Massacre of the Innocents

• 1. Introduction

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  The Massacre of the Innocents fills only a few lines of the Gospel of Matthew, yet it has echoed through carols, canvases and church calendars for centuries. In those lines, King Herod the Great of Judea orders the killing of every boy aged two and under in Bethlehem and the land around it. Matthew then reaches back to the prophet Jeremiah: "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more." A crime on this scale should leave tracks in the historical record. Does it? If the event is unproven, where did Matthew find the shape of the story? How many children could one small town even have lost? And why do some Christians mark the memory with solemn prayers while others mark it with flour fights and practical jokes?

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• 2. The Silent Record

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  Nicolaus of Damascus was a personal friend of Herod the Great, and his surviving works never mention a slaughter at Bethlehem. Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, catalogued many of Herod's misdeeds, including the murder of three of the king's own sons. He says nothing about this one either. No gospel other than Matthew tells the story.

  One later voice seems to offer support. In the early 5th century, Macrobius wrote that on hearing that Herod's son had been slain when the king ordered all boys in Syria under two to be killed, Augustus said: "It's better to be Herod's pig than his son." Scholars set this aside as evidence. It was written long after the supposed events, it may have been shaped by the gospel narrative, and the account itself is confused.

  Most modern scholars therefore do not accept Matthew's account as history. Some call it a kind of folklore inspired by Herod's reputation. Others say the argument over historicity matters less than it seems, because the gospels were written as theological documents rather than as timelines.

  A minority disagrees. Paul L. Maier and the Anglican scholar Richard T. France have argued for the account, although most scholars do not accept their arguments. James Dunn sees the massacre as an act that fits Herod's known character. Joan E. Taylor and Anthony Le Donne point out that Herod was vindictive and harsh, and that Jews of the period often faced life as refugees, frequently in Egypt. Taylor goes further and argues that Jesus himself could have been a refugee whose background shaped his teachings.

  Whether or not the killings happened, scholars have found a striking literary model for them in a much older king of Egypt.

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• 3. Pharaoh's Shadow

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  In the Book of Exodus, as it was retold in an expanded version current in the 1st century, Pharaoh's scribes warn him that a child is about to be born who will threaten his crown. That child is Moses. Pharaoh responds by killing the Hebrew children. Moses' father and mother, however, are warned in a dream that the boy's life is in danger, and they act to save him.

  Matthew's telling echoes that pattern closely. The Magi are warned in a dream and do not report back to Herod. Herod, furious at being outwitted, strikes at the children of Bethlehem. The author appears to have built the episode on the Exodus tradition.

  The parallel runs further. Moses is forced to flee, and like Jesus he returns only after those who sought his death are themselves dead.

  Then comes the quotation from Jeremiah. Rachel weeps in Ramah in the verse Matthew cites, which is numbered 31:15 in most Bibles and 31:14 in the Hebrew Bible. Yet the link to the massacre is not obvious, because the verses that follow in Jeremiah turn toward hope and restoration rather than grief. Matthew leaves that hopeful ending unquoted.

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• 4. Counting the Children

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  The liturgy of the Byzantine Rite speaks of 14,000 Holy Innocents. An early Syrian list of saints raises the figure to 64,000. Coptic sources go higher still, to 144,000, and they place the event on the 29th of December.

  These numbers sit awkwardly beside the geography. In 1910, Frederick George Holweck wrote the entry on the subject for the Catholic Encyclopedia. He noted estimates that accepted the event as real but admitted that Bethlehem was far too small to supply such crowds. Those estimates reduced the victims to somewhere between 6 and 20 children.

  Richard T. France reached a similar answer by a different route. Citing estimates that Bethlehem held around 1,000 people at the time, he agreed that if the massacre was historical, about 20 children was the likely upper limit.

  Tradition has nonetheless called these children the first Christian martyrs, though by the church's own phrase they died unknowingly.

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• 5. Songs and Stages

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  In 1534, a man named Robert Croo wrote down the oldest known text of the Coventry Carol. The carol belongs to a mystery play called The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, performed in Coventry, England. That play retells the Christmas story from the second chapter of Matthew. Its song is a mother's lament for her doomed child, and its author is unknown. The melody dates from 1591, and the carol is traditionally sung a cappella.

  Other medieval plays gave the massacre a place too. The Ordo Rachelis tradition links four plays: the Flight into Egypt, Herod's succession by Archelaus, the return from Egypt, and the Massacre itself. All of them center on Rachel weeping in fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecy. The story also appeared in the medieval N-Town Plays.

  A 17th century Dutch song, O Kerstnacht, schoner dan de dagen, begins by praising Christmas Night but turns out to be about the massacre. In 1974, the Dutch progressive rock band Focus recorded its first two verses for the album Hamburger Concerto.

  The church itself gave the day a sung text. The communion motet for the Feast of the Holy Innocents is Vox in Rama, drawn from Matthew 2:18. Renaissance and baroque composers set it in polyphony, among them Jacob Clemens non Papa, Giaches de Wert and Heinrich Schütz, who set it in German.

  Marc-Antoine Charpentier went further and wrote a full oratorio, Caedes sanctorum innocentium, catalogued as H.411. He composed it between 1683 and 1685 for soloists, chorus, two violins and continuo.

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• 6. Painted Violence

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  When Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the massacre around 1565-67, he gave the soldiers banners bearing the Habsburg double-headed eagle. The choice turned an ancient crime into a comment on his own century. The religious wars that followed the Reformation made the comparison between ancient brutality and early modern brutality easy to draw. His son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, kept producing versions into the 17th century.

  The subject offered painters a chance to arrange crowded, violent scenes of massed bodies. It served as an alternative to the Flight into Egypt in cycles on the Life of the Virgin. Its popularity declined in Gothic art, then revived in the large works of the Renaissance. Artists borrowed from Roman reliefs of the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, to the point of showing the figures heroically nude.

  Cornelis van Haarlem's version of 1590 seems to reflect the violence of the Dutch Revolt. His mothers are not passive victims. They take revenge on one of the killers.

  Guido Reni painted an early version in 1611 for the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna, in an unusual vertical format. It now hangs in that city's Pinacoteca Nazionale. Peter Paul Rubens painted the theme more than once, in 1611-1612 and again in 1636-1638. Nicolas Poussin painted his between 1625 and 1632, and Matteo di Giovanni also took up the subject.

  One Rubens version, now in Munich, was engraved, and the engraving carried the composition far from Europe. It was reproduced as a painting as far away as colonial Peru.

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• 7. Birth of a Feast

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  Around the year 485, the Leonine Sacramentary recorded the first known commemoration of the Holy Innocents as a feast of the Western church. The earliest observances were tied to the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January. Prudentius mentions the Innocents in his Epiphany hymn, and Leo speaks of them in his Epiphany homilies. In the 6th century, Fulgentius of Ruspe gave a homily titled De Epiphania, deque Innocentum nece et muneribus magorum, meaning "On Epiphany, and on the murder of the Innocents and the gifts of the Magi."

  The Roman Rite once gave the day an unusual sound and look. Before 1955, it borrowed the marks of penitential days, with violet vestments, no Gloria, and a Tract in place of the Alleluia. If the feast fell on a Sunday, it was kept as on its octave day, with red vestments, the Gloria and the Alleluia. Pope Pius XII suppressed the octave in 1955. The feast is now celebrated with the features once reserved for that octave day, a practice the 1960 Code of Rubrics reinforced.

  The date varies by tradition. West Syrians keep the 27th of December, including the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church and the Maronite Church. The Church of England, the Lutheran Church and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church keep the 28th, the fourth day of Christmastide. The Eastern Orthodox Church observes the 29th of December.

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• 8. Childermas Customs

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  From the time of Charlemagne, Sicarius of Bethlehem was venerated at Brantôme in the Dordogne as one of the purported victims of the massacre. His cult shows how far the memory of the children traveled from Bethlehem.

  In the Middle Ages, especially north of the Alps, the day became a festival of inversion. Children and adults swapped roles, and boy bishops presided over some church services. Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens suggest this was a Christianized form of the Roman Saturnalia, when even slaves played masters for a day.

  In medieval England and France, the day was also said to be unlucky, and no new project was to be started on it. A stricter custom avoided work, where possible, on that weekday for the whole following year. Philippe de Commynes, minister to King Louis XI of France, wrote in his memoirs that the king observed this custom. He also described his own trepidation when he had to bring the king news of an emergency on such a day.

  Today some Western Christians, including Catholics and Lutherans, attend Mass to remember the martyrdom of the Innocents. In England, Childermas, or Children's Mass, includes a blessing for children, who sing in the choir and take on special roles in the service.

  In Spain, Hispanic America and the Philippines, the 28th of December is the Day of the Holy Innocents, a day for pranks like April Fool's Day elsewhere. The pranks are called bromas or inocentadas, and the victims are the inocentes. In another reading, the pranksters are the inocentes, and victims should not be angry, since the innocent cannot sin. In Ibi, in Alacant, the annual Els Enfarinats festival has inocentes in full military dress inciting a flour fight.

  In Trinidad and Tobago, Catholic children have their toys blessed at Mass.

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