to jerusalem. herod s reaction is unsurprising. he s already paranoid. now he s thinking, oh, they ve slunk off back to wherever they came from because they found something they didn t want to report to me. and so i think this only causes him to push the panic button. kill every male child under the age of 2. according to the gospel of matthew, herod sends his soldiers to bethlehem to find and kill jesus. kill them all! herod, as a king, would have been perfectly willing to kill any and every person that he
beside his right hand lay his scepter, and they went toward herodium for it was there that the burial took place by his own order. and thus did herod end his life. but how should herod be remembered, as a great king who brought peace and stability, or a bloodthirsty and paranoid tyrant who tried to kill the infant jesus? the gospel of matthew does such a good job painting the picture of a monster ah! that it s hard, even for modern skeptical readers, to see anything other than the psychopath who slaughtered the innocent. ah! i don t think the popular
it s the kind of story they told about herod, as a paranoid, neurotic king who was capable of acts of great barbarism. the massacre of the innocents is not historical, but what it does do for matthew is it makes jesus look like a new moses. in the old testament, pharaoh tries to kill baby moses by slaughtering all of the hebrew children. matthew, by showing herod slaughtering all of these children in bethlehem, is showing that jesus is like moses, and herod is like the pharaoh. so who is the true king herod, and can history and archaeology reveal the man behind the myth? billions of mouths.
according to matthew, the men had come to king herod to ask for guidance. kings would not turn down audiences with people like the wise men, especially if they seem to have insider trader information that was plausible about the future. so the scene between herod and the wise men in the gospel of matthew is absolutely plausible. this sort of thing happened all the time. i think an audience with herod the great would ve been really terrifying. if you were not sure of what herod thought about you, or even worse, if you knew that herod didn t like you, it probably was one of the more terrifying experiences of your life. i hear you have a question for me? so the magi come to herod and say, where s the king of the jews to be born?
according to the story in matthew, joseph is warned in a dream that herod is a threat to their newborn child, and they get out of town fast. they want to make sure that they were nowhere near herod s homicidal grasp. herod probably thought that he had killed all the children in bethlehem, but he never knew that jesus had escaped. matthew says that to escape the massacre, mary and joseph flee to egypt. like any couple with a child, mary and joseph would have been overjoyed to know that their son was still safe. they re human beings, we have to remember, and they had the same human emotions that any parents