Reply #107: The slaughter of the innocents [View All]

[Stunster]

King Herod The Great slaughters all male infants two years old and under. Only he didn't, because the noted Jewish historians Philo and Flavius Josephus don't mention it, and they absolutely despised Herod. They accused him of virtually everything except excessive flatulence.

If such a cruel and heartless massacre of babies had occurred...or even been rumored...those two would have certainly written it down.

Then there's the problem of Jesus' cousin, John the Baptist, who lived in the neighborhood and was a male under the age of two at the time. Why wasn't he killed?

First, Bethlehem at the time of Jesus's birth would have had a population of less than 1,000 people. How many of them would have been male children under the age 2? Not a huge number. A few dozen at most.

Second, from the point of view of people writing about events in the Roman Empire, Bethlehem would have been about as insignificant a village as one could get. Even the Old Testament remarks on its smallness and seeming unimportance (Micah 5:2).

Third, Herod was known to be a monster. If the only bad thing he ever did was slaughtering a dozen or two infants in Bethlehem, then that might have attracted some attention. But if slaughter and torture was his standard and routine MO, then, not merely the massacre of infants in Bethlehem but quite a few other instances of it might have escaped the notice of historians, or not have been thought worthy of special mention. One can easily imagine someone writing a historical summary of Stalin's career not specifically mentioning every bad thing he ever did as a ruler. This would be more true of ancient historians, who were not peer reviewed or subject to modern academic standards of scholarship.

Fourth, Philo was primarily a philosopher, not a historian, who would have been in his teens when the putative Bethlehem massacre took place. Josephus wasn't born until about 40 years after it. Since history was not a formal and organized discipline at that time, and society was largely illiterate, written sources used by Josephus and Philo would have been patchy, not comprehensive. Certainly Herod himself is unlikely to have written down a record of all his atrocities. So the likelihood is that the sources for this event would have been exclusively local and oral. But by the time Josephus was writing (Jewish Antiquities is dated 93AD), all or almost all of the inhabitants of Bethlehem at the time of the putative massacre would have been dead. It's easy to see why, if only, say, 35 infants were killed, that after almost 100 years, this would have been largely forgotten about against the backdrop of Herod's many known other cruelties.

Fifth, Herod killed several of his own sons. So ordering the massacre of children would not have been out of character, and we know that he had an uncontrollable bloodthirsty wrath that was directed against anyone threatening his kingship, and there's some evidence that he may have been going insane in his last years. Matthew was written before Josephus was writing about Herod, so this fact could not have been known to Matthew via Josephus. That actually bolsters the case that Matthew wasn't making it up.

Sixth, the mother of John the Baptist, Elizabeth, lived in "the hill country of Judaea". That's a much wider area than just the immediate environs of Bethlehem.