As you wish. Let's start with some simple history:
Jesus grew up and did most of his teaching out of Nazareth, yet, according to two Gospel writers, was born in Bethlehem.
Now, how did that happen? First off, let's remember that the traditional story we've all heard from our school Christmas plays are actually clumsy amalgams of Matthew and Luke's accounts. These two are the only ones to address Jesus' birth, and both felt the need to explain the Bethlehem/Nazareth issue.
Matthew's Gospel has Mary and Joseph already living in Bethlehem, so there's no problem there; the trick is getting them to Nazareth, flying in the face of all logic, after Jesus' birth.
I say "flying in the face of all logic" because Bethlehem was (it you want to think of it this way) practically a suburb of Jerusalem, whereas Nazareth was in the province of Galilee, out in the boonies, as it were. People don't pack up and move without good reason, and any kind of moving would've been
towards Jerusalem, where the policital, social, and financial opportunities were, not
away from it, into poverty and obscurity. Remember, people back in the day didn't commute to work.
Matthew needs a
darn good reason for the Jesus family to hit the road, and he finds one by rifling through the Old Testament -- Jesus and his family need to go into hiding because Herod, having heard of the birth of a new King, orders every newborn male child be put to death.
Now where have we heard that story before? More importantly, where would the
Jews have heard that story before?
That's right -- It's
Exodus II: The Sequel. Matthew is making a point of Jesus' greatness to his Jewish audience by parallelling him with their greatest hero: Moses.
So Joseph sneaks his family out, leads them to Egypt where they will be safe, and eventually relocates to Nazareth once the heat is off, so to speak.
Hmmm -- this just gets better and better -- What does Matthew tell us about Joseph?
- He had a father named Jacob
- God communicated with him (only, it seems) through dreams (Matt. 1:20, 2:13, 2:19, and 2:22)
- He rescues Jesus from certain death by taking him down into Egypt.
If you're a Jew, you should be getting a serious case of
deja vu right about now. This is the Joseph of Genesis 37-50, so here we have Matthew doing it again: making the point of Jesus' greatness by having his story mirror another Jewish hero.
You'll notice that this is pretty much Matthew's signature style -- everything Jesus does, some OT hero or prophet did it first.
My point? They say history repeats itself, but never so completely or conveniently -- not unless someone's writing it that way. Either God contrived to micromanage (heck,
nanomanage) human history for no reason other than to have these stories balance out the way they do, or someone's cooking the books.
Personally, I'm inclined to believe the simpler possibility.
Let me take a brief pause, but I assure you; we've barely gotten our feet wet. Care to go deeper?