 Some scholars, such as Everett Ferguson, write that the story makes sense in the context of Herod's reign of terror in the last few years of his rule, and the number of infants in Bethlehem that would have been killed no more than a dozen or so may have been too insignificant to be recorded by Josephus, who could not be aware of every incident far in the past when he wrote it.The story's first appearance in any source other than the Gospel of Matthew is in the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James of , which excludes the flight into Egypt and switches the attention of the story to the infant John the Baptist