Virtually every good plot of comics, books or movies must also have a well-written villain, characterized by cunning, cunning, extraordinary charisma and intelligence. In the story of Jesus' birth, this role fell to King Herod the Great.
Before the Magi reached their destination, and before they bowed down to the true King, born in Bethlehem, they met another king, whose name echoes tragically in history, because it is remarkably infamous in the human imagination. Following in the footsteps of the Magi we must consider this figure as well, especially since the description of their visit to Herod takes more space than the description of their encounter with Jesus.
We have a lot of documented information about the then ruler of Judea, for example in the diaries of his adviser Nicholas of Damascus and in the works of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus Flavius.
The evil king of the nativity play
It is ironic and a peculiar giggle of History that Herod's true fame came not because of his undeniable achievements, but because of the Gospel story of the slaughter of the innocents, which many historians consider invented . But it is thanks to her that he is a figure more widely known to this day than all the great ancient rulers who truly shaped the fate of the world.
Probably hardly anyone (apart from historians specializing in this period of antiquity) would know today about some king of a small country on the outskirts of the Roman empire, if not for the fact that the evangelist Matthew made him an anti-hero and the villain of his story about the birth of Jesus. However, since Herod became the full-time hero of nativity plays, even young children recognize his name.
photo:José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0 Christianity made Herod the embodiment of evil
With the bloody glow surrounding this ruler, the exploits of other tyrants and despots pale. For two thousand years, the Christian tradition has treated Herod as the epitome of pure evil and the archetype of the wicked king.
Yet history has given him the nickname Great! Only a few rulers deserved such an epithet. Only one of the Polish kings received this honor, known as the one who found Poland wooden and left it bricked. People might call Herod Cruel, Suspicious, Merciless, or Bloody, but they preferred to call him Great (...).
Killer of young children
Let us now deal with an episode known only from the Gospel of Matthew and known as the slaughter of the innocents. This story is a scratch in the festive Christmas mood. On the one hand, we celebrate the birthday of Jesus, and on the other, on December 28, we remember the Holy Innocents.
We associate the word "young people" with teenagers, but here are about children who were under the age of two, and died only because they were unlucky to be born like Jesus in Bethlehem and it is close to his birth. Like a certain Brian from the Monty Python movie, born next door (although he happened to be saved).
According to Matthew, when Herod the Great realized that the Magi had failed him and did not provide information that would help identify which child they wanted, he became furious. The behavior of the Magicians caused him extreme annoyance because he was fooled. It was then that he ordered all male children under two years of age to be killed in Bethlehem.
The slaughter of innocent babies, perpetrated due to the old king's paranoid fears, while Joseph, warned by an angel, escaped with Mary and baby Jesus to Egypt, raises our understandable opposition. No angel came to their parents. They died and Jesus was saved. You could say - that's life. Not everyone is the Messiah.
New Moses
Of course, it is also possible that the whole story was made up by Matthew. Most historians dispute that such an event even happened. Many modern scholars will say that the evangelist wanted to introduce Jesus as the new Moses, therefore the story of His birth is also built to resemble the story from the Book of Exodus, where little Moses escaped alive despite the extermination of Jewish boys.
The resemblance is striking, especially when we consider the Jewish Haggadah, according to which Egyptian astrologers foretold the Pharaoh that a special child would be born in the Hebrew nation and that when it grows up, it will bring an end to the Egyptian rule and increase the power of the Israelites. The pharaoh then ordered all the Jewish boys to be thrown into the river immediately after birth. However, God appeared to Moses' father in a dream and promised to save his son.
The text is an excerpt from the book “Trzej kings. The Secret of the Magi from the East ”, which has just been released by Wydawnictwo Znak.
Flavius Josephus presented this story in an almost identical way. Written much later than the New Testament, the rabbinic tradition passed on the legend of the life of little Abraham in danger. While he was in the womb, King Nimrod learned that a boy was about to come into the world to rise against him. He therefore ordered that the male newborns be killed. The pregnant Amatlai (Terah's wife) ran away from home, gave birth to a son in the desert and hid with him in a cave.
There are countless such stories (about rulers who learn from the prophecy that a newborn child will do their undoing and therefore try to find and kill him). The theme of a defenseless child, who is written greatness, but has been haunted by an enemy from birth, is common in myths. Suffice it to recall, for example, the history of Heracles, Perseus or Romulus and Remus.
"Ten thousand! Fifty! A million! ”
The Church Fathers (Saint Irenaeus, Saint Cyprian, Saint Augustine and others) claimed that the Youths (that is, the murdered contemporaries of Jesus from Bethlehem) had no bad luck, and unanimously recognized the victims of Herod's decree as saints and martyrs, because these little ones spilled - according to them - blood for Jesus, though they did not consciously, and it was not their choice. We can read the lofty words that the boys of Bethlehem "gained the crown of martyrdom without experiencing the evil of this world, the temptations of the flesh and the promptings of Satan" . In other words, they have been handsomely rewarded in Heaven and have been worshiped throughout the ages as patron saints of all murdered children.
The authors of pious treatises and lives of saints also tried to shock the audience and conquered the alleged number of children murdered in Bethlehem. Saint Jerome wrote about multa parvulorum milia , that is, about many thousands of boys. The Byzantine liturgy mentions 14,000 murdered children (as reported by the Greek synaxarions, that is, liturgical books containing short biographies of saints for each day).
The Syrian calendars increase this number to 64,000, and the 9th-century French monk Usuard decided to beat all of them with 144,000 murdered infants, based on the symbolic number of the elect given in the Apocalypse.
This is a bit reminiscent of the famous sketch with Zenon Laskowik and the late Bohdan Smolen as Mrs. Pelagia, working in a factory of baubles (including Christmas balls). When the editor asked how many of them she was doing per day, Pelagia replied that it was roughly two hundred and eighty-three, but on learning that this was an interview for viewers of the evening newspaper, she said:"Oh, I won't say five hundred! Ten thousand! Fifty! A million! ”.
How many victims does Herod have on his conscience?
If we assume that the slaughter of the innocents did take place, it would be worth using at least some common sense. Giuseppe Ricciotti estimated the total population of Bethlehem at that time at a maximum of 1,000. Given that some thirty children are born out of a thousand a year, and the mortality rate and the fact that Herod's order only concerned male children, the boys killed in Bethlehem could be twenty-five or thirty, though probably the number this one should be lowered even further .
There were much less slaughter victims than you might think
There are also scientists who believe that the population of Bethlehem at that time was only about three hundred, so if such a slaughter had happened it would have consumed no more than six or seven boys (up to two years old).
According to defenders of the credibility of this story, this would explain why Josephus, a historian born about forty years after the death of Herod, makes no mention of the crime. He might not have known about it, and even if he heard that a few or a dozen infants had died in a deadly hole, he might have considered it a trivial episode that deserved no mention in a footnote.
At that time, Bethlehem was a small shepherd's settlement full of poor peasants, in addition to the mainstream political events in Palestine. These children did not count at all ... Besides, probably even the parents of the murdered would not know who was responsible for the death of their children . Well, some wetboys came and did their job, rather than justifying their motives. Real killers do not enter into discussions and explanations. If Herod had given such an order, he would certainly have been anxious not to publicize the matter.
Regardless of whether this story is true or is a pious fabrication, it must be admitted that the order to kill the children in Bethlehem seems fully in line with the psychological profile of the ruler, whose cruelty resulted (especially at the end of his life) from mental illness and from psychosis of fear of losing self-power.
Source:
The text is an excerpt from Roman Zając's book “Trzej kings. The Secret of the Magi from the East ”, which has just been released by Wydawnictwo Znak.