The Massacre of Innocence Part Four

Finally, I must address the most lamentable aspect of the Infancy Narrative of Matthew:  What the story does to defame the God of its pages.

Of course, I do not intend to minimize the described horrors of the Massacre of the Innocents—or of the ancient blood-soaked roads to Egypt, or to Galilee, or inevitably to Rome.  Or of the horrors of the blood-spattered David, or Herod, or whomever.  I will not even pretend that evil or pain or any bad thing can ultimately be thought of as entirely independent of the God who made all.

But I also do not have to pretend that the merest scrap of reputable evidence supports the historicity of Herod’s massacre.  Maybe it never even happened at all, or maybe it did happen—in the final analysis (more’s the pity) it made no difference either way.  It was the warning of a dream, not the tragedy of Bethlehem, that at last sent Joseph to the town of Nazareth so that his reputed son might be called “a Nazarene.”  (No one’s ever really been able to figure that last phrase out, so I’ll not trouble about it.)

The Infancy Narrative does not even need to be in Matthew at all.  If the Bible reader needs some critical mass of “signs,” then surely signs of the type wherein Jesus eases suffering would be preferable to Herod’s cruelty.  It is not as though the Gospel accounts are intended to be exhaustive; John concludes with not one but two references to the notion that much of Jesus’ doings are unrecorded.

(It must surely be of note that introductions and conclusions—or sometimes their absence or multiplicity—are such an issue in Gospel scholarship.  The credulous notion is such that the Gospels should arise and subside almost seamlessly in the larger Bible “story,” differing internally only insofar as they represent the fruits of individual accounts by distinct, sincere eyewitnesses, writing perhaps with different audiences in mind.  Instead we have the complete opposite—shared stories, sometimes even shared phrasings, arranged with greater or lesser artistry, with the efforts of the artists most obvious when the Gospels lurch at the start or stumble to a close.)

And while we’re on the subject of things written or not written, there is the small matter of Jesus in John 7, misleading his “brethren” about whether he was going to the feast of tabernacles.  Certain source texts can be mined to ostensibly justify translating John 7 as saying that Jesus was not going to the feast “yet,” but no translator has been able to wish away the fact that Jesus is described as going there secretly.  Perhaps a word or two more (or less) from the Gospel writers might have made Jesus look better.

I know I am talking about small things, but it has been the nature of humans—Gospel-writers and other people—to make much of small things.  Let the notion at hand be the power of God, and two thousand years of debate about the particular capacities of the Son of God will ensue.  Let the Son of God curse a fig tree to withering, and two thousand years of debate about the justice of Jesus—or of the Gospels--will ensue.

And then there are small matters like the Massacre of the Innocents—though of course a reasonable person flinches at using the word “small.”  (Do not, however, underestimate the capacity of humans to be unreasonable; there are actually serious Bible scholars, confronted with the fact that Herod’s massacre apparently passed unnoticed to history, who have lowered themselves to producing the lowest possible demographic estimates of the expected mortality total.)

The Massacre of the Innocents was a horrible thing—need it have ever happened?  One might ask (to the extent to which we will accept that God had a real role in a real story) if God could not, in his omnipotence, have maneuvered the wise men in some other way?  Could not God have given the doomed children a life like anyone else?

To ask questions like those, however, merely places the issue in the realm of larger questions about the nature of God.  Does not God doom all his creatures to die?

Jews and Christians are often taken to task for the actions of God in their Scriptures.  To use an example I have touched on before: the Fall of Jericho, in which Rahab and “all her kindred” were spared.  The episode is part of the Conquest, which—rightly or wrongly—has now become part of the history of genocide.

How much more would Jews and Christians prefer the story to be one in which Jericho was smitten with a (well-deserved) natural disaster, with the Israelites poised on the horizon to selflessly rush to the rescue of those who might be saved!  Heck, maybe we could even dispense with the “well-deserved” part.

While such an amended Jericho story might better suit modern sensibilities (to say nothing of modern political expedience), the underlying religious question remains: Does not God doom all his creatures to die?  A dead two-year-old or dead seventy-year-old under the rubble of the wall is just as dead in any scenario.

It is not the kindest thing, to say that people are going to die in any event; nor is it all that kind to God (for we—for our part—have no shortage of capacity to offend him) to recall that neither Death nor anything else escapes his power.  God feeds the birds of the air, and not a sparrow falls to earth but that God wills it.  Terrible to say it, and more terrible not to believe it.

But that is not the same as choosing to believe in a terrible God, or choosing to spread belief in such a God.  And so we come to the end of the blood-soaked road to Nazareth.  Joseph takes his family there, because a dream tells him to, according to “Matthew.”  “Luke”—it is no surprise—tells a different story.  In Luke, Joseph starts out in Nazareth.  Neither story needs any dead little boys, and Luke apparently never dreamt of such an unforgettable thing, though Luke does not refrain from making a claim to “having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first” (Luke 1:3, KJV).

I would be inclined to describe the massacre not merely as an unforgettable thing, but also as a pivotal thing (for such it would seem, by the conventions of storytelling) except that, as we have seen, it was not pivotal.  Why, oh why, then did Matthew say it occurred?

“Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,

“In Rama there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not” (2:17-18).

So there we have it.  The author of the introduction to Matthew was too busy writing a story about the fulfillment of prophecy to remember why a person should write a story about the fulfillment of prophecy.  I will leave it to Bible scholars to explain what a stretch the “Rachel” connection is at any rate.  I will confine myself to statements a layperson might make, to the extent that such statements are commensurate with a lay believer’s understanding:

God—the God who made a world of reasonable people to understand him and embrace the teachings of his son—will confine himself to reasons for issuing prophecy.  That’s what prophecies are—things happen because of reasons, even reasons known only to the sovereign mind and will of God.

God will prophesy horrible things.  God will threaten horrible results if people do horrible things.  God will even prophesy horrible results if people do NOT do horrible things.  But God is not a horrible God.  God will not engineer horrible things simply to fulfill prophecies.  The author of the flimsy introduction to Matthew forgot that.