Ready to give (and receive) a good dose of jokes? You may enjoy April Fool’s Day like a child, which is celebrated in Latin America and Spain without knowing that, at the origin of this celebration, there is a dark story of cruelty and death that has nothing to do with humor, but yes a lot with innocence.
Herod, the Three Wise Men and the biblical story of a cruel massacre
The Christian origin of April Fool’s Day must be sought in the Gospel of Matthew, one of the books of the New Testament in which the life of Jesus is recounted.
It turns out that wise men from the East—whom we would later know as the Three Wise Men—announced that the messiah who, according to prophecies, would become the king of Israel was about to be born. And that they had the intention of going to worship him.
Herod the Great—then king of Judea by order of the Roman Empire—told them that, when they found him, they should tell him where he was so that he too could go and worship him. However, in reality what he wanted was to kill him, afraid that he might lose his power in the hands of this baby.
After knowing and worshiping Jesus, warned by a revelation, the wise men decided not to inform Herod. And then “when Herod realized that he had been tricked by the wise men, he became angry and ordered the killing of all the children in Bethlehem, in the entire region, from two years old and under, according to the time that he had carefully ascertained from the wise men,” says the Bible.
(What happened to Jesus in the meantime? The biblical story says that an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him to flee with the baby and mother to Egypt to prevent Herod from killing him.)
Over time, the children killed by Herod’s orders in Bethlehem became “Holy Innocents” and martyrs for Christians.
How many were there? Throughout history completely different figures have been used. The Greek liturgy, for example, spoke of the death of 14,000 men, a number that rose to 64,000 for the Syrians and 144,000 among authors of the Middle Ages, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. Modern authors, however, established much lower figures ranging between six and 20, taking into account that Bethlehem was a small town.
(It is worth mentioning that the famous historian Flavius Josephus, a key source of information about the time of Jesus’ birth, did not mention this order of Herod in his works, according to the encyclopedia. However, he did recount other cruelties committed by him in the section end of his reign).
Why December 28? The link with Christmas
The Latin Church, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, instituted the celebration on a date that is not exactly known but which took place between the end of the 4th century and the end of the 5th century. In other words, the celebration of the Holy Innocents has more than 1,500 years of history.
The date of December 28 is not linked to the events narrated in the Bible – where there are no exact chronological references – but to the celebration of Christmas.
The objective was for the commemoration of the Holy Innocents to be framed within the “octave of Christmas”, the eight-day period in which the birth of Jesus is celebrated, with the understanding that the children whom Herod ordered to be killed, For the Christian vision, they gave their lives for the messiah.
(The date of Christmas, by the way, is not linked to the chronology of the events either. Here is the explanation)
“The Feast of Fools”
For the Middle Ages, the celebration of April Fool’s Day coincided with a popular festival called the “Feast of Fools” in which a joking pope or bishop was elected and in which ecclesiastical rituals were parodied, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Within the framework of April Fool’s Day “parents temporarily abdicated their authority” and “in convents and monasteries, younger nuns and monks were allowed to act as abbess and abbot for a day,” says the Encyclopedia.
The festivals, which had probably originally been an adaptation of the famous Saturnalia of the Roman Empire, became a “mockery of Christian morality and worship,” explains the encyclopedia, which lasted until the 16th century despite the sanctions of church.
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