Is the New Testament the only source that reports an instance of mass infanticide ordered by Herod?
Yes.
That’s not surprising. From what Josephus tells us about Herod, it would hardly been out of character for him; but in that era, the death of a few dozen replaceable peasant babies wouldn’t necessarily get recorded.
I find it helpful to compare this episode to the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by the eruption of Vesuvius. The reality of the event is beyond question: the cities have been partially excavated. To the best of my knowledge, we have one surviving literary source (Pliny).
Yeh, what Grimpen said. Take a look at modern day tyrants and dictators; that was the norm for thousands of years of human history. The massacre of a few score or couple hundred people because the king was pissed off about something was a trivally common event.
And IIRC we have Pliny’s record because he lived there.
Am I remembering correctly?
Plus, it isn’t like there were newspapers back then, and we have them archived on microfilm. All that existed were a small number of historians. And if any did record this, what they wrote may have not survived until modern times.
Right – and even if the gospel reference is taken as 100% accurate it would be a relatively small number, Bethlehem being a small town. Many believers somehow get the idea that it was some sort of grand genocidal-scale incident, but that’s nor scripturally supported. It looks more like a vulgar “reprisal massacre” type of thing, where the tyrant or occupier just takes it out on a random sample of a village because somebody there did something to piss him off; this time it was boys around age 2 killed, another time every 10th random man, another day it may have been every other marriageable maiden taken away to be sold.
Quite close. Pliny was at Misenum at the time; his uncle, stationed with the fleet, took a boat to make closer observations, and died in the eruption.
In terms of documentation for ancient events, Pliny’s comments are a nice irony: “he perished in a catastrophe which destroyed the loveliest regions of the earth, a fate shared by whole cities and their people, and one so memorable that it is likely to make his name live forever…” (tr. Betty Radice)
So, so far at least, the direct answer to the OPs question, “Is the New Testament the only source that reports an instance of mass infanticide ordered by Herod?”, seems to be yes. That he was a nasty guy who might very well have done that is accepable as a characterization of a tyrant, but not an answer to the question.
Pretty much, yes. But I’m not sure that saying it’s a “characterization of a tyrant” is a good way to put it, if by that you mean that Herod was a tyrant, and tyrants did that sort of thing, so it’s possible in a generic sort of way. Herod was a particularly nasty tyrant, who seems to have been about at the same level as Stalin for paranoia and his penchant for murdering potential rivals. Herod killed two of his sons and his wife, among many others. Having 15-30 babies killed (what scholars think is about right, given the population of the area) would have been a morning memo for him.
/nitpick
It wasn’t just Bethlehem, it was the surrounding area too.
Still adds up to about 15 to 30. The “surrounding area” to such a small town would not account for too many people.