he reacted strongly, fearing the threat of a rival. This was hardly surprising since his own position as King of Judaea was not strong: he was a stooge of the occupying Romans, and he was not even ethnically Jewish, despite being a Jew by religion. The Holy Family duly fled south, and returned only after Herod was dead. Even then, they chose to settle in the more northerly territory of Galilee, rather than in the kingdom of Judaea, which was by then ruled by Herod’s son.

This sequence of events is found only in Matthew’s Gospel. Luke has no reference to the Wise Men, the Flight into Egypt, or Herod’s subsequent Massacre of the Holy Innocents; and the Nativity does not figure at all in Mark or John. Matthew’s Gospel, written particularly for Christians from within the Jewish tradition, frames the story of Jesus’ life so that it is seen as a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. The story of the Flight into Egypt illustrates this: in chapter 2 v. 15 we read that the Holy Family remained in Egypt until the death of Herod ‘that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the prophet, saying, “Out of Egypt have I called my son” ’. The quotation is from Hosea 11 v. 1.

There are many historical inconsistencies in the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. But, leaving consideration of these aside, it is undoubtedly the case that, at this time, Egypt would have been the best place to go for refuge, if starting from Bethlehem. To the west lay the Mediterranean; to travel east would soon take one out of the Roman Empire and so into potentially hostile territory; to travel north would involve traversing most of Herod’s kingdom and moving into other puppet kingdoms, before reaching Syria, a military zone under the direct control of a Roman Governor, who actually also had final authority over Galilee, Samaria and Judaea.  Only by going south could one get out of the territory of Herod fairly quickly and into another jurisdiction within the Roman Empire – the province of Egypt which, unlike Judaea, was also independent of the Governor of Syria.

Many legends grew up around the Flight into Egypt and it is often these that are represented in painting and sculpture. There is, after all, no detail in Matthew’s account, and yet people clamoured for information about what happened. In the western tradition of Christianity the most influential apocryphal account is that in the  Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which was perhaps written in Latin round about the eighth century, although its earliest surviving manuscript is from the eleventh. This describes how lions and panthers accompanied the fleeing family, bowing in humility before the Christ-child, and how, at Jesus’s command, palm trees bowed down so that Mary could reach their fruit and be refreshed by it. These and other such stories from Pseudo-Matthew were included in one of the most famous and influential of all medieval books, the Golden Legend, a collection of holy stories assembled in the thirteenth century, and so the apocryphal details of the Flight into Egypt became common knowledge. The eastern church was no different: there, the Flight into Egypt also has a long artistic tradition, and there are imaginatively elaborated narratives in apocryphal writings such as the Syriac Infancy Gospels and the rich traditions of the Coptic Christians of Egypt.

Joyce Hill