My education, profession and personality drive me to question things that most people dont even think about. We sing "We 3 kings of oreint are" or "Away in a manager" etc. Meanwhile those who have ill meaning intentions seek to discredit my faith on the grounds of historical misunderstanding. They prey on the ignorance of the average pew warmer. Causing them to doubt their reason to believe all because ignorance. These ill meaning scholars fill our minds with conjecture and fallacious logic. Teh di vinchi code is a great example. ANyone who has done any serious historical research into the historical Jesus would immedaitley dismiss anything that the author claims as evidence. Furthermore the methodology(meaning the way you go about collecting and analysing the data) of the author is dubious. You can not take two words that have no historical relation to each other then put them together and declare a hide code! It is just a dubious for me to claim that I know french just because I live in Quebec! The average pew warmer accepts what so and so says as true because they are too lazy ask the questions and do the real work of research.

Now I could have listed many articles, and other sources here but I dont feel the need to do that. Two books that I suggest are "The Meaning of Jesus" Co authored by Marc J Borg and N.T Wright and "The Pagan Christ by Tom Harpor. These are considered to be paramount historians on the historical Jesus. Copies of the Hermetica writing of Alexandria, qumran texts, dead sea scrolls and many other early 1st century documents can all be bought at your local inidgo bookstore. Asking such questions about what really happened 2000 years ago will lead us to the true meaning of christmas. Plus,misconcepts lead to wrong doctrine. So such questions are necessary for anyone who is serious about their faith.

You asked "What does the flight to eygpt have to with the christmas story?" Well the simple answer is that the bible considers it to be. All the gospels follow this narrative structure: announcment->testimony->responce to the testimony. In Luke chapter two Herods response to the birth of Jesus was his response to the testimony.

So why did I write what I wrote. Christmas is not about warm fuzzy feelings, or once a season acts charities. " I am someone who believes that being Christian necessarily entails doing busniess with history and that history done for all it's worth will challenge spurious versions of Christainity, including many that think of themselves as orthodox, while sustaining and regenerating a deep true orthodoxy, suprising and challenging though it will ways remain(N.T Wright "The Challenge of Jesus" pg. 16 1999)." This is my real motive for writing. To encourage us all to think about the real baby who was born, not some mythical baby of our own imagination. Because this baby didnt not come to hold a rattler but to rattle our misconceptions about god.