As with Luke’s account of Quirinius’s census, Matthew’s account of Herod’s massacre was not intended to be read as what we would now consider history, certainly not by his own community, who would surely have remembered an event as unforgettable as the massacre of its own sons.

Matthew needs Jesus to come out of Egypt for the same reason he needs him to be born in Bethlehem: to fulfill the scattered prophecies left behind by his ancestors for him and his fellow Jews to decipher, to place Jesus in the footsteps of the kings and prophets who came before

him, and, most of all, to answer the challenge made by Jesus’s detractors that this simple peasant who died without fulfilling the single most important of the messianic prophecies—the restoration of Israel—was in fact the “anointed one.”