Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. Read Free Page B

priests and the scribes of the people together” and asked them to indicate from the scriptures where the king, or savior, or Christ, as prophesied, would be born. They replied: Bethlehem. Herod saw the wise men “privily” and sent them to Bethlehem: “Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.”
    The wise men, and their story of the newborn baby who was to be king of the Jews, aroused all Herod’s paranoia. Matthew says that “being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.” Joseph, too, was warned in a dream that he, Mary, and the child were endangered by Herod. He was told, “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.” Joseph did as he was told. The “flight into Egypt” has become another of those memorable episodes which has inspired artists over the ages—it is the subject of Caravaggio’s finest work, now in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome. The little party is seen resting. Joseph holds up a musical score for a young angel to play a lullaby, while Mary and the baby sleep.
    Herod’s terror that the infant king would steal his kingdom led to his greatest crime in his long life of misdeeds. He dispatched armed assassins “and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under” (Mt 2 : 16). It was his last act. Within weeks he was dead. His territories were divided, and his son Archelaus inherited Judaea. Joseph was told this, and returned with his family. But he was careful to avoid Judaea, for fear Archelaus would have inherited his father’s suspicious nature, and returned to Nazareth in Galilee by a roundabout route, through Gaza and Samaria.
    The story of the birth of Jesus, and the visits of the shepherds and the wise men, is the idyllic side of the Nativity, giving Jesus’s infancy a delightful storybook quality which has entranced everyone, young and old, for two thousand years. But the massacre of the innocents, as it came to be known, reminds us of the darker side of life in an obscure province of the Roman Empire in the first century AD: the atrocious, unbridled cruelty of power, the absence in practice of any rule of law to restrain the powerful, and the contempt for human life, even the tenderest, shown by the mighty. This was the reality of human wickedness which Jesus was born to redress, against which he spoke, and which finally engulfed him. The massacre of the innocents is a foretaste of Calvary.
    Some few people could see into this future, as is recorded in Luke (1 : 13-23, 59-65). He writes that Elizabeth’s husband, Zacharias, was skeptical when the angel Gabriel told him that his elderly wife was pregnant with the future John the Baptist, and as punishment was struck dumb. But when the child was born and taken to be circumcised, Elizabeth refused to name him after his father and insisted he be called John. Her neighbors and cousins protested: “There is none of thy kindred that is called by this name. And they made signs to his father, how he would have him called.” To their astonishment, Zacharias “asked for a writing table, and wrote: saying, His name is John. And they marvelled all.” More remarkable still, “his mouth was opened immediately, and his tongue loosed, and he spake, and praised God.” But, as with so many incidents in the story of Jesus, this happy tale is overshadowed by the threatening world surrounding it. News of the remarkable birth must have spread and reached Herod’s ever-suspicious ears. An ancient tradition, published by the early fathers, such as Origen, says Herod had Zacharias slaughtered “between the temple and the altar.” So he is venerated as an early martyr.
    There was another old priest who did duty