On the contrary, Luke asserts that Joseph and the mother of Jesus lived peaceably during six weeks in the place where their child Jesus was born; that He was circumcised according to the law of the Jews, eight days after His birth; and when the time prescribed by the law for the purification of His mother had arrived, she and Joseph, her husband, carried Him to Jerusalem in order to present Him to God in His temple, and to offer at the same time a sacrifice which was ordained by God’s law; after which they returned to Galilee, into their town of Nazareth, where their child Jesus grew every day in grace and in wisdom.  Luke goes on to say that His father and His mother went every year to Jerusalem on the solemn days of their Easter feast, but makes no mention of their flight into Egypt, nor of the cruelty of Herod toward the children of the province of Bethlehem.  In regard to the cruelty of Herod, as neither the historians of that time speak of it, nor Josephus, the historian who wrote the life of this Herod, and as the other Evangelists do not mention it, it is evident that the journey of those wise men, guided by a star, this massacre of little children, and this flight to Egypt, were but absurd falsehoods.  For it is not credible that Josephus, who blamed the vices of this king, could have been silent on such a dark and detestable action, if what the Evangelist said had been true.

In regard to the duration of the public life of Jesus Christ, according to what the first three Evangelists say, there could be scarcely more than three months from the time of His baptism until His death, supposing He was thirty years old when He was baptized by John, according to Luke, and that He was born on the 25th of December.  For, from this baptism, which was in the year 15 of Tiberius Caesar, and in the year when Anne and Caiaphas were high-priests, to the first Easter following, which was in the month of March, there was but about three months; according to what the first three Evangelists say, He was crucified on the eve of the first Easter following His baptism, and the first time He went to Jerusalem with His disciples; because all that they say of His baptism, of His travels, of His miracles, of His preaching, of His death and passion, must have taken place in the same year of His baptism, for the Evangelists speak of no other year following, and it appears even by the narration of His acts that He performed them consecutively immediately after His baptism, and in a very short time, during which we see but an interval of six days before his Transfiguration; during these six days we do not see that He did anything.  We see by this that He lived but about three months after His baptism, from which, if we subtract the forty days and forty nights which He passed in the desert immediately after His baptism, it would follow that the length of His public life from His first preaching till His death, would have lasted but about six weeks; and according to what John says, it would have lasted at least three years and three months, because it appears by the Gospel of this apostle, that, during the course of His public life He might have been three or four times at Jerusalem at the Easter feast which happened but once a year.