The Massacre of Innocence Part Three

There remains a type of consideration I touched on from the concubine’s story in Judges, which I have not yet applied to Matthew’s Infancy Narrative.  In Judges a town is slaughtered, and all are killed but marriageable virgins.  In Matthew a town (with its surroundings) suffers the slaughter of infants “from two years old and under” (2:16, KJV).  The consideration is the same: “How?”

“How,” I asked in regard to Judges, “did the Israelites know they were getting virgins?”—which I contend is a quite lively question, if the story is to be given serious thought.  Then again, if there is a shred of truth to the story, one can well imagine that a young maid of sufficient liveliness herself would serve for “virgin”—after all, the story is supposed to be a story of blood-curdling horror, and if it happened in reality it happened with reality’s messiness.

History, as told in Christendom, has wrapped itself around the pathos of the Massacre of the Innocents.  And history, it must be said, has presented no shortage of episodes like the slaughter ordered by Herod.  Soldiers in some circumstances will butcher the most obviously innocent while in the service of the most obviously guilty.  Yet Matthew presents no narrative of the town authorities being convened in some orderly fashion; the story, if it is to be believed, can be appended with no extra-biblical trappings—especially if such trappings would operate against the perpetrator’s—Herod’s—best interest.

So the story is how we have it: Herod’s soldiers descend upon Bethlehem and perform their infamous deed.  They slaughter without warning, without explanation, without delay.  That is the story and—when not engaged in apologetics—Christianity tells just that story:

“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men” (2:16).

How?  That is to say, how did the soldiers know their victims were “from two years old and under”?  Did they “diligently enquire” of the parents, of the town authorities, or of the municipal records?  Mongol conquerors, if the stories are to be believed, augmented their populations by sparing among their captives all those whose height did not reach a wagon’s axle.  Could not Matthew have provided a comparable, believable criterion by which Herod’s victims were sorted?

(To be fair, at least it appears that Matthew intended—quite logically—to limit Herod’s victims to males; the KJV choice of “children” is not supported generally by other translations.  Perhaps the King James translators could not keep their minds away from Matthew’s subsequent linking of the slaughter to “Rachel weeping for her children.”)

The massacre “story” (that is, the generally-remembered account shared, particularly at Yuletide, for two millennia) is one of shocking, bewildering cruelty—with all the terror and misery we would understandably attach to it.  The actual, recorded story presented in Matthew (if ever there had been any truth to it) is a story told to square up a theological position.  It is not an account of an event; it was never intended to be.  The “Massacre of the Innocents” is not an episode in the life of Jesus; it is an episode in the life of the collected canon.

The Massacre could have been left out of the Gospel of Matthew, though admittedly prying that story out of the book would also require the elimination of the part where the Three Stooges from the East parade into Herod’s court, announcing their intention to search out and pay homage to a helpless babe whom the legendarily-murderous Herod would doubtless fear as a usurper.

That means we would also have to get along without the part where Moe, Larry, and Curly are warned in a dream not to report to Herod—and they apparently cannot imagine any reason to report the dream to Joseph, who might be inclined to believe it, given his willingness to be persuaded by a dream to marry a pregnant virgin (1:20-22).  No, we have to wait for Joseph to be warned in his own dream to flee to Egypt (2:13).

So presently Herod dies.  Joseph, according to Matthew, is told in a dream to leave Egypt and “go into the land of Israel,” and then, “being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee” (2:19-22).

We, and our mightily-strained credulity, have to go through all this to get to a place where Jesus is established as a “son” of David from Bethlehem, the “city of David.”  Luke, in his equally-strained narrative, tells us that Joseph had at the outset traveled “unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem” because “he was of the house and lineage of David” (Luke 2:4).

The Infancy Narrative of Matthew asks nothing more of us, in regard to Jesus’ origins, than does Luke: that Jesus (in some way or other) is “of the house and lineage of David.”  The genealogy that Matthew presents is presumably in support of that claim.  It is worth noting that said genealogy puts twenty-seven generations from David to Jesus.  (Matthew counts two fourteens, but that is a small matter; many commentators contend that quite a few generations of worthies were edited out.)

The stretch of Jesus’ genealogy from David to the Captivity is basically just the king-list, and the stretch from the Captivity to Jesus is—no surprise—otherwise unattested.  No one would expect that Joseph of Nazareth would have any better documentation than any other ordinary Jew of the era.  Would his lineage have been reckoned all that special at any rate?  After all, is “of the house and lineage of David” all that exclusive a claim, especially considering that “Beth-lehem-judah” was by definition a city of David’s tribe, one of the few tribes that had remained relatively intact?

All those effectively-anonymous generations after the Captivity could prove little more than Joseph’s participation in a vast, swirling, and occasionally redundant gene pool, to say nothing of the fact that “of the house and lineage of David” could apply to the progeny of any number of princely younger sons over a dozen royal generations.  And no one would contend that poor documentation or questionable legitimacy would have abated Herod’s proclivity for suspecting usurpers—any Jewish boy was a latent threat to the Idumean Herod.

So, in a twisted sense, Herod’s intent could scarcely be entirely unfulfilled.  In view of Matthew’s criteria, the drivers of the wise men’s train would need to have taken care not to run over any “sons of David” on the Bethlehem road.  If the grisly soldiers had no more discipline or order than to hack about themselves at random, they still might easily have assassinated three or four dozen “sons of David.”

I have asked repeatedly, “How?”  I could have asked more generally, “How is any of this believable?”  Of course, to be fair, there are answers.  To frame a refutation to just one of my snide observations, it might be postulated that the wise men were assured in their warning dream that their logical first concern—the safety of the Holy Family—was already being attended to.  Perhaps they were told that Joseph was going to get a dream of his own.  Perhaps.

But “perhaps” does not serve in all circumstances, even when divine intervention is thought to be in play.  Sure, when the supernatural is invoked, pigs can fly (or, in the case of the Gergesenes, plummet.)  But the power of God is not the central theme in the Infancy Narrative; the power of God (“is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”) appears abruptly with the Baptist, who himself appears abruptly.  One might almost think—I’m being snide again—that the Baptist starts a completely different document by a completely different author with a completely different notion of messiahship.

So what is wrong with the Infancy Narrative?  After all, it might have happened, though it might be sort of unbelievable.  But that is the most important reason to object to its unlikely nature: It is not unlikely in the service of a spiritual or theological point—it is unlikely even in the service of the manifest intention of making Jesus’ messiahship seem likely.  Even lowly John the Baptist needs no introduction.  The Son of God does not need to be introduced as the adopted son of Joseph of Nazareth.

And so we must proceed presently to the heart of the issue: Not why the Infancy Narrative is wrong, but rather the wrong it has done.