The two "Infancy Narratives," Luke and Matthew, are very different from each other. I haven't seen much speculation on the sources of these stories. They follow the legendary language of the stories of the births of kings, and are generally thought to have been made up to point to the significance of the event of the birth of Jesus, an event whose significance was not known at the time it happened. Matthew builds his five-part narrative on five verses from the Hebrew Scriptures that he sees as explanatory of the significance of this child Jesus. The narrative is very methodically constructed, and parallels the five-part outline of the rest of Matthew, which is built around five "sermons." Whatever you believe about it, Matthew is an interesting piece of literature.
Luke builds his infancy narrative on five canticles (songs) that are loosely based on quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures. Luke's writing is the best Greek in the New Testament, and is of high literary value even in translation.

As far as I can tell, the people of the time were quite aware that these narratives, were fictional works built on a very sketchy collection of facts. It's only within the last hundred years or so, that we've have the slavish literalism of the fundamentalists. Before that, believers viewed these stories as open to embellishment and the "folk process."

The story of the Holy Innocents mirrors the story of the story of Pharaoh's slaughter of Hebrew children at the birth of Moses. So, my guess would be that the story of the Holy Innocents is fictional, but still of great value.

The sacred stories of most cultures have profound value. Those who ridicule them, ridicule all those who hold those stories sacred.

Up above, Big Al said he hadn't heard where Fry talks about Abraham. I gathered from Tunesmith's original message in this thread that Fry had ridiculed the Abraham-Isaac story, but maybe I misunderstood the post.

-Joe-