death all the members of the Sanhedrin who, during the siege of Jerusalem, had taken part against him and his Roman allies; Aristobulus, his brother-in-law, the son of Alexandra, was drowned by his orders in a bath at Jericho; he gave over to the executioner, under a false pretence of treason, old Hyrcanus, the last of the Asmonaeans;1 he unjustly suspected Mariamne, one of his wives, and she had to die. The intrigues of Pheroras and Salome aroused his suspicion in regard to his two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus: he ordered them to be strangled. As he grew old he became more cruel and stern; the Pharisees, exasperated by his irreligious and anti-national policy, plotted a revolution; he seized the two chiefs, Judas and Matthias, and had them burnt alive.3 When he saw that all Jerusalem was moved by the thought of a Deliverer who was born, the old despot at once resolved to seize and put him to death. But his satellites tried in vain to discover the child. Bethlehem was the object of secret search; the violence of Herod grew with failure; he did not shrink from radical and revolting measures. He who had marked by murder almost every year of his reign, who just before his death caused the murder of his own son; who, when he saw his end approaching, and believing that none would lament at his funeral, ordered the massacre of the principal generals in the district of Jericho; now commanded the massacre of all the children at the breast in Bethlehem and the country round about. He was the typical example of an angry and ferocious tyrant. The hill where Rachel had been buried was stained with blood and wet with tears; the cries of the mothers filled the valleys. It is necessary to have seen Eastern mourning, to have heard 1 Antiq. xv. 9. the cries and sobs round newly-opened graves, in order to imagine the distress of the women who refused to be comforted because their children were not. Herod, after the murder of the sucklings of Bethlehem, might sleep in peace; he thought he had stifled in blood the increasing hopes of the people; but he was deceived. Herod succeeded only in tracing a bloody aureole round the cradle of Jesus; who was thus escorted by a spotless band of martyrs. Others by thousands were to follow these slaughtered innocents; the path of Christ across humanity is a way of blood; all who would follow the Crucified are devoted, like him, to deadly persecution in this world, where no one has been more opposed than God himself. Jesus escaped from the wrath of Herod; for after the wise men had departed, Joseph was warned of God. The same voice which had before spoken to him, in a dream, on the eve of his marriage, now spoke again: “Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him. When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt." The Gospel tells us nothing of the incidents of this long journey, nor in what part of Egypt the fugitives abode. The only detail they give us is about the length of the sojourn: "They remained until the death of Herod." Legend, on the other hand, is extremely fanciful, and the apocryphal Gospels are full of marvels during the exile of the child Jesus. Wild beasts, lions and panthers, became gentle as lambs before him, palm-trees bowed as he passed; flowers sprang where he trod, wells spouted forth in the desert to slake his thirst, roads grew shorter and distances were as nothing; the idols broke as he drew near, the devils fled, the possessed were freed, and the Child-God multiplied wonders around him which betrayed his Godhead. 1 Matt. ii. 13. History cannot accept these strange tales, and the Church has never sanctioned them. Ancient traditions, still current in the Coptic Church in Egypt, tell us that the holy family halted under the sycamores of Heliopolis, near the well of Matarea, and dwelt at first at the entry of Memphis, in old Cairo. There is still to be seen there a very ancient church, built in memory of the abode of Jesus; the Coptic Christians worship there, and do not fail to show visitors to the crypt the three arcades sacred to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The flight into Egypt not only saved the threatened life of Jesus, but began to spread around and over him the silence and peace which were never again to be broken until the day of his great strife. The star of the wise men disappeared, the voices of the prophets were still, heaven was veiled, the humble family lost in the crowd; the father and mother alone kept, as a hidden treasure, the mystery of Jesus. The following year, 750-751, Herod died; but Joseph, established with his own people in the Jewish colony of Memphis, was in no haste to return to Judaea. Warned by inspiration to go back to the land of Israel, he left Egypt with the child and his mother; but learning that Archelaus, the new king of Judaea, continued the oppressive and impious policy of his father,' he judged it prudent not to remain there. Galilee and Peraea were better ruled; they had as their tetrarch Antipas,2 another son of Herod. This prince, who loved luxury, and was, moreover, of a kindly nature, had undertaken to build two towns, Tiberias and Julias, and he endeavoured, by the gentleness and liberality of his government, by the splendour of public edifices and many material advantages, to draw to himself the greatest possible number of inhabitants from the neighbouring provinces. 1 Antiq. xvii. 9. 2 Antiq. xvii. II. It was revealed to Joseph in a dream that he was to retire to Galilee; he returned therefore to Nazareth, where he took up his abode. In this little province, so despised by the Jews that it was proverbially incapable of producing anything good, Jesus grew, unknown. He was to be called a Nazarene, a name1 recalling an idea and expression familiar to the prophets when they spoke of the Messiah: "Behold the man," said Zechariah," whose name is The Branch;" 2 and Jeremiah had already said: "I will raise up to David a righteous Branch," and Isaiah, first of all, had seen "A Branch grow out of the roots of Jesse." And, indeed, not out of the roots of Jesse and David, but out of the roots of the human race, no Branch ever flourished like unto Jesus of Nazareth.5 The word used by Jeremiah and Zechariah is not Netzer, but Tzemach; but the meaning is the same. CHAPTER IV. HISTORICAL NATURE OF THE MIRACULOUS NARRATIVES OF THE BIRTH AND INFANCY OF JESUS. The THE history of the birth of Jesus has a supernatural character which nothing can weaken or disguise. personal intervention of God is at once its crown and support. The Divine Spirit took the sovereign initiative, revealed himself under different ways to the consciences of the elect, called them, commanded them, moved them at his pleasure, and they freely did his will. He who, in this unique instant of history, chooses to see only the play of forces of nature and mankind, will never penetrate the mystery of Christ; for he forgets God, the supreme motive force which subdues nature and mankind to associate them with his designs. All the opponents of the miraculous, partisans of exclusive science; rationalists, pantheists, materialists, positivists, or sceptics, strike out of history and treat as legends or poetical narratives the Gospel of the Infancy, as St. Matthew and St. Luke have delivered it to us; they see in these narratives only an ordinary event, embellished by sentiment and imagination, like all births of illustrious men in ancient times. The only historic fact, according to their system, can be stated in one line: Jesus was born in Palestine, in the reign of Augustus. |