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
