Mythbusting Herod the Great

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By Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Herod the Great is an interesting guy. And as is usually the case, there is far more to his story than the black/white view offered by the Christian mythology still being pushed by today’s fundamentalists. Nuance (read as “truth”) has no place in such a simplistic worldview.


Am I saying Christian historians and theologians lied about Herod the Great? Yes, I am. And their lies persist today. Fact must fit doctrine, after all, and Herod suffers as Jesus suffers. They lie about Jesus because they aren’t interested in the truth about the historical Jesus – they want the theological Jesus instead. The same goes for Herod. The Herod of the New Testament is the theological, not the historical Herod.


The real Herod wasn’t put there by “God” in order to fulfill prophecy. He put himself there, through skill, luck, ruthlessness, and pragmatism.[1] He knew what he had to do to make himself acceptable to the Romans, and he was shrewd enough to understand that it was the Roman team to whom he should yoke his chariot, not the Parthians, who were the other major power on the Eastern stage.


Most Christians know Herod the Great through an old myth: We are assured that Herod went after the children and slaughtered them to make sure he got the one he was after – Jesus.


But the simple facts are he probably never knew that Jesus existed. After all, almost nobody else noticed, even after the supposedly dramatic moment of his death. One of the problems with accepting Acts’ truthfulness with regard to its wildly inflated conversion rates is that any cult growing so rapidly would certainly have attracted the notice of – someone, and as church historian W.H.C. Frend is force to admit, nobody did.^[2] A very literary first century Roman world missed entirely the advent of Jesus and Christianity.


It is an unpalatable fact for fundamentalists that there is no evidence at all to suggest Herod actually “slaughtered the innocents.” Nor is there any evidence that Jesus’ father, Joseph, was a troublemaker who would have attracted the king’s notice. He is presented in the New Testament as a simple carpenter.

Rubens' Massacre that never happened

Lingering Lies: The Persistent Influence of Misinformation: Scientific American

Lingering Lies: The Persistent Influence of Misinformation: Scientific American

The brain holds on to false facts, even after they have been retracted

By Valerie Ross | July 18, 2011

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After people realize the facts have been fudged, they do their best to set the record straight: judges tell juries to forget misleading testimony; newspapers publish errata. But even explicit warnings to ignore misinformation cannot erase the damage done, according to a new study from the University of Western Australia.

Psychologists asked college stu­dents to read an account of an ac­cident involving a busload of elderly passengers. The students were then told that, actually, those on the bus were not elderly. For some students, the information ended there. Others were told the bus had in fact been transporting a college hockey team.

And still others were warned about what psychologists call the continued influence of misinformation—that people tend to have a hard time ig­noring what they first heard, even if they know it is wrong—and that they should be extra vigilant about getting the story straight.

Students who had been warned about misinformation or given the alternative story were less likely than control subjects to make inferences using the old information later—but they still erred sometimes, agreeing with statements such as “the pas­sengers found it difficult to exit the bus because they were frail.”

This result shows that “even if you understand, remember and believe the retractions, this misinformation will still affect your inferences,” says Western Australia psychologist Ullrich Ecker, an author of the study. Our mem­ory is constantly connecting new facts to old and tying different aspects of a situation together, so that we may still unconsciously draw on facts we know to be wrong to make decisions later. “Memory has evolved to be both stable and flexible,” Ecker says, “but that also has a downside.”

[For more on how memory relies on connections and makes inferences, see “Making Connections,” by Anthony J. Greene; Scientific American Mind, July/August 2010.]