When was it established that there were 14,000 innocents martyred?

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I think I can begin to offer an answer to this, though it's still bit's and pieces. Basically, my guess is sometime in the 4thC, (as far as it is possible to tell, given the fragmentary nature of the sources) though it is clear that some number or other seems to be assigned to the death toll relatively early on.

My reason for thinking this:

R. Brown's The Birth of the Messiah, 1999 (p. 205) talks about the "Byzantine Liturgy" first setting the number to 14, 000. Now, unfortunately I don't have full access to these books, so I can't work out the context in which "Byzantine Liturgy" is used. From some basic searches, it seems the Byzantine liturgy is sometimes mixed up with the conceptual apparatus of the Byzantine rites, and the Byzantine Divine Liturgys originate from writers like John Chrysostom, active in the latter half of the 4C. I would therefore suggest that the figure of 14,000, if it did become generally established in the West, would have probably become established shortly after the fall of Constantinople (15th C), as holy texts were sent west to keep them out of Muslim hands, but of course it's possible that it was established much earlier.

The purpose of such a number seems to be the obvious one, I'm afraid - a way of exacerbating the sense of Herod's selfishness and evil. It seems strange to modern ears, as 14,000 infants implies a pretty massive population for a provincial 1st century town like Bethlehem, and a systematic campaign of slaughter that would be materially, economically and organizationally difficult for this sort of society. Other numbers raise it above 100,000 though, so maybe the Byzantines weren't peculiar in setting a large figure.

Greek numerals seem to be decimal, so I don't seem any reason for rounding to 14,000. It seem either a relatively arbitrary choice of the author or, more likely in my view, a record of some oral tradition of the time.

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