Did Herod kill babies in Bethlehem?

RELIGION 

One of the Christmas narratives, which followed Jesus' birth, is the massacre of innocent babies.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, Herod the Great, king of Judea, became furious when he realised he had been tricked by the wise men.

He sent his men to kill all the baby boys in the vicinity of Bethlehem, who were about two years old.

Matthew said this had been predicted by prophet Jeremiah, who was active about 600 years before the birth of Jesus.

The Gospel said the visit of the three wise men had alerted Herod about a newborn king.

He tried to get the wise men to direct him to baby Jesus with sinister motives to kill him.

The Magi realised this and refused to cooperate, returning to their country by another route.

Matthew says Baby Jesus escaped the gruesome infanticide because an angel warned Joseph in a dream to escape to Egypt, together with the baby and its mother.

Thus the Holy Family experienced a stint in Africa and as refugees.

Because only the year-olds were targeted, Matthew makes us believe that the incident happened when Jesus was two years old.

Historian Clement of Alexandria, also argues that the wise men from the east must have arrived in Jerusalem one year-and-a-half after Jesus was born.

He argues that, contrary to what is depicted in art, the three wise men did not find Jesus in a cattle shed.

They came a year-and-a-half later, when Jesus and Mary were still in Bethlehem.

Had they come earlier, Mary would not have performed the ritual of Jesus purification at the Temple with an offering of two turtle doves, which was the offering of the poor.

If the wise men had already given her gold, she would have been obligated to offer a lamb.

The Christian teaching upholds Mathew's narrative as a historical event and commemorates the Feast of the Holy Innocents in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Rite and Orthodox churches.

The slain boys are honoured as Christian martyrs and saints.

The feast is observed on December 28 in Western churches and on December 29 in Eastern churches.

How many were killed?

The numbers are not clear in literature, publications, narrative or Christian tradition.

When Christianity reached Constantinople, the Greek Rite literature recorded the number as 14,000.

But in the early Syrian list of saints, the Holy Innocents were stated as 64,000.

Yet the Catholic Encyclopedia says the children killed were between six and 20 in Bethlehem and a dozen or so more in the surrounding areas.

Yet Professor William F. Albright, the dean of American archaeology in the Holy Land, wrote that the population of Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth was about 300 people only.

And that the number of boys, less than two years old, were about six or seven.

But did it happen?

Many historians and scholars dismiss this as myth, legend, or folklore. They ask why it is not found in any other gospel.

In fact, there was no known non-Christian reference to the massacre for the next four centuries to verify the claims!

One of the most extensive historical record of the time was written by the Jewish historian, Josephus.

Josephus wrote two whole book scrolls on the life of Herod the Great and gave the world more primary material about Herod than anyone else.

And he does not mention the massacre of infants in Bethlehem in his Antiquities of the Jews, written in AD 94.

They argue that it was a story modelled on Pharaoh's attempt to kill the Israelite children in Exodus 1:22.

They claim it was Matthew's attempt to justify Jeremiah's prophecy.

However, those who say it is a historical event, argue that the fact that Josephus did not record this event, does not mean it did not happen.

There are other events in the first century AD that Josephus did not record, they say.

Maybe the killing is not mentioned in secular histories of that era because it did not catch the attention of secular historians.

Bethlehem was a small, rather insignificant town in the hill country of Judah.

When the Jews returned from Babylonian captivity, only 123 men settled in Bethlehem.

It probably did not have more than a thousand citizens at the time of Christ's birth.

The killing of a few children in an obscure Judean community would scarcely have attracted much attention in the notably bloody world of that day.

Scholars, such as Everett Ferguson, argue that the story makes sense in the context of Herod's reign of terror in the last few years of his rule.

They refer to many of Herod's misdeeds including the murder of three of his own sons.

Herod had 10 wives whose children started scheming to succeed him as he grew old.

According to Josephus, he poached on them, one by one using poisoning, pitting them against each other and actually putting to death three of them on suspicion of treason.

He also killed his favourite wife, Mariamne, the Macabean princess, together with her mother, his motherin-law.

Herod also killed several uncles and a couple of cousins. Such a man could not have lost sleep about killing two-year-old babies in a small, obscure village south of Jerusalem in order to keep his throne secure for himself, or his sons.

Who is Herod?

According to history, King Herod was nearing 70 when Jesus was born.

He had reigned over Judea for more than 30 years. He was rich and powerful, but increasingly paranoid.

He was king of Judea, but only as a vassal for the emperor of the Roman Empire.

Judea was under the Roman Empire, having been conquered in 63 BC.

Very often when the Romans conquered a province, they did not want to send a governor out.

If there was a local king doing a good enough job and was willing to administer the people on Rome's behalf, they let him be.

Herod was assigned to Judea in 37 BC as a reward for his loyalty to Rome during the Parthian War.

His reign involved navigating through the balancing act politics of quelling popular Jewish uprisings while maintaining the favour of his Roman overlords.

He was, therefore, unpopular with the local Jewish population, but pragmatically useful to Rome.

He was ethnically an Arab, but a practicing Jew.

With his influence in Rome, he increased the land he governed from Palestine to parts of modern Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, constructing fortresses, aqueducts and amphitheatres and earned him the title Herodes Magnus (Herod the Great).

The Romans also gave Herod the title ‘King of the Jews' even when he controlled the Jews with Rome's help.

He quelled lots of riots, drove some adversaries out of Jerusalem, but face lifted Jerusalem and rebuilt the great temple in Jerusalem to appease the Jews.

He also built a gorgeous palace for himself, a stadium and theatres.

He remained in charge until his death in 4 BC. He was buried about six kilometres southeast of Bethlehem.

Rome was, however, tired of Herod's failure to avoid bloodshed in governing Judea and, according to historians, he was always just one political revolt away from being sacked by Caesar Augustus.

It was, therefore, imbued in him that street revolts were best avoided by nipping the causes in the bud.

So, when his intelligence intimated to him about the Magi from Persia, who had arrived in Jerusalem talking about a newborn king of the Jews, he had to stop it before it created another uprising among the Jews that could cost him his job.

The Jews were always expecting a messiah who would liberate them from the rule of the Romans.

But whether he slaughtered the babies in a tiny village of Bethlehem, just six kilometres from his palace, in the process of preventing riots, it is debatable because such an act could have sparked off the riots itself.

Modern analysts have referred to such a terrible massacre as collateral damage in the governance of nations.

They refer to similar unnecessary deaths of innocents during war, terror bombings and bringing down protests.

Others use it to analyse the use of force, as opposed to negotiations to bring peace.

Thus the adage: You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can't bomb the world to peace.