Like a shoddy police procedural with an easily-recognizable bad guy—the unshaven one with the heavy accent—the Christmas story has one villain in particular. Not Joseph, who didn’t believe Mary’s tale until an angel came to him in a dream. Not the innkeeper who said there was “no room” for Joseph and Mary. (That’s probably a misunderstanding anyway.) No. The real baddie, looming up behind the whole narrative, is King Herod.
Modern scholars know quite a lot about Herod the Great, mostly because of the Judaean historian Flavius Josephus, who had access to court records. The Roman Emperor Augustus had given Herod the title “King of the Judaeans,” even though he wasn’t fully Jewish. The Romans liked to give the appearance of civilized rule by getting local thugs to do their dirty work. Herod was simply the most successful warlord in the region.
