The absence of any mention of the Bethlehem massacre in Josephus, who wrote in considerable and often unflattering detail about Herod's reign and who had every documented interest in cataloguing the king's cruelties, is treated by most historians as significant evidence against the episode's historicity as an actual event, though it cannot by itself prove a negative with absolute certainty, since Bethlehem was a small town and the number of victims implied, if historical, would have been correspondingly small and might in principle have escaped wider notice.
Critical scholarship, following the detailed analysis in Raymond Brown's standard commentary on the infancy narratives, generally reads the massacre as a Matthean theological composition constructed to draw a parallel between Jesus and Moses, whose own infancy, in Exodus, involves a similar royal order to kill Hebrew infant boys that the future deliverer alone escapes, a parallel Matthew appears to be drawing deliberately across several details of his infancy narrative.
This scholarly assessment does not affect the episode's standing within Christian tradition, where the Holy Innocents have long been venerated as martyrs regardless of debates over the passage's historical basis, an example of how a Gospel narrative can carry full devotional and liturgical significance within a tradition independent of the historical judgments modern critical scholarship reaches about the underlying text.