It's that time of year to find the slimmest grain of truth in the highly improbable nativity story,
so that the fact of some person or locale actually existing brings credence to a tale of angels and virgin births and wise men and baby gods.
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...its GANDALF!
...I hear it's da' balm....
ba dum bump....
(I'm killin' myself here)....
don't make no sense.
TL;DR, get your scrolling finger ready.
All quotes from Matthew Chapter 2. As others have noted, most NT Nativity stories disagree with each other anyway, so it doesn't much matter where we get our source material:
Matthew 2:3 When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.
2:4 - 2:8 Herod tries to con the Wise Men into finding Baby Jesus and bringing him back to the palace.
Ah, good ol' Herod the Great, Lex Luthor to the Xian Superman, Baby Jesus. Judeans hated Herod for several reasons - he was an illegal immigrant to Judea, originally hailing from Idumea. Herod tried to fix that problem when he married his second wife, Mariamne, one of the last surviving heirs to the powerful Hasomenean dynasty of Judea. Surviving until Herod killed her, that is, along with two of his own sons.
Herod also had very close ties to Rome, a sure way to piss off Judeans at that time. His father Antipater was one of the richest merchants in Palestine. When Julius Caesar jumped into the Egyptian civil war on the side of his girlfriend Cleopatra VII, Antipater was one of the very few people willing to help the Romans. Antipater not only collected money for Caesar, he sent him reinforcements of 3000 Jewish soldiers. (For which Caesar thanked him profusely in his book "The Alexandrian Wars."
Unfortunately, Herod was mostly written up by two historians who hated his guts - Flavius Josephus and Philo of Alexandria. But Philo got his stories second-hand from people fleeing Judea for Egypt, and Josephus was writing many years after the fact.
In his defense, Herod ruled Judea for a long time, keeping the peace and collecting the taxes. He also built one of the greatest engineering projects of his time, the deep-water port at Caesarea.
2-9 When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.
Nah. Stars don't do that.
2:13 And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.
All the rigamarole about Egypt is, like most of the Nativity story, an attempt to fulfill various Old Testament prophecies. When I lived in Egypt, I read about umpteen holy shrines, oases, mountains, camel stalls, etc. etc. etc. where the Holy Family supposedly stopped during their flight. Sort of the equivalent of the American "George Washington Slept Here" tourist con.
Everyone of these places had some long-winded quote blessing it, supposedly uttered by Jesus Himself. Who was an infant at the time, let's remember, and probably not toddling around making too many long speeches.
2:16 Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.
As mentioned above, Philo and Josephus practically recorded every burp and fart of Herod The Great. They absolutely hated the guy, yet neither of them bothered to mention the Slaughter of the Judean Rug-Rats.
Also, Herod served strictly at the pleasure of the Romans. Who just wanted to keep the peace and collect the taxes. If Herod had ordered the massacre of all those babies, the Romans would have yanked him out of office in a heartbeat.
According to Josephus, the Romans nearly did that over a single death - when Herod's brother-in-law Aristobulos drowned. Since the words "accidental death" and "Herod" did not naturally occur together, Aristobulos' mother asked Cleopatra VII to intervene. Cleopatra turned it over to Mark Antony, who sent for Herod and personally interrogated him. And let him go, when Antony was satisfied the death was accidental.
2:22 But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee.
Herod Archelaus deserves a mention because he sort of disproves the Xian propaganda about the Judeans groaning under the oppressive, totalitarian rule of the Romans.
Archelaus must have inherited the Asshole Gene from his father. He managed to bring together two groups of people who loathed each other - the Judeans and their neighbors the Samaritans, who worshipped a slightly different god.
The two peoples formed a joint committee and complained about Archelaus to the Roman governor in Syria (i.e., the boss of Pontius Pilate et. al).
And what did the Romans do? According to Isaac Asimov's "Guide to the Bible," they exiled Archelaus to a spot about as far away from Judea as they could possibly put him - the Roman fortress town of Vindobona. Better known today as Vienna, Austria.
