Where in Egypt did Joseph take Mary and the child?

Question

Accepted Answer

Matthew does not say. He writes only that Joseph “took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod”, and that after the dream in Egypt he came back to the land of Israel and settled at Nazareth. Egypt was the nearest Roman province outside Herod's reach, with a Jewish population of hundreds of thousands, above all in Alexandria; the map point stands at Heliopolis, the On of Genesis, about 410 km from Bethlehem in a straight line, the first stop that the later tradition names in the Nile valley. The places come from tradition. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, a Latin text of the early Middle Ages, has the idols fall at a city it calls Sotinen in Hermopolis; a homily ascribed to the patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria (died 412) but written much later, in which the Virgin tells him the story in a vision, takes the family by Bubastis and Hermopolis up the Nile to a house at Qusqam in Upper Egypt. The Coptic Church keeps a fuller route today, from Pelusium by Bubastis, Heliopolis and Babylon of Egypt (Old Cairo) up to Qusqam: the sycamore and spring at Matariya in Heliopolis, the crypt of the church of St Sergius in Old Cairo, and the monastery of al-Muharraq at Qusqam, where the family is said to have lived six months until the angel told Joseph to return. The length of the stay is also unknown; Matthew ties the return to Herod's death in 4 BC, and the Copts count about three and a half years. Matthew's point is not the route but the fulfilment: “Out of Egypt have I called my son”, Hosea's words about Israel, now spoken of the child who retraces the nation's path.