Matthew 2:13 After [the magi] had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to look for the child to kill him.” 2:14 Then he got up, took the child and his mother during the night, and went to Egypt. 2:15 He stayed there until Herod died. In this way what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet was fulfilled: “I called my Son out of Egypt.”

Sceptical view

Conner (All That’s Wrong with the Bible) complains that:

‘The original verse in Hosea clearly refers to Israel coming out of slavery in Egypt and includes nothing whatsoever about Christ or anything Messianic.’

Robert M. Price cites the present passage to illustrate his thoroughly skeptical view of the historicity of the Gospel narratives, according to which it is ‘likely that virtually the whole Gospel narrative is the product of haggadic midrashon the Old Testament’.  He adds:

‘It has been customary to suppose that early Christians began with a set of remarkable facts, then sought after the fact for scriptural predictions for them. We have supposed that Hosea 11:1 provided a pedigree for Jesus’ childhood sojourn in Egypt, that it was the story of the flight into Egypt that made early Christians go searching for the Hosea text. Now it seems, by contrast, that the flight into Egypt is midrashic all the way down. The words in Hosea 11:1 “my son,” catching the early Christian eye, generated the whole story, since they assumed such a prophecy about the divine Son must have had its fulfillment.’ (The Historical Jesus: Five Views)

Jonathan Pearce (The Nativity: a Critical Examination) attempts to make a number of points:

• According to v15, this episode is clearly contrived: it happened ‘so that a prophecy could be fulfilled.’  (This represent a naively wooden reading of the text.  For Matthew, Scripture can be ‘fulfilled’ in a number of ways, not all of which entail a simple prediction/fulfilment pattern.)
• The words of Hosea do not fit Matthew’s account.  (I have dealt with this elsewhere.)
• Matthew’s account is not corroborated anywhere else in the New Testament.  Luke tells a completely different story, and leaves no space for the sojourn in Egypt.  (Again, I have discussed the relationship between the two accounts elsewhere.)
• The fact that there was a large Jewish population in Egypt that could have sheltered the family does not make it this particular account likely.  (Perhaps not: but it makes it more likely than would otherwise be the case.)
• The story of the Flight to Egypt can be readily explained in terms of Midrash, and is therefore not historical in nature.  (The supposition that an account is given a Midrashic interpretation does not thereby show it to be ahistorical).

Believing view

Wilkins (Holman Apologetics Commentary) notes that, according to some critics,

‘Matthew fabricated details or manipulated true facts of Jesus’ life in order to make it appear that Jesus fulfilled OT prophecies about the coming Messiah. For example, some suggest that Matthew, who wrote to a Jewish audience, made up a life story about Jesus that fulfilled prophecies such as being born of a virgin in Bethlehem, or going to Egypt, or being raised in Nazareth.’

Wilkins offers, by way of response:-

‘The creation of falsified historical accounts to substantiate a claim to prophetic fulfillment is not a staple of Jewish interpretive history. As a Jewish author, Matthew would not have had a precedent for such a blatant disregard for Jewish interpretation of OT prophecies. And he would have been subject to criticism from the Jewish interpretive community for falsifying predictive prophecy.

‘The apostles, including Matthew, were so gripped by the reality of Jesus as the Messiah that they suffered persecution at the hands of the Jews, and most of them later experienced martyrdom. They would not have been willing to die for a lie they themselves helped to invent.

‘When the Gospels were written and circulated, there were many people still living who had been alive when the events of Jesus’ life had occurred. They would have confronted Matthew with his fabrication. But no such record of this kind of accusation against Matthew surfaces from the ancient records.

‘The Jewish people would have used these kinds of fabrications as a way of discrediting the claims that Jesus was the Messiah. If Jesus had not been born in Bethlehem, or if his claim to being Messiah were not in line with OT prophecies, they would have been readily denied by Jews who were familiar with the details. However, we do not hear of any such accusations, not even from the Talmud, which at points speaks derogatorily about Jesus but never accuses his followers of falsification of Jesus’ life to fit messianic prophecies.’

The flight to, and return from, Egypt is, for Matthew, more than a coincidence.  The prophet’s words are not in the form of a prediction of a future event at all, but rather they look back to the Exodus.  ‘My son’ in Hos 11 is clearly Israel, and Matthew clearly wishes us to understand that Jesus is the new Israel, and this his mission will be the ultimate Messianic rescue rescue from captivity.  Mt 4:1-11, with its use of wilderness-texts, also sees Jesus as the new Israel.

Ehrman sees similarities between Matthew’s approach to OT prophecies and the so-called ‘pesher’ method of interpretation used by the Essenes in the Qumran community:

‘Like many other Jews, the Essenes who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls believed that the prophets of Scripture had spoken about events that came to transpire in their own day, centuries later.’

According to France:

‘Israel’s exodus from Egypt was taken already by the Old Testament prophets as a prefiguring of the ultimate Messianic salvation, and Matthew’s quotation here thus reinforces his presentation of the childhood history of Jesus as the dawning of the Messianic age.’

Keener insists:

‘Matthew knows the verse (Hos 11:1) quite well: indeed, instead of depending on the standard Greek translation of Hosea here, he even makes his own more correct translation from the Hebrew. If we read Matthew’s context, we see that this is not the only place where he compares Jesus with Israel: as Israel was tested in the wilderness for forty years, Jesus was tested there forty days (Matt 4:1-2). Matthew also expects his target audience to know Hosea’s context: as God once called Israel from Egypt (Hosea 11:1), he would bring about a new exodus and salvation for his people (Hosea 11:10-11). Jesus is the harbinger, the pioneer, of this new era of salvation for his people.’

Other OT texts represent the Messiah as God’s son: Ps 2:7; 89:26-27; 2 Sam 7:14; cf. Num 24:7-8, (LXX, in which God himself brings the Messiah out of Egypt).

Blomberg, however, thinks that attempts to find a messianic reference in Hosea’s use of ‘son’ seem ‘contrived and unconvincing’.

‘The original event need not have been intentionally viewed as forward-looking by the OT author; for believing Jews, merely to discern striking parallels between God’s actions in history, especially in decisive moments of revelation and redemption, could convince them of divinely intended “coincidence.”…That Israel had been delivered from Egypt, that Israel would again be exiled there but again restored, and that the child believed to be the Messiah also had to return to Israel from Egypt formed too striking a set of parallels for Matthew to attribute them to chance. God clearly was at work orchestrating the entire series of events.’ (Commentary on NT Use of OT)

Again:

‘Just as God brought the nation of Israel out of Egypt to inaugurate his original covenant with them, so again God is bringing the Messiah, who fulfills the hopes of Israel, out of Egypt as he is about to inaugurate his new covenant.’

According to Carson (EBC)

‘Jesus is often presented in the NT as the antitype of Israel, or better, the typological recapitulation of Israel. For example, Jesus’ temptation after forty days of fasting recapitulated the forty years’ trial of Israel. Pharaoh had to let Israel go because Israel was the Lord’s son (Ex 4:22–23). Thus it is only fitting that Jesus also come out of Egypt as God’s Son, for already by this time he has been presented as the messianic “son of David” and, by the virginal conception, the Son of God (see also Mt 3:17).’

Carson concludes that

‘for Matthew Jesus himself is the locus of true Israel. This does not necessarily mean that God has no further purpose for racial Israel; but it does mean that the position of God’s people in the Messianic Age is determined by reference to Jesus, not race.’

In God With Us: Themes From Matthew, Carson adds:

‘Jesus is often presented in the New Testament as the antitype of Israel; that is, the true and perfect Israel who does not fail. If Israel is likened to a vine that produces disgusting fruit (Isa. 5), Jesus is the true vine who brings forth good fruit (John 15). If Israel wandered in the wilderness 40 years and was frequently disobedient in the course of many trials and temptations, Jesus was sorely tempted in the wilderness for 40 days, but was perfectly obedient (Matt. 4:1–11). Israel in the Old Testament is the Lord’s son (Exod. 4:22, 23; Jer. 31:9); but Jesus, Himself a son of Israel, indeed a son of David, was supremely the Son of God; and therefore He re-enacted or recapitulated something of the history of the “son” (the nation of Israel) whose very existence pointed forward to Him.’

Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert discuss the motif of the Exodus in the New Testament:

‘When the New Testament talks about the exodus as a type of salvation, what it focuses on is not at all its political and economic aspects, but rather the picture it provided of the spiritual salvation God was bringing about. In Matthew 2:15, for example, when Matthew ties Jesus explicitly to the redemption of Israel from Egypt, he doesn’t draw out any political or economic implications. Rather, he has already said that Jesus’s mission was to “save his people from their sins,” and now he’s tying the exodus itself to that aim. It’s as if he is saying, “If you think the exodus was a great redemption, you haven’t seen anything yet!” In Ephesians 1:7, too, Paul adopts this language of “redemption”— famously used to describe the exodus— and puts it again in terms of salvation from sin: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.” Similarly in Colossians 1:13–14, the apostle evokes the exodus with the imagery of Christians being taken out of Satan’s kingdom: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Again, the language and imagery of exodus are used to talk not about political and economic redemption, but about spiritual redemption.’

Kevin DeYoung, Greg Gilbert. What Is the Mission of the Church? (p. 80). Crossway. Kindle Edition.

Greg Boyd (Cross Vision) argues from Matthew’s quotation of Hosea that it is legitimate to look for, and find in Scripture, meanings that the original readers cannot have understood:

‘Interpreted in the light of Christ, Hosea’s statement can be seen as anticipating, and thereby pointing to, Jesus’s exodus from Egypt. And Matthew is making this point because his Gospel is focused on portraying Jesus as the fulfillment of all of God’s plans for Israel.’

This is fair enough.  However, to extrapolate from this (as Boyd does) to the view that the message of Jesus (especially that of his cross) actually reverses the meaning of many OT texts, is a dubious procedure, to say the least.