Reflection on the Holy Innocents

The new edition of Butler's Lives of the Saints notes that Matthew's telling of this story in chapter 2 of his Gospel "is not purely a record of events. He is concerned to show a parallel between the infancy of Jesus and the infancy of Moses, the fate of the Innocents resembling that of the Hebrew children killed on Pharaoh's orders when Moses was born (Exodus 1:13-22)."

We don't know how many slaughtered Innocents there were. Traditional counts from several centuries later (the Byzantine liturgy speaks of 14,000, and Syrian calendars say 64,000) are exaggerated beyond any reasonable estimate of the population of Bethlehem at the time. Most modern day estimates say there couldn't have been more than a dozen or so children under two in a small village such as Bethlehem and its surrounding countryside.

Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC, was the one who built the Temple in Jerusalem, which was destroyed in 70 AD. He was also a murderous madman, who even killed members of his own family. (There was a Roman quip that it was safer to be Herod's dog than his son!) So this massacre of infants was not out of character.

Christian tradition has venerated the Innocents as martyrs, "who died not only in witness to Christ but actually instead of Christ." In England the feast used to be "Childermas."

I have always pictured the escape of Joseph, Mary and Jesus into Egypt sort of like refugees alone in a strange and alien land. Actually, that wasn't quite the case. Alexandria, Egypt, at that time had one of the largest Jewish populations of any city in the world outside of Jerusalem, possibly several hundred thousand, and it was a flourishing center of learning and culture. It's very possible they found a warm and protective welcome among the Jewish diaspora community for the time they had to spend there.