Excerpt from The Star of Bethlehem: A Sacred Drama in Five Acts and a Prelude Family to return to Palestine; as does the statement (matthew ii: i4-15) When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt; and was there until the death of Herod. It does not seem probable that the messenger of the Most High should have required that the delicate woman and tender infant should take a journey involving months of weari some travel, had the cruel tyrant already been stricken with mortal sickness, so some more easily accessible place of concealment would suffice. Moreover, it is less likely that the frightful atrocity of the Massacre of the Inno cents should have escaped the pen of Josephus had it been perpetrated at the end of the cruel monarch's blood stained reign rather than in a less conspicuous period of his life. But the fact that to my mind incontrovertibly establishes the correctness of the date I have selected for the birth of our Lord, 745 from the foundation of Rome, is that in this year Augustus secured from the Roman Senate his reappointment as Consul for the express pur pose of taking a census, which accords with the statement (luke iizl) And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, since the taking of the census of the empire would unquestionably involve the imposi tion of a poll-tax. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.