Why did it take the wise men two years to find Jesus?

Answer 1

-----------------------

The Bible does not say it took the wise men two years to find Jesus. In fact, Matthew 2:1 says (KJV): "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem." There is no historical reference to the wise men, but if they did come to visit Jesus it would seem to have been shortly after his birth.

Answer 2

The question may arise from the fact that Luke's Gospel says that Mary and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem just forty days after his birth, to present him at the Temple, and that they then returned peacefully to their home in Nazareth. This means that Jesus would not have been in Bethlehem if the wise men arrived any later.

However a parallel reading of the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke quickly tells us that the two stories are quite independent of each other.

• In Matthew's Gospel, Bethlehem was the home town of Joseph and Mary. After the birth of Jesus, they fled to Egypt to escape King Herod, who sought to kill Jesus. After the death of Herod, they returned towards their home in Bethlehem, but being warned by God, turned aside and travelled to Nazareth in Galilee.
• In Luke's Gospel, Nazareth was the home town of Joseph and Mary. They were required to travel to Bethlehem because of a census of the entire Roman Empire during the time that Quirinius was governor of Syria. A few weeks after the birth of Jesus, the young couple took Jesus to Jerusalem to be presented at the Temple, then returned peacefully to their home in Nazareth.

Once we recognise the independence of the two nativity stories, we are compelled to adopt a critical principle of reading if we mean to understand each story on its own terms. We must scrupulously avoid reading into Matthew's account any facts or notions taken from Luke's account, and vice versa. Thus, in reading about the wise men, we must not assume that the young family left Bethlehem before the wise men arrived.

Nor do we know whether the wise men would have come two years after the birth of Jesus or as little as a few days later. The story says that a star led them westwards to Jerusalem, then turned around and led them south-east to Bethlehem, where it showed them the very house where Joseph and Mary lived. On this, however, Ian Wilson (Jesus: The Evidence) says the hard reality is that the Matthew nativity story does not offer sufficient historicity for anyone to be confident that there was a star at all.

Answer 3

coz they're mind readers and just knew