population of Bethlehem, their number could only have been small, probably twenty at
most.65 But the deed was none the less atrocious; and these infants may justly be regarded
as the 'protomartyrs,' the first witnesses, of Christ, 'the blossom of martyrdom' ('flores
martyrum,' as Prudentius calls them). The slaughter was entirely in accordance with the
cha racter and former measures of Herod.66 Nor do we wonder, that it remained
unrecorded by Josephus, since on other occasions also he has omitted events which to us
seem important.67 The murder of a few infants in an insignificant village might appear
scarcely worth notice in a reign stained by so much bloodshed. Besides, he had, perhaps,
a special motive for this silence. Josephus always carefully suppresses, so far as possible,
all that refers to the Christ68 - probably not only in accordance with his own re ligious
views, but because mention of a Christ might have been dangerous, certainly would have
been inconvenient, in a work written by an intense self-seeker, mainly for readers in
Rome.
65. So Archdeacon Farrar rightly computes it.
66. An illustrative in stance of the ruthless destruction of whole families on suspicion that
his crown was in danger, occurs in Ant. xv. 8. 4. But the suggestion that Bagoas had
suffered at the hands of Herod for Messianic predictions is entirely an invention of Keim.
(Schenkel, Bibel Lex., vol. iii. p. 37. Comp. Ant. xvii. 2. 4.)
67. There are, in Josephus' history of Herod, besides omissions, inconsistencies of
narrative, such as about the execution of Mariamme (Ant. xv. 3, 5-9 &c.; comp. War i.
22. 3, 4), and of chronology (as War i. 18. 2, comp. v. 9. 4; Ant. xiv. 16. 2, comp. xv. 1.
2, and others.)
68. Comp. on article on Josephus in Smith and Wace's Dict. of Christian Biogr.
Of two passages in his own Old Testament Scriptures the Evangelist sees a fulfilment in
these eve nts. The flight into Egypt is to him the fulfilment of this expression by Hosea,
'Out of Egypt have I called My Son.'69 In the murder of 'the Innocents,' he sees the
fulfilment of Rachel's lament70 (who died and was buried in Ramah)71 over her children,
the men of Benjamin, when the exiles to Babylon met in Ramah,72 and there was bitter
wailing at the prospect of parting for hopeless captivity, and yet bitterer lament, as they
who might have encumbered the onward march were pitilessly slaughtered. Those who
have attentively followed the course of Jewish thinking, and marked how the ancient
Synagogue, and that rightly, read the Old Testament in its unity, as ever pointing to the
Messiah as the fulfilment of Israel's history, will not wonder at, but fully accord with, St.
Matthew's retrospective view. The words of Hosea were in the highest sense 'fulfilled' in
the flight to, and return of, the Saviour from Egypt.73 To an inspired writer, nay, to a true
Jewish reader of the Old Testament, the question in regard to any prophecy could not be:
What did the prophet - but, What did the prophecy - mean? And this could only be
unfolded in the course of Israel's history. Similarly, those who ever saw in the past the
prototype of the future, and recognized in events, not only the principle, but the very
features, of that which was to come, could not fail to perceive, in the bitter wail of the
mothers of Bethlehem over their slaughtered children, the full realisation of the prophetic
description of the scene enacted in Jere miah's days. Had not the prophet himself heard, in
the lament of the captives to Babylon, the echoes of Rachel's voice in the past? In neither