The Children of Bethlehem

The Holy Innocents, kept in the West on 28 December (29 December in the Byzantine calendar), commemorates the male children of Bethlehem killed on the order of Herod in his attempt to destroy the newborn Christ, an episode recounted only in Matthew's Gospel. Christian tradition honours them as martyrs, the first to die for Christ though without knowing him, and the feast's liturgy holds together the joy of Christmastide with the shadow of violence, keeping it within the Christmas octave rather than at a distance from it.

Historically the massacre is not otherwise attested, and scholars debate whether it is a historical event or a theological narrative shaped to echo Pharaoh's killing of the Hebrew infants and to present Jesus as a new Moses; the number of victims, greatly inflated in later legend, has no basis in the text, which implies a small village. In the medieval calendar the day was marked by inversions of order, the boy bishop and the "Feast of Fools", and in the modern period the Innocents have been widely taken up as patrons of children and invoked in reflection on the killing of the innocent.