Critics such as Ehrman (Jesus, Interrupted) cast doubt on the historicity of this cruel incident because it lacks clear independent support from contemporary historical accounts.

Jonathan Pearce (The Nativity: a Critical Examination) adopts a similarly sceptical approach.  Pearce quotes David Fitzgerald:

‘It beggars belief to think anyone would have missed an outrage as big as the massacre of every infant boy in the area around a town just 6 miles from Jerusalem—and yet there is no corroboration for it in any account, Jewish, Greek or Roman. It’s not even found in any of the other Gospels—only Matthew’s.’

No: it doesn’t ‘beggar belief’.  And as for the observation that the account is absent from Mark, Luke and John, an obvious part of the reply is to point out that Mark and John contain no accounts of the Nativity.

Pearce proceeds to quote Peter Richardson:

‘It seems likely that Herod’s killing of his own children prompted the report of his murder of a larger group of children.’

But this is simply to admit that the slaughter of the children was entirely in keeping with what is know about Herod, and therefore makes it more, rather than less, likely that the account is historically accurate.

Pearce conjectures that the author of the First Gospel has conflated what was known about Herod’s bloodthirstiness with the story of the killing of the Egyptian first-borns at the time of the Passover.

However, it would have been regarded by most people at the time as ‘a minor incident in a period full of atrocities.’ (France), and not worthy of a place in the history books of the time.  The killing of a few babies (given the population of Bethlehem and its environs at the time, the number may have been as few as 12) is perfectly consistent with his known character.  Constantly suspecting treachery, he killed his wife, three sons, and a number of other relatives.  Josephus records that when Herod near to death, he ordered that one member of every family should be killed, to ensure that the nation was really in mourning (mercifully, that order was not carried out).  (See the comments of David Hilborn, www.christiantoday.com).

Regarding the ‘argument from silence’, Lydia McGrew notes:

‘Examples abound of cases where we would think a certain writer would surely have reported a certain event or fact, yet he does not do so. Ulysses S. Grant in his memoirs never mentions the Emancipation Proclamation. Should this cause us to doubt other sources that tell us that Lincoln issued it? Obviously not. Two contemporary Romans who describe the eruption of Vesuvius fail to mention the destruction of Pompeii. The church historian Eusebius apparently deliberately suppressed the Emperor Constantine’s brutal killing of his wife Fausta and his son Crispus. No doubt Eusebius had his political reasons for doing so, not wholly laudable, but the point is that his mere silence in no way means that Constantine did not carry out the killings. Grafton’s highly regarded English Chronicles discuss the reign of King John but never mention Magna Carta. Marco Polo never mentions the Great Wall of China.’ (The Eye Of The Beholder)

Specifically, sceptics complain that the incident is not mentioned by Josephus.  According to this source, Josephus declares that he is being selective in which of Herod’s atrocities he mentions.  And it would be in neither Josephus’ or his Roman audience’s interest to mention this event, which was so sympathetic to the Christian message.

More idiosyncratic than sceptical, Gundry imagines that the Evangelist:

‘pursues Mosaic typology…with an episode corresponding to Pharaoh’s slaughtering the male babies of the Israelites at the time of Moses· birth (Exod 1:15-22). To do so, he changes the sacrificial slaying of “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons,”‘ which took place at the presentation of the baby Jesus in the Temple (Luke 2:24), into Herod’s slaughtering the babies in Bethlehem.’

Keener (The Gospel of Matthew) catalogues Herod’s known atrocities (I quote verbatim, but with added bulleting and without the references to ancient sources):

• When Herod’s young brother-in-law was becoming too popular, he had a “drowning accident” in what archaeology shows was a rather shallow pool;
• later, Herod had falsely suspected officials cudgeled to death.
• Wrongly suspecting two of his sons of plotting against him, he had them strangled…
• Likewise, five days before his own death Herod, on his own deathbed, had a more treacherous, Absalom-like son executed…
• In a fit of jealous rage (which he later regretted) he had his favorite wife strangled; she turned out to be innocent of the crime of which he had accused her.
• He had religious men who had tampered with his golden eagle burned alive…
• Fearing lest his people would not mourn at his death, he reportedly ordered that nobles from throughout the land be executed when he died to ensure mourning on that day…(Instead they were freed, leading to rejoicing)…In an era of many, highly placed political murders, the execution of perhaps twenty children in a small town would warrant little attention.

Green:

‘To be sure, there is no independent record of this particular atrocity, but it is mild in comparison with some of Herod’s other massacres. He slaughtered the last remnants of the Hasmonean dynasty of Jewish high-priestly kings who had ruled before him. He executed more than half the Sanhedrin. He killed 300 court officers out of hand. He executed his own Hasmonean wife, Mariamne, her mother Alexandra, and his sons Aristobulus, Alexander and Antipater. Finally, as he lay dying, he arranged for all the notable men of Jerusalem to be assembled in the hippodrome and killed as soon as his own death was announced. A man of ruthless cruelty and with a fanatical neurosis about any competition, it is quite in character that he should order the execution of the male children in Bethlehem. It was not a big place; there would probably have been only thirty or so of them, and their deaths would not have made a ripple on the history of the day.’

It feels callous to try to estimate how many little boys may have been killed.  But here are a few thoughts.  Only 123 men returned to Bethlehem after the Babylonian exile (Ezra 2:21).  It appears to have grown into a village of perhaps 1,000 people by the time of Jesus’ birth.  In this case, around a dozen or so boys were slaughtered.  (Jonathan Pearce’s idea that the number must have been fairly large because it is called a ‘massacre’ is clearly absurd.)

This is tragedy enough for the village, but not headline news in the light of the other events in Herod’s turbulent career: ‘Herod murdered his own sons and his wife Mariamne and ordered that 2,000 Jewish leaders be executed after his death so that the nation would mourn him, although this order was not carried out.’ (Holman Apologetics Commentary)

Tidball (p119) refers to the account of ‘the slaughter of the innocents’ as

‘the starting-gun of hostility that would eventually lead Jesus to the cross. When Herod heard that wise men from the east were searching for “one who has been born king of the Jews” (Mt 2:2), he immediately sensed a threat to his reign and took steps to remove it (Mt 2:16-18). In ordering the massacre of the baby boys of Bethlehem, Herod was both acting in character and signalling a conflict between his way of doing things – typical of power-obsessed worldly rulers – and the way of King Jesus. This conflict grew in intensity until Jesus was arrested, tried and executed by those worldly rulers.’

Regarding the apparent lack of corroborating evidence for this cruel act, C.E.B. Cranfield wonders if it is recollected in the pseudepigraphal Assumption of Moses (AD 6-30):

‘And he [Herod] will cut off their chief men with the sword, and he will destroy [them] in secret places, so that no one may know where their bodies are.  He will slay the old and the young, and he shall not spare.  Then the fear of him shall be bitter unto them in the land.  And he shall execute judgments on them as the Egyptians executed upon them, during thirty and four years, and he shall punish them.’

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