National Geographic Blows It Again

When I was growing up in the 1960s, my mother had a subscription to the National Geographic and I regularly perused its issues.  It had a reputation as recently as the 1980s for a high degree of accuracy and the avoidance of sensationalism.  Some time between then and this decade something went awry.  Two years ago it completely botched the report on the Gospel of Judas and admitted it.  This month its issue reports, reasonably competently, on the discovery of Herod (the Great)'s tomb a year and a half ago at the site south of Bethlehem known as Herodium (also called Herodion).

But, gratutiously, and highlighted by a quotation box, they insert the claim that Herod almost certainly did not kill the babies two years old and under in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth.  The sole reason given is that the report of this massacre occurs only in the Gospel of Matthew.  Of course, very liberal scholars have said something similar for a long time, but without good reason.

What makes the National Geographic report's statement all the more unfortunate is that it comes right in the context of fairly detailed recounting of Josephus' reports of all the cruelty and executions Herod did manufacture.  Increasingly paranoid as he got older about supposed threats to his "throne," he had several of his sons and wives put to death.  It would be one thing if Josephus gave one kind of portrait of Herod and Matthew a quite different one, but both sources agree entirely on Herod's ruthlessness and the specific manner it most manifested itself--repeated murders of those even slightly perceived to be a threat to his power.  Reports that a boy had been born with the right ancestral credentials to reign over Israel would easily have threatened this megalomaniac from Idumea who wasn't even a Jew by birth and would never have survived the installment of someone with the right lineage.

So why didn't Josephus say anything about these babies (see Matthew 2 if you are not familiar with the story)?  Because, like all other historians of his day, he was concerned to recount the events related to the kings and queens, military generals, aristocracy, and institutionalized leaders of religion of his people--not the lives and times of ordinary peasants.  Bethlehem had at most 500 people and, even factoring in large families, one can scarcely imagine more than 20-25 babies affected by Herod's soldiers' raids, and perhaps less.  It was a blip on the horizon of Herod's nefarious resume.  It may even have been little reported in circles outside of later Christian ones.

This is not an idiosyncratic view.  Any of the numerous scholarly evangelical commentaries on Matthew will present it.  R. T. France, author of one of those commentaries, wrote a whole article in a major scholarly journal (Novum Testamentum) almost thirty years ago explicating the detail.  Today, not a few non-evangelical sources at least cite the opinion, too.

Thanks to the aggressive efforts of scholars like Darrell Bock, Ben Witherington, Craig Evans, N. T. Wright and others, the major networks are little by little recognizing that evangelical biblical scholarship exists, in massive and sophisticated amounts, and are reporting on it.  The Discovery Channel didn't learn their lesson with the Talpiot Tomb fiasco, and it appears National Geographic still needs to move into the twenty-first century.  Or, given their much better performance in decades past, perhaps they need to move back to the twentieth century!