The very next verse in Luke’s account, Luke 2:39, adds: “So when they had carried out all the things according to the law of Jehovah, they went back into Galilee to their own city Nazareth.”

Why, then, does Luke 2:39 read as if Joseph took the family right from Jerusalem to Nazareth without going back to Bethlehem?

It appears that Luke simply omits the intervening events (the return from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, the astrologers’ visit and the flight to Egypt), even as Matthew says nothing of the shepherds or the trip to Jerusalem where Simeon and Anna saw Jesus. Certainly the astrologers did not visit Jesus in Nazareth, for Matthew says otherwise; and in Nazareth Jesus would not have been endangered by an order to kill children in ‘Bethlehem and its districts.’