Unlike the two infancy narratives, their details have much circumstantial overlap and feel like real events, but in their present shape they are also designed to make sense of something which came to be a real problem for the later Church. The Romans killed Jesus, however much the Temple establishment, in fury and fear at the nature of his preaching, had prompted them to do so. Jesus had said nothing more outrageous about the religion of the Jews than other wild representatives of Judaism had proclaimed either before him or in his own time. His was not a theological but a political threat to
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