That Christmas scene of over 2000 years ago was not so romantic and peaceful as we may like to think. Five miles away in Jerusalem was the country’s ruler, King Herod the Great. He had already murdered in succession, his brother-in-law, his wife’s grandfather, his wife, his wife’s mother, and his two sons, so that the Emperor Augustus said that it was better to be Herod’s pig than his son.

He died within a year of that first Christmas, and during that final period of his reign, in a vain attempt to kill the Holy Child, he massacred all the baby boys in Bethlehem. One of his last acts, four days before his death, was to murder yet another of his own sons.

Herod had ruled by the permission of his overlords, the Romans, whom later a British chieftain in far-off Scotland was to call “the plunderers of the world”. “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace”. (1)