What Happened After the Three Wise Men Visited Baby Jesus?

‘The Massacre of the Infants’ Is an Ancient Example of a Horror That Peaked in the Last Century: Democide

In a hauntingly beautiful painting, Léon Cogniet tells several thousand words about a sad event connected to a joyous celebration.

January 6 was originally the day for Christmas in some parts of the world, but after some debate, the date became more widely known as the Epiphany. (I wrote more about the dating of Christmas here). It immediately follows the popularly song-ified 12th day of Christmas.

The Epiphany commemorates the visit of the Three Wise Men / Magi / Three Kings (depending on your translation preferences) to the baby Jesus, bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. As recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, they followed a star, believing it heralded “the newborn king,” and arrived shortly after Jesus’ birth (Matthew 2:1-12).

But what happened after the Three Wise Men found Jesus is often left out of the Epiphany celebration (though some Christians do memorialize it on Dec. 28). And it’s understandable why.

Which brings us to Cogniet:

Small portion of Léon Cogniet’s painting, ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (1824); photograph uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ivonna Nowicka, CC BY-SA 4.0.

‘The Massacre of the Innocents’

The Three Wise Men, upon nearing Jerusalem, sought an audience with King Herod the Great, inquiring about the “newborn king.” Herod claimed interest in finding the child to “do him homage” (Matthew 2:8). But when the Wise Men failed to return to Herod after visiting Jesus (Matthew 2:12), Herod’s real intentions surfaced.

My book, Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen, notes in Station 10 that politically powerful people wanted Jesus dead long before they finally crucified Him.  This was the first attempt on His life.

Herod ordered “the massacre of all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity two years old and under” (Matthew 2:16).  And his law enforcers obeyed!  They missed their target — Jesus’ family had fled (Matthew 2:13-15) — but created what’s known as “collateral damage” to those who’ve accepted the modern, military euphemism.

Many artists have tried to capture the anguish of this totally legal government action, but Cogniet has perhaps done the best job. The focal point is a mother trying to keep her young son quiet as Herod’s enforcers rampage. The mother’s eyes lock with those of the painting’s observers. If we zoom out to the full painting, more madness can be seen, including a woman trying to escape with a child under each arm:

Léon Cogniet’s full painting, ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (1824); public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Governments killed more than 200 million of ‘their own’ in the last century

Professor and Holocaust historian R. J. Rummel compiled the most widely cited data on what he called democide: the intentional killing of people by their own government. He tabulated over 200 million such deaths in the 20^th Century alone.  These don’t include deaths from foreign wars (which is its own gruesome category).

It’s difficult to imagine that governments would brutally dispose of their own citizens, until you realize that governments don’t exist to protect ordinary people; governments exist to perpetuate governments. Coercive civil authority is inherently, intrinsically evil. Monopoly-violence institutions, by definition, justify the violence of some persons against other persons, based on each person’s status within the imposed, hierarchical social order.

Victims may even welcome the intrusions, right up until they realize what’s actually happening, as occurred in other large-scale democides.  Hannah Arendt — who popularized the term the “banality of evil” — famously (or infamously) “pointed out that some Jewish leaders in Europe had effectively helped the Nazis.”

Too many people worship government, too often until it’s too late.

This in no way absolves government actors of their violence, their evil, their sin. But it does illuminate the social climate that makes possible the scaling up of organized horror.

Not such Wise Men, after all?

The Three Wise Men, too, seem somewhat naïve: They trusted in the goodwill of a sitting king, regarding a prophecy of what most people believed would be a rival “king.”

Perhaps if they had been the Three Anarchists, the Massacre of the Innocents wouldn’t have happened.

But, alas, ours is not to rewrite history, but to learn from it, and so to better the present and future.

May we be truly wise and undermine government sooner rather than later.

I know this is a somber subject, but …

I’m interested in your thoughts! Tell me in the Comments how wise you think the Wise Men (and anyone else involved in the incidents) really were, and/or anything else you’d like to say about today’s themes!