Gospel according to Matthew 2

¹ After Jesus had been born at Bethlehem in Judaea during the reign of King Herod,[*a] some wise men came to Jerusalem from the east.

² ‘Where is the infant king of the Jews?’ they asked. ‘We saw his star as it rose[*b] and have come to do him homage.’

³ When King Herod heard this he was perturbed, and so was the whole of Jerusalem.

⁴ He called together all the chief priests and the scribes of the people, and enquired of them where the Christ was to be born.

⁵ ‘At Bethlehem in Judaea,’ they told him ‘for this is what the prophet wrote:

⁶ And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, you are by no means least among the leaders of Judah, for out of you will come a leader who will shepherd my people Israel’.[*c]

⁷ Then Herod summoned the wise men to see him privately. He asked them the exact date on which the star had appeared,

⁸ and sent them on to Bethlehem. ‘Go and find out all about the child,’ he said ‘and when you have found him, let me know, so that I too may go and do him homage.’

⁹ Having listened to what the king had to say, they set out. And there in front of them was the star they had seen rising; it went forward, and halted over the place where the child was.

¹⁰ The sight of the star filled them with delight,

¹¹ and going into the house they saw the child with his mother Mary, and falling to their knees they did him homage. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.[*d]

¹² But they were warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, and returned to their own country by a different way.

¹³ After they had left, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother with you, and escape into Egypt, and stay there until I tell you, because Herod intends to search for the child and do away with him’.

¹⁴ So Joseph got up and, taking the child and his mother with him, left that night for Egypt,

¹⁵ where he stayed until Herod was dead. This was to fulfil what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: I called my son out of Egypt.[*e]

¹⁶ Herod was furious when he realised that he had been outwitted by the wise men, and in Bethlehem and its surrounding district he had all the male children killed who were two years old or under, reckoning by the date he had been careful to ask the wise men.

¹⁷ It was then that the words spoken through the prophet Jeremiah were fulfilled:

¹⁸ A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loudly lamenting: it was Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they were no more.[*f]

¹⁹ After Herod’s death, the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt

²⁰ and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother with you and go back to the land of Israel, for those who wanted to kill the child are dead’.

²¹ So Joseph got up and, taking the child and his mother with him, went back to the land of Israel.

²² But when he learnt that Archelaus[*g] had succeeded his father Herod as ruler of Judaea he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he left for the region of Galilee.[*h]

²³ There he settled in a town called Nazareth. In this way the words spoken through the prophets were to be fulfilled: ‘He will be called a Nazarene.’