RMJ has written a very fine post on this.
AN INTELLECTUAL RUCKUS IS MADE every year about the birth narratives of Jesus in Luke and Matthew being so different and pointing out that none of what is said in them can be confirmed to have happened. The census, the slaughter of the children, etc. Though it's become so rote a ruckus that it should be considered untellectual by now.
Even those who are supposed to be academics don't much fact check themselves on the neo-pseudo-pagan anti-Christian liturgies these days. It's not as if there's any professional price to pay if they get that wrong. I will mention in passing that most of the history of that period, earlier and later is similarly undocumented but no one will seriously question it.
While it might be reasonable to figure that something so profitable to rulers as a census for purposes of taxation as in Luke's narrative might have left evidence which survived, anyone who thinks something as routine as the Matthew Gospel's ordered massacre of a bunch of babies of poor people would survive in historical records has an extremely naive view of how power is still routinely wielded by the rich and so powerful and what they figure is worth keeping records of. Routine murder of poor children is still too routine to matter much. The recording of history and what gets paid attention to is a question of what those in a position to do that really value and it's still mostly money. The United States can't even manage to change the damned Constitution to prevent even the murder of middle-class children in their schools and it's become so routine as to have no effect, whatsoever. And we're supposed to be a republic.
I think, though, the assertion that the slaughter of the innocents is undocumented so is merely a myth gets it wrong in what is the most important way. I think that of all of the birth narratives, the slaughter of the innocents and the family fleeing into Egypt, the El Norte of that time and place, is absolutely documented and it isn't because we can be any more certain that the actual family of Jesus experienced it. But, I will speak up for an even standard in academic proclamations and note that even the single attestation in the Gospel of Matthew lends weight to something like that having happened even if you don't believe in astrology or significant, prophetic dreaming. There is certainly nothing unbelievable in the general outline of the story. A known to be murderous king coming to believe an unspecified new born baby in a specific town is a danger to his rule and his dynasty ordering his thugs to kill all the babies in that district, a parent finding out the danger and fleeing with their children. The modern fashion in historical speculation says that the actual number of such babies in such a town wouldn't be the numbers imagined by renaissance and baroque painters, more like what the peasants of 1970s Nicaragua discussed in The Gospel At Solentiame, as they could understand the Gospel on this better than almost any American or Brit academic expert could.*
Despite the vulgar significance at the heart of that academically trivial and pointless responsible, modern obsession, that exercise in scholarly responsibility doesn't get near the heart of the two birth narratives. As that sermon by Bishop Gene Robinson noted, not everything has to have happened for it to be true, that is if by "truth" you mean having a coherent and important true meaning instead of being an objective report on something that had happened in pedestrian, abstract clerical reporting.
As I've said last week, my preferences tend to be with Luke's interpretation with frightening angels telling very low status shepherds about the most significant event in human history, the birth of the Son of God, of God choosing to become incarnated as a human being - no one understands the Incarnation - and them having the faith to go look for him in an animals shed, sleeping in the feed trough. I contrasted that to the wise men with their three Christmas presents, though Matthew doesn't specify that the child was a baby and may well have been more of a toddler by the time they caught up with what their astrology told them was going on with the Jews. Too bad their astrology didn't tell them Herod was a complete rotter.
But there is an aspect of Matthew's account we can be certain was absolutely true in the Gene Robinson way, the attempt of Herod to kill him, showing that from the start the baby who was to have the future of Jesus would be a danger to earthly power and would be the object of their murderous violence as soon as they found out about him. He could well have been the victim of their uninformed, routine violence, anyway. The Crucifixion of Jesus under the Romans is the final proof of the truth of Matthew's perhaps symbolic nativity story of the three astrologers and their symbolically portentous gifts. The accounts in Matthew are true in the most important way. Certainly it's more important for human experience. That event has been repeatedly reenacted and expanded on. How much truth would there have been in an accurate live-birth record as found all round the United State these days as compared to the perennial truth of Matthew's scary Christmas stories? How much would the record of a live birth be an important truth as opposed to the life of the child that followed that birth? Just what is truth supposed to be good for, in the end?
Herod is Trump putting babies in concentration camps to keep his power through appealing to racism and hate and his media and the Republican-fascist party supporting him, many of them those "evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics." He is Trump denying Covid-19, advocating Darwinist "herd immunity" sacrificing so many more babies and children than Herod had available to murder. Herod is the entire Republican-fascist caucus of the Congress and the majority on the Supreme Court. And that's just here in one country. Herod has led most of the world for most of history, including the so-called Christian world. Imagine how different things would have been if people had taken him more seriously. The secular world hankers for a time when even fewer people will take him seriously. Even the alleged left.
That other story in Matthew 25 in which Jesus, himself, identifies the least among us as being enough of a of God so that what we do for them we do to God and what we neglect to do, we neglect to do for God. Poor children aren't in that list as given in Matthew 25 but they would certainly have been the least of the least as they are now and for every age in the past and will be into the future as it looks now. Children are marked out for murder by oppressive worldly power, they are certainly marked out for the violence of poverty, for neglect, they are the targets of official and unofficial violence, for both the violence of the state and the other worldly powers of organized crime, some of that organized crime conducted by other children. And just as the parents of Jesus, Mary and Joseph are so terrified for the life of their child, they were forced to leave their homeland to save his life, just as so many are fleeing from the Herods of Central America and Eastern Africa and the Middle East and Ukraine and in so many places that none of us could come up with an adequate list.
All of those "white evangelicals" (we aren't supposed to notice the ones who aren't fascists) and in many cases their fellow "traditional Catholics" who participated in Trump's and earlier Republican-fascists use of those fleeing violence in Central America were reenacting Herod's side of the story, they still do and for exactly the same reasons.
The blasphemy of those who mouth "Jesus Christ" or "The Bible" as they worship Mammon and take on the mark of the antichrist is unremarked in the nice, polite Christianity of the mainline churches and Catholicism, indeed, the majority of those incumbent in the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops are fully in on the act as are those billionaires and millionaires who fund the "trad-catholic" corruption that is engaged in a hostile take-over of the Catholic Church.
And that doesn't get to the foremost murderers of Children, killers of their souls, their lives if they achieve adulthood, the specters terrorizing their parents, their physical and spiritual welfare, murderous, self-satisfied neglect, addiction, sex trafficking. Poverty is its basis.
That truth is one that you won't read or hear any snark about but it is a far more important truth than whether or not Matthew would have gotten an A in a properly conducted history class while a critique of the historicity of the most pedestrian facts of his Gospel would get the top grade. We know it's accurate history of THIS child because what this child said about the Least among us and that what we do and neglect to do for it we do to God and the consequences of that action or inaction would be the gravest alternatives we will ever provoke in our lives. But that is held to be less important than getting his hometown right and date of birth accurate. The real truth is Jesus was born last week in the Congo, in North Korea, in El Salvador, in Ukraine, in Somalia.
If she were close enough, her or his single-mother will have to make the flight into America's Pharaonic regime maybe as soon as they can travel, maybe the baby's father will go with them but quite likely not. Mary was lucky she had a husband who stuck by them and who could. The Supreme Court and the Republican-fascists in Congress, FOX with its mythical war on Christmas are Herod. So are the gangs they'll be fleeing. So is every member of the Republican-fascist party. And what you can say about that incarnation of The Lord, you can also tell in stories of so many places it will make you weep. And you can even weep more for the children, infants, toddlers, older children and least among us adults who are the victims of the ever reincarnated Herod power among us. It doesn't get any truer than the most significant of real history, a narrative that is continually re-happening right before our eyes and which is the only history that matters because we have some power to do something about it.
* I will point out how acceptable "ethics" talk about killing babies after birth is and generally has been since the second half of the 19th century. I am unaware of any "ethics" professor, any biologist, any medical guy ever being fired for advocating the killing of babies. In the ever widening game of "I can take an even more extreme stand," which is as much a part of competitive academics as it is in degenerate politics, there are perfectly respectable and respected "ethicists" who have toyed with the assertion that parents should get to have their children killed if they don't measure up to their standards. I'm not aware of anyone ever getting canned for that. I'll bet someone who asserted the accuracy of Matthew's accounts would be looked more askance at than even the most infanticidal "ethics" faculty would. If I were online as much as I used to be I'd make up a faculty identity so I could access academic publications to see what the status of that issue is in academic scribblage is these days.
In ghetto settings, Jewish children died from starvation, disease, and a lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to the high death rates. They considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.” Because children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, German authorities often selected them, the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims led to mass graves to be shot.
I am, of course, obliged to point out that I'm talking about post-partum murder of children, not access to abortion which is an entirely different matter which I've dealt with, favoring legal, accessible, medically safe abortion and universal education and availability of effective, scientific contraception. That and education in how to avoid STDs belongs in every school from earlier than kids are going to be screwing around. Anyone who claims to be against abortion who isn't for that is a liar.
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