Puzzle 3: Slaughter at Bethlehem
the gospel of Matthew paints a grisly scene: Herod the Great, the king of Judea, feeling threatened by the birth of a baby who he feared would eventually seize his throne, dispatches his troops to murder all the children under the age of 2 in Bethlehem, warned by an angel, however, Joseph escapes to Egypt with Mary and Jesus, only after Herod dies do they return to settle in Nazareth, the entire episode having fulfilled 3 ancient prophecies, about the Messiah, the problem: there is no independent confirmation that this mass murder ever took place, there's nothing in the writings of Josephus or other historians, there's no archaeological support, there are no records or documents, certainly an event of this magnitude would have been noticed by someone other than Matthew, with the complete absence of any historical or archaeological corroboration, isn't it logical to conclude that this slaughter never occurred? it's easy to see why we'd say that, since today an event like that would probably be splashed all over CNN and the rest of the news media, but you have to put yourself back in the first century and keep a few things in mind, first, Bethlehem was probably no bigger than Nazareth, so how many babies of that age would there be in a village of 500-600 people? not thousands, not hundreds, although certainly a few, second, Herod the Great was a bloodthirsty king: he killed members of his own family; he executed lots of people who he thought might challenge him, so the fact that he killed some babies in Bethlehem is not going to captivate the attention of people in the Roman world, and third, there was no television, no radio, no newspapers, it would have taken a long time for word of this to get out, especially from such a minor village way in the back hills of nowhere, and historians had much bigger stories to write about, this just wasn't much of a story, at least not in those days, a madman killing everybody who seems to be a potential threat to him - that was business as usual for Herod, later, of course, as Christianity developed, this incident became more important
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