One of the weirder ‘celebrations’ of the Christian tradition, and apparently one of the oldest on record. The American Catholic Church decided to severely downplay its observances just before I started parochial school. But all our Irish grannies and Italian nonnas seemed to find it perfectly logical (“You get nothing for nothing”) that the creation of a Perfect Saviour would require the simultaneous sacrifice of a few hundred or thousand (or maybe just a couple dozen) male infants under the age of two…
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NotMax
It’s the exception to Sturgeon’s Law, it’s 100% crap.
raven
He came dancin across the water mon
Tommy
I am a Methodist. Raise that way. Long lines on that side of things. My mom is a Catholic. I’m am an atheist, but the priest in her church was always nice”to me.
OzarkHillbilly
As one who has fallen, I can say that it fits within Catholic dogma perfectly, and is not weird at all. It is also just one of the many reasons I left that failed theological experiment over 40 years ago. (IIRC I was 12yo when I began skipping mass)
OzarkHillbilly
And by a perfect fit I mean that in Catholicism God is all about feasting on the blood of innocents.
PurpleGirl
It’s parallelism to the story of Moses in the Old Testament; as Pharaoh ordered the death of the boy babies of his time from which order Moses had to be saved, so too Jesus had to be saved from a similar order of his time. It’s not so weird if seen from this perspective.
Ken
@PurpleGirl: And of course even without looking it up, the parallelism alone is enough to tell us that this is from the Gospel according to Matthew, who was trying to persuade the Jewish community that this had finally been the Messiah. The other three don’t mention the slaughter of the innocents – and neither does Josephus, who never found a rumor about the Herodians too scurrilous or unlikely. So the general consensus is that Herod didn’t do it.
Lihtox
I’d never heard of the feast until reading about it in Madeleine L’Engle’s The Irrational Season, and so I see it as she does: a feastday of mourning. Terrible things happen even as a consequence of great things, and one shouldn’t just dismiss them out of hand as some sort of “necessary sacrifice”.
rea
@Lihtox: The reason for calling it a “necessary sacrifice” is that Matthew makes it clear that the massacre fulfilled prophecy:
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:
‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’
Although the fact that the massacre neatly fullfilled Old Testament prophecy is one reason to be skeptical of it.
rea
I’ll add that the whole birth story is an obvious fabrication to match Old Testament prophecy. Jesus was from Nazereth, but the prophecy was that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem; therefore the absurd claim of a Roman census that required everyone to go back to the town in which their ancestors had lived a thousand years before, in order to be counted. Needless to say, there is no historical record of such a census.
MattF
Could have happened. Matthew might well have been alluding to a communal memory of some Roman atrocity. The Romans were not humanitarians, the Jews had a history of stubborn rebelliousness.
rea
@MattF: Except that Matthew attributes it to King Herod, who was a Roman client, but a Jew governing a legally-independent country.
MattF
@rea: Yeah, I’m not saying the whole story is true– just that there’s a plausible side to it.
WereBear
Jung says such stories are ancient archetypes, and that makes the most sense to me. Such stories are the backbone of our storytelling, illustrate morals and lessons, and are found in remarkably similar forms in every human culture. Joseph Campbell picked up these ideas and ran with them, as have many others.
But sadly, only a few branches of Christianity acknowledge this truth.
In my voracious reading I ran across descriptions of the 1922 Emily Post version of her book on etiquette.
What if I formulated this as a Holy Book that everyone had to follow? That a formal dinner party would be the height of sanctity? Modern society would be turned inside out struggling to follow such ill-fitting advice.
And so, here we are, still trying to make sense out of a collection of myths and folk tales and propaganda. And it’s a shame.
Because what we are after is spirituality. And that’s well worth exploring.
Comrade Dread
Given the population of Bethlehem was pretty small, and the story isn’t reported outside of the gospel, if the act took place, it was probably less than a dozen and not well known outside of the locality.
That said, given Herod’s other reported brutality, I wouldn’t put it past him.
The Red Pen
That’s the most twisted description of The Feast of the Innocents, that I’ve encountered.
The story is that King Herod feared that his dynasty would be ended by the birth of a new king, so he ordered the slaughter. The feast is a memorial to these (likely entirely apocryphal) victims. It’s like “we’re sorry that news of Jesus’s birth was used as an excuse to murder you.”