Matthew 2:13–18 says Joseph learnt in a dream that Herod would kill the baby and so took off to Egypt just in time to miss the massacre of the innocents of Bethlehem by Herod, who sure enough decreed the murder of all children under two years old. Joseph heeded the divine warning, and fled as directed, only returning after Herod had died.

Such a massacre and hiding of a child of great promise from the wrath of a king is one of the oldest themes in mythology. Many of the infant saviours were threatened with death and yet were miraculously preserved—the saviour saved! The tyrant king or ruler of the country usually feared the young god, by his superior power and goodness, would prove a rival king, and so took measures to destroy him. It has already happened in the Christian bible. Turn to Exodus (1:15-22):

And the King of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives… And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the stools, if it be a son, then ye shall kill him.

There was an angel warning about the impending danger. And so Moses was, like Sargon of Babylon a thousand years before, hidden in an ark of bulrushes on the river. Herodotus, the Greek historian, tells us that King Cyrus of Persia had similarly to be hidden away at birth from a jealous king, and every Jew knew the story of Cyrus. Suetonius, the Roman historian, gives a similar legend about the birth of the Emperor Augustus. The wholesale “massacre” alone is peculiar to the Jesus story and that horrible detail is enough of itself to damn it. No Roman or Jewish writer ever heard of the horror.

Not one writer of that age, or of any nation, makes any mention of Herod’s massacre even when they are listing crimes. Even the Rabbinical writers who detail his wicked life so minutely, fail to record such an atrocious act, which must have been published far and wide. Josephus, a Jew contemporaneous with Matthew, who records all the crimes of Herod, does not mention this atrocity (about fourteen thousand in number) in Judæa. Roman historians who give us any account of Herod’s character do not say anything about any such deed. Nor does Luke, who has a reputation among theologians as a good historian. Nevertheless the story places the nativity in the reign of Herod the Great, 37 to 4 BC, and so Jesus was born sometime before 4 AD.

Dionysos Exiguus, a sixth century monk, calculated the year of Herod’s death and assumed it was also the year of Jesus’s birth. Unfortunately his calculation was four years out and so our calendar has been ever since. Herod’s death is now recorded as 4 BC rather than 1 AD as it would have been if the monk were correct.

In any case was he right to assume Jesus was born in the same year that Herod died? For it to be true, Jesus must have been born before Christians think he was. Herod died in 4 BC when the holy family was already hiding in Egypt where they had fled to escape him, according to Matthew. When they fled, Jesus was no longer a new born child, because Herod had been looking for boys up to the age of two. The implications are that Jesus was born before 4 BC and possibly even before 6 BC to allow time for fleeing, the infant to be up to two years old and an indeterminate number of years abroad.

Since Herod was an old man when he heard the news of the birth of his rival—not less than sixty-eight according to Josephus—he could hardly have been worried about an infant rival. By the time the infant was adult Herod would have been dead. Nor can it be argued that he worried for the sovereignty of his children, who he treated abysmally, if he allowed them to survive at all.

The elements of truth in the story of Herod are that he was an ogre and that at this time Herod suppressed the Essenes. He literally did murder thousands of children but they were the same Children as those of the gospels. They were not infants but the Children or Sons of Israel, meaning the Jews. And he certainly was paranoid because the children he could correctly be accused of murdering were his own children—some of his own sons who he feared as rivals—but they were adults when murdered.

Josephus says the Essenes were favoured by Herod because one of them, Menehem, had accurately prophesied that Herod would be king. They were allowed not to make an oath of fealty to him unlike all other Jews except Pharisees. Essenes would not, of course, recognize any Lord but God and, short of butchering them all, Herod perhaps had no choice. Josephus relates this tale immediately before he describes Herod’s reconstruction of the temple in 19 AD even though the event itself occurred twenty years before—even before Herod became king. The association of the favouring of the Essenes with the construction of the temple implies that Herod sought the Essenes’ support in his project which was initially unpopular.

The help he might have needed was an army of priests trained as masons to build the sacred inner buildings, the holy of holies and its approach. Bribed with the promise that the Zadokites would be established as the accepted priesthood, it seems the Essenes agreed only later to find they had been tricked. Assembling the materials must have taken a year or so, the construction of the inner buildings took eighteen months and the outer cloisters another eight years, but the surrounding porticoes and the immense platform supporting the temple courts took many more years to build. The Essenes might have been fobbed off with Herod’s excuses for not instating them during the eight year period but surely for no longer and so they could have fallen out of favour between about 15 and 8 BC.

Luke 2:1–7 tells us Caesar Augustus decreed a taxation and associates the birth with the necessary census. Matthew has no record of there being a census and no census in the reign of Augustus is known in Judæa near the supposed year of Jesus’s birth, though there certainly was one about 6 or 7 AD conducted by Quirinius, Legate of Syria, putting Jesus’s birth date at least ten years later than Matthew. Such a late date means either that Jesus was crucified at the age of 30 in the year that Pilate was recalled, or that he was younger than 30 when he died. If the length of his ministry in John is correct, Jesus must then have been only around 25 when he started his ministry. And, if the census was that of 6 AD it is not clear why Jesus’s family had to be assessed for tax by the Romans when Quirinius taxed Judæa since they lived in Galilee and Galilee was not ruled by the Romans but by the puppet king Herod Antipas. Furthermore Roman custom was to register people for a census at their place of residence not at their place of birth which would impose absurd burdens on people who had established themselves elsewhere, and many enterprising Jews had done this even in those distant times.

Christian apologists try to explain all this by asserting without sure foundation there was another census ten or fourteen years earlier—from Augustus, Romans carried out a census every fourteen years in their dominions—and indeed Herod could have agreed to a census when the Jews were persuaded to pay tribute to Rome. This takes us again to about 8 BC by which time the Essenes had fallen out of favour with Herod, and Jesus’s family was fleeing to Egypt in Matthew. It is also about the time that Qumran began to be reoccupied after several decades of desertion. Indeed Egypt might have been Essene code for Qumran. It all ties together but there is no evidence for the earlier census. Why, for example, doesn’t Matthew mention it? And why was there no rebellion when the earlier taxation was imposed as there was for the later one? The Essenes would certainly have been opposed to it.

We have to admit that there is no solid evidence about when Jesus was born, though it was before 4 BC when Herod died. Christian clergymen teach the children in their charge the dates of Jesus’s life as if they were certain of it. Perhaps when the children are a little older the priests admit that no one really knows, but then they say it does not really matter. For professional Christians, truth does not matter. Only God’s truth matters. What then is God’s truth but pious lies?

If Matthew was written in Alexandria in Egypt, his birth narrative is merely a little touch to humour the large Jewish population of the city, suggesting that the Son of God was sheltered in Egypt, presumably by Egyptian Jews. An angel and a dream save the baby saviour from massacre. It was not new! The same methods had earlier rescued other heroes.The story is the same as that of Abraham who Nimrod attempted to murder by killing all the infants in the land, the Jewish first born in Egypt who were threatened by the Pharaoh to eliminate Moses, and Hadad, who fled to Egypt when Joab tried to account for him by killing all the men of Edom. Suetonius says that the Roman Senate tried to get rid of the baby Octavius, (the Emperor Augustus) in the same way. Matthew wants to show Jesus as the equal of Moses and so exalts him by giving him an equal history.

The story of the popular Hindu deity, Krishna, is strikingly similar in nearly every feature. It is so close in some details that earlier scholars thought that these were derived from an early Christian mission to India. Modern scholars reject the idea, and they wonder only if some parts of the Christ and the Krishna legend did not come from a common source, a source which some find in the legends about the Persian King Cyrus given by the Greek historian Herodotus.

The Hindu branch of the Hindu and Persian race, the eastern part of the Aryan race, lost the severity of the original religion, and developed its phallic and sensual elements. Buddhism failed and the cult of Krishna gained in popularity until it appealed more than any other of the numerous religions of India. It flourished in India two or three centuries before Christ, but no one is sure whether there is a historical person at the root of it, as in the cases of Buddhism and Jesus.

The legend of Krishna is that he was born of a married woman, Devaki, but like Maya, Buddha’s mother, she was considered to have had a miraculous conception. King Kansa was warned in a vision that the son of Devaki would destroy him, and take his place, and the child had at once to be taken away out of reach of the monarch. The king had Devaki’s earlier children put to death (“murder of the innocents”), and Krishna had to be saved, as King Cyrus was saved from the King of the Medes and Moses from the King of Egypt. Krishna, moreover, gave signs of his real divine origin soon after his birth and in his boyhood. In the end Krishna—who is most unchristlike in his amorous adventures among the milkmaids, which endear him to the unascetic Hindu—killed King Kansa, took his place, and wrought marvelous things for his people.

A familiar religious emblem of India was the statue of the virgin mother, Devaki and her divine son Krishna, an incarnation of the great god Vishnu. Christians say the story was taken from Christianity, but, if the Hindus were to adopt any foreign model for their own gods, they had extensive contact with Egypt and Isis and Horus would be models rather than the hero of some minute and unimportant sect of a minute and unimportant people. In fact mother and child images are age old in religion and probably go back to Mother Goddess religions.

Among features in common is the angel warning, and Krishna’s angel was not only thoughtful enough to warn the parents to flee, but informed the tyrant ruler, to make sure he played his proper role. Kansa, the ruler, heard an angel voice announcing that a rival ruler had been born in his kingdom. In the Christian story it was slightly hit and miss, depending upon the Magi to inform Herod almost accidentally.

Kansa, like Herod, set about devising a way to destroy his infant rival. Herod’s decree required the destruction of all infants under two years of age (Mt 2:16), even though he had commanded earlier that the young child should be sought diligently (Mt 2:8). Kansa decreed that active search be made for whatever young children there may be upon earth, that every boy in whom there may be found signs of unusual greatness be slain without remorse.

There was in a cave temple at Elephanta in India a sculpture—universally admitted to be much older than Christianity—of a king with a drawn sword, surrounded by slaughtered infants. The slaughtered infants in the cave are all boys surrounded by groups of men and women in supplication. For those with ears to hear, the story in Matthew is copied from the Hindu religion and was surely learnt from Sadhus in Alexandria or from Persia.

In each case:

• There was an angel warning about the impending disaster.
• The governor or ruler was hostile to the mission of the young saviour.
• A bloody decree was issued aimed at the destruction of the infant Messiah.
• The hurried flight of the parents takes place.
• The Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus, for hundreds of years believed by Christians to be inspired by divine authority, relates that Christ and his parents sojourned for a time at a place called Matarea. One place claimed as the birth place of Krishna was Mathura.

As Krishna and his parents crossed the River Jumna in their flight, they nearly drowned but the infant Krishna noticed and with his foot parted the waters and they passed over safely, like Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. Egyptian legend has similar stories. The mother of Zoroaster had alarming dreams of evil spirits seeking to destroy her unborn child. A good spirit consoled her, saying:

Fear not. Ormuzd, Most High God, will protect the infant, sent as a prophet to the people and the world who are waiting for him.

Christ and Krishna are otherwise quite different stereotypes. Yet worshippers on the plains of India saw the appearance on earth of their god much as the Christians of the first century saw theirs. Was there a common source in some of the older myths, or simply a parallel evolution of the religious imagination playing about the birth of a god? Who knows but The Jesus ideal is just one version of a legend which stretches over three thousand years of time and is found equally in Egypt and Syria, Greece and Rome.