Truth or Fiction: Did Herod Really Slaughter Baby Boys in Bethlehem?

00:00:06.000 | Embedded into the Christmas story and in the birth narrative of Jesus into this world

00:00:11.000 | is a dark story of loss and of tragedy, of tears and of pain.

00:00:17.000 | Matthew 2.16 has been traditionally called "The Massacre of the Innocents."

00:00:22.000 | There we're told about the killing of all boys two years old and younger in the region of Bethlehem.

00:00:28.000 | The event is deeply unsettling, but it's also part of the historical record of the birth of Christ.

00:00:35.000 | Did this actually happen historically, or was this massacre of the innocents a story invented by the early Christians?

00:00:43.000 | And if the event is historically real, if such a public slaughter really happened,

00:00:48.000 | why are there no other historical records to corroborate the event?

00:00:53.000 | For answers, we welcome special guest Dr. Paul Meyer, a widely respected historian,

00:00:58.000 | in what will be a little longer of an episode than usual.

00:01:01.000 | Until his retirement, Dr. Meyer served as the Russell H. Seabert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University.

00:01:08.000 | And he is the author of many fictional books and many non-fictional books, including "In the Fullness of Time,"

00:01:13.000 | "A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the Early Church,"

00:01:17.000 | as well as several books for children, including "The Very First Christmas."

00:01:21.000 | Dr. Meyer, thanks for joining us. I want to ask you if Matthew 2:16 really happened in history.

00:01:26.000 | There's a question mark on this event, of course.

00:01:28.000 | But before we go there, who is this figure we know of in the Christmas story, known as Herod the Great?

00:01:34.000 | Well, Tony, you may be surprised to hear this, but believe it or not,

00:01:38.000 | if you're ever asked which is the one figure from the ancient world on whom we have more primary evidence

00:01:46.000 | from original sources than anyone else in the world,

00:01:50.000 | the answer is not Jesus or St. Paul or Caesar Augustus or Julius Caesar, none of those.

00:01:57.000 | Alexander the Great, no, no. It's Herod the Great, believe it or not.

00:02:01.000 | Why? Because Josephus gives us two whole book scrolls on the life of Herod the Great.

00:02:08.000 | And that's more primary material than anyone else. And I don't think Herod deserved it.

00:02:13.000 | He was a very remarkably successful politician, keeping the peace between Rome,

00:02:20.000 | which had conquered Judea ever since 63 B.C., and he acted really simply as a Roman governor overseas.

00:02:28.000 | He was known as a client king, meaning very often when the Romans conquered a province,

00:02:33.000 | they didn't want to send a governor out. There was a local king doing a good enough job.

00:02:39.000 | And so, yes, he may be called king, but he was definitely deferent to Rome as per his whole administration.

00:02:47.000 | He was in charge from, well, 40 B.C. he was awarded the title king.

00:02:52.000 | He didn't actually take control of the land until, with Roman help,

00:02:56.000 | he drove some adversaries out of Jerusalem and really from about 37 B.C. on,

00:03:02.000 | he's in charge until his death in 4 B.C.

00:03:06.000 | He was remarkably successful in a lot of ways.

00:03:10.000 | He deserves the title Herod the Great if we talk about his accomplishments through much of his life.

00:03:17.000 | He was the one, of course, who rebuilt the great temple in Jerusalem.

00:03:21.000 | He was the one who single-handedly created a city of Caesarea,

00:03:26.000 | where there was no good port in the Holy Land here.

00:03:30.000 | He creates one by sinking some ship hulls and then using it as a base to build a great breakwater

00:03:37.000 | in an otherwise rectilinear sea coast.

00:03:42.000 | So, and he built Caesarea in 12 years and he built other cities like that, too.

00:03:47.000 | In Jerusalem, he facelifted the entire city.

00:03:51.000 | In addition to building a gorgeous palace for himself, he had a hippodrome, a stadium,

00:03:56.000 | and theaters and this kind of thing. He was kind of a Hellenistic monarch.

00:04:01.000 | And he also built seven great fortresses across the land,

00:04:05.000 | strong points at which he could defend his administration.

00:04:08.000 | One of them, of course, most famous was Masada, down along the southwest corner of the Dead Sea.

00:04:16.000 | Everything he touched diplomatically seemed to turn to gold.

00:04:19.000 | He kept peace both with Jerusalem and Rome, and so in that sense he was very successful.

00:04:26.000 | Yeah, politically successful. But there's another side to Herod.

00:04:30.000 | Explain the paranoid side of Herod that begins to emerge later on in his life.

00:04:36.000 | Well, basically, basically, he was responsible for many of the problems back home.

00:04:42.000 | His home was a can of worms, simply because he married ten wives,

00:04:47.000 | and each of those produced princes for him,

00:04:51.000 | and each of those male princes was scheming to succeed as number one,

00:04:56.000 | and there could only be one number one.

00:04:58.000 | And so if there weren't two or three collateral plots taking place before they had orange juice in the morning,

00:05:04.000 | you know something was wrong.

00:05:06.000 | Josephus gives us just a hideous tale of what was going on in the family,

00:05:12.000 | attempted poisonings, one brother against another.

00:05:15.000 | It so rattled Herod that he actually put to death three of his own sons on suspicion of treason.

00:05:24.000 | He put to death his favorite wife out of ten of them.

00:05:28.000 | Mariame was his favorite.

00:05:30.000 | She was a Hasmonean Maccabean princess, and he put her to death,

00:05:35.000 | and then he killed his mother-in-law, I should have said one of his many mothers-in-law.

00:05:39.000 | He invited the high priest down to Jericho for a swim.

00:05:43.000 | They played a very rough game of water polo, and they drowned him.

00:05:48.000 | He killed several uncles, a couple of cousins.

00:05:52.000 | Some have said he's a real family man in that negative respect.

00:05:58.000 | As a matter of fact, Augustus himself, to whom Herod was always very deferent,

00:06:05.000 | said, "I would rather be Herod's pig than his son."

00:06:09.000 | It's a double pun. In Greek it's "souos" and "weos," clever turn of words.

00:06:16.000 | And the other idea is that at least pigs weren't slaughtered for human consumption over there,

00:06:22.000 | and they had a better chance at a longer life.

00:06:24.000 | It was a brilliant pun on the part of Augustus.

00:06:27.000 | Yes. And at one point late in his life, Herod plots to kill a stadium full of Jewish leaders.

00:06:33.000 | The plot fails. What does this reveal about him?

00:06:38.000 | Well, Josephus says a very grisly thing to report about Herod in his last months.

00:06:44.000 | He was so paranoid that he, of course, did have some grasp of reality.

00:06:52.000 | For instance, he was worried that nobody would mourn his own death in the Holy Land.

00:06:56.000 | Of course, it shows how deadly accurate he was.

00:06:58.000 | They were preparing, again, a general celebration,

00:07:02.000 | and nobody likes to die knowing that they're going to dance in your grave.

00:07:06.000 | And so he was going to give the people something to cry about.

00:07:09.000 | Now it's in 4 BC. He's down at his winter palace in Jericho.

00:07:15.000 | It's the only place in the Holy Land that doesn't snow or get cold in the winter.

00:07:19.000 | It's 1,200 feet below sea level. And here he's dying.

00:07:23.000 | He tries every remedy in the world to stop the gang of diseases that were creeping up on him.

00:07:30.000 | He went to the hot springs at Kalaroli at the northeastern corner of the Dead Sea.

00:07:35.000 | By the way, there's still springing hot water 2,000 years later.

00:07:40.000 | And that didn't cure him.

00:07:42.000 | And so now he goes back to his winter palace, and he invites his sister Salome in.

00:07:47.000 | And he says, "I want you to arrest all the Jewish leaders in the land and imprison them

00:07:53.000 | in the hippodrome just below the palace here."

00:07:56.000 | And that hippodrome has been discovered archaeologically, by the way.

00:07:59.000 | And so she does. And then she says, "Brother, why am I doing this?"

00:08:02.000 | And Herod says, "Well, I know that when I die, the Jews are going to rejoice.

00:08:07.000 | So I'm going to give them something to cry about."

00:08:10.000 | And so he wants them all executed in that hippodrome so that there'll be thousands of households

00:08:17.000 | weeping at the time Herod the Great dies.

00:08:22.000 | So is that the kind of a sweet guy who could have killed the babies in Bethlehem?

00:08:25.000 | I think so.

00:08:27.000 | Most certainly. Goodness.

00:08:29.000 | Speaking of Matthew 2, the Bible records this scene from Herod's paranoia late in his life.

00:08:34.000 | The wise men alert him to the birth of a new king in Bethlehem.

00:08:37.000 | He wants to know where so that he can eradicate this new rival.

00:08:41.000 | And the wise men wisely don't return to him.

00:08:44.000 | Herod then responds by slaughtering all the boys 2 years old and under in Bethlehem

00:08:49.000 | and in all the region, the Bible tells us.

00:08:52.000 | For all that Josephus writes about Herod, he makes no mention of this.

00:08:57.000 | In fact, there's no extra biblical evidence that this slaughter ever happened.

00:09:02.000 | So how do you respond to that?

00:09:04.000 | No, it's interesting. Josephus does not mention it, and therefore a lot of biblical critics

00:09:10.000 | will pounce on that aspect of the nativity account and say, "Therefore it didn't happen."

00:09:17.000 | Now please understand, this is an argument from silence, and that's the weakest form of argumentation

00:09:24.000 | you can use, as we say in the profession, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

00:09:31.000 | And in this case, one or two things could have happened.

00:09:35.000 | Josephus may have heard about it and not used it, because you don't have hundreds of babies killed here.

00:09:41.000 | You have only about 12, as a matter of fact. Twelve or 15.

00:09:46.000 | The infant mortality in the ancient world was so huge anyway that this is really not going to impress

00:09:52.000 | a reader too much, believe it or not. And I think if Josephus is choosing between the two stories

00:09:58.000 | about how Herod died right before his death, I think it would take the one where he's going to

00:10:04.000 | slaughter hundreds of Jewish leaders. Or he may not have heard about it, again, simply because,

00:10:10.000 | again, little Bethlehem doesn't amount to much. A little village of 1,500 or so, I did an actuarial study.

00:10:18.000 | Bethlehem at the time, you wouldn't have more than about two dozen babies two years old and under,

00:10:24.000 | half of them among sex. And so this is not a big deal, and I think that's why Josephus

00:10:31.000 | either never heard about it or didn't feel it important enough to record.

00:10:35.000 | So this does not militate against Matthew's version by any means.

00:10:41.000 | In fact, I was arguing once years ago on the infant massacre with a professor in Wagner College

00:10:47.000 | in New York who claimed that this is all fiction, that surely a massacre of hundreds of Jewish

00:10:54.000 | boy babies would have come to the attention. Well, I agree, it would have if there had been hundreds.

00:10:58.000 | But that's ridiculous. A little village that size, they have hundreds of boy babies two years old

00:11:03.000 | and under? Give me a break. It couldn't possibly be the case.

00:11:07.000 | So, and all the coasts thereof. Well, look, Jerusalem's five miles away, right?

00:11:12.000 | Therefore, this would include Jerusalem as well if we're going to take literally all the coasts thereof.

00:11:18.000 | We're talking about Bethlehem and probably half a mile around when we're talking about the surroundings of Bethlehem.

00:11:25.000 | Fascinating, and certainly no less a real tragedy.

00:11:30.000 | So finally, as a historian, in your mind, is there any reason to doubt the historicity of the slaughter of the innocents?

00:11:37.000 | I see not one iota of evidence that it could not have happened, and therefore, again, there's no reason to doubt the account as far as I'm concerned.

00:11:47.000 | To be sure, Luke hasn't heard about it. Remember, Matthew and Luke don't copy from one another when it comes to the Nativity.

00:11:55.000 | And that's good, because this way they can hit it from different angles.

00:11:59.000 | I think it really happened, and let's remember again that the first martyr of Christianity was not Stephen, it was Jesus, but not even Jesus.

00:12:11.000 | For my money, the first martyr in the Christian Church was the first baby that was killed in Bethlehem, and we always overlook that.

00:12:18.000 | Thank you, Paul. That was guest historian Dr. Paul Meyer, joining us for this special Christmas edition of the Ask Pastor John podcast.

00:12:27.000 | And from historical controversy, we move to cultural controversy, and tomorrow I'll ask John Paper about Santa Claus.

00:12:35.000 | A lot of you have emailed in to find out, is Santa harmless fun, or is he a Christmas-time diversion?

00:12:42.000 | That's the question tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I'll see you then.

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