When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.  Matthew 2:16

            The population of Bethlehem for a census was quite crowded as seen from the lack of housing for visitors.  But during a normal week, scholars put the population in a town like Bethlehem anywhere from 300 to 1,000.  That means the number of babies to two-year-olds would be rather small—six to twenty?  So it probably wasn’t a massacre of hundreds or thousands which then would make the historical record.