The conduct of Herod is incredible if we accept Matthew’s account:  “Herod’s first anxious question to the magi is to ascertain the time of the appearance of the star.  He ‘inquires diligently’ (ii. 7); and he must have had a motive for so doing.  What was this motive?  Could he have any other purpose than that of determining the age under which no infants in the neighbourhood of Bethlehem should be allowed to live?  But, according to the narrative, Herod never conceived the idea of slaughtering the children till he found that he had been ’mocked of the wise men;’ and the mythical nature of the story is betrayed by this anticipation of motives which, at the time spoken of could have no existence.  Yet, further, Herod, who, though in a high degree cruel, unjust, and unscrupulous, is represented as a man of no slight sagacity, clearness of purpose, and strength of will, and who feels a deadly jealousy of an infant whom he knows to have been recently born in Bethlehem, a place only a few miles distant from Jerusalem, is here described not as sending his own emissaries privately to put him to death, or despatching them with the Magi, or detaining the Magi at Jerusalem, until he had ascertained the truth of their tale, and the correctness of the answer of the priests and scribes, but as simply suffering the Magi to go by themselves, at the same time charging them to return with the information for which he had shown himself so feverishly anxious.  This strange conduct can be accounted for only on the ground of a judicial blindness; but they who resort to such an explanation must suppose that it was inflicted in order to save the new-born Christ from the death thus threatened; and if they adopt this hypothesis, they must further believe that this arrangement likewise ensured the death of a large number of infants instead of one.  A natural reluctance to take up such a notion might prompt the question, Why were the Magi brought to Jerusalem at all?  If they knew that the star was the star of Christ (ii. 2), and were by this knowledge conducted to Jerusalem, why did it not suffice to guide them straight to Bethlehem, and thus prevent the slaughter of the innocents?  Why did the star desert them after its first appearance, not to be seen again till they issued from Jerusalem? or, if it did not desert them, why did they ask of Herod and the priests the road which they should take, when, by the hypothesis, the star was ready to guide?” ("The English Life of Jesus,” by Thomas Scott, pp. 34, 35; ed. 1872).  To these improbabilities must be added the remarkable fact that Josephus, who gives a very detailed history of Herod, entirely omits any hint of this stupendous crime.