Thank you all for contributing.

leeneia, you've raised darker characters before on Early Music Muse. There isn't anything I can do about that but you can - just turn your screen resolution down.

Pete from seven stars link, I've never thought of myself as a secularist or an anythingist, really! I'm just interested in the evidence, as Jack Campin says. There is no evidence for the slaughter of the innocents, no one but Matthew mentions it, not even the other Gospels, and it seems highly strange that such a major and catastrophic event, if real, would be missing from contemporary accounts - Josephus, for example. In any case, Matthew, who was keen to stress Jesus' Jewishness, seems to have borrowed the story from Moses' childhood.

Anyway, I don't really want to get caught up in questions of biblical historicity. Such concerns are a footnote in my article about the story of the song and its power. Pete, I checked the video link and don't know why it didn't work for you - but here it is.