The Holy Innocents, 28 December

The Holy Innocents falls on the twenty eighth of December in the West, the date this rule records, and it notes a twenty ninth of December date in the Byzantine calendar instead, commemorating the infants of Bethlehem that the Gospel of Matthew describes Herod the Great ordering killed in an attempt to eliminate the infant Jesus as a rival claimant to his throne. The episode is attested only in Matthew's Gospel, with no independent corroboration in the historian Josephus's otherwise fairly detailed account of Herod's reign, though Josephus does document a ruler capable of exactly this kind of brutality, including the execution of several of his own family members on suspicion of conspiracy, a context that makes the episode plausible even without external confirmation of the event itself.

The date sits inside a deliberately structured sequence within the Western twelve days of Christmas, following Saint Stephen on the twenty sixth of December and Saint John the Evangelist on the twenty seventh, a sequence medieval tradition grouped together as the Comites Christi, the companions of Christ, moving from an adult martyr, to an apostle who was not martyred, to these infant victims who died for Christ's sake without having chosen or understood their own death, a theological progression the calendar's own ordering was designed to trace across the three consecutive days.