Herod Antipas

From 2011 to 2019 we looked at film depictions of Pontius Pilate.   Go here to look at the last entry. This year we will begin looking at film depictions of the third of the three human judges Of Christ, Herod Antipas.  Herod Antipas was the youngest son of Herod the Great, the ruler of Judea at the time of the birth of Christ.  Herod the Great died shortly after the birth of Christ, probably in 4 BC.  His father Antipater had exercised the real power in the closing decades of the Hasmonean monarchy of Judea, skillfully kissing up to the Romans.  The first Roman procurator of Judea, Antipater was the de facto ruler of the realm of the Hasmonean monarchy by the time that he was assassinated by poison in 43 BC.  Herod the Great, through skillful maneuvers, ruled Judea solely by 37 BC , and he would retain his grasp on power until his death.

Herod’s reign was noted for his expansion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and an extensive building program.  He might have been remembered fondly by the Jewish people if he had not also been a murderous tyrant.  The massacre of the Holy Innocents after the birth of Christ was completely in character for him.  Ties of blood or marriage were no protection.  Three sons, one wife and numerous other relatives all fell to Herod’s paranoia and rage.  Herod well deserved the quip of Augustus that he would prefer to be Herod’s pig rather than Herod’s son.

Managing the feat of surviving his blood thirty father, Herod Antipas, under the terms of Herod’s will, inherited rulership of the separated regions of Galilee and Perea.  Although the New Testament calls him King Herod, he actually was the Tetrarch of these regions, largely a distinction without a difference.  Herod Antipas ruled at the sufferance of the Romans, and it is a credit to his survival skills that he held these territories for 43 years until his death.

Pious Jews tended to have little use for the Herodians, viewing them as recent converts, merely playing at being Jews, but pagans at heart.  Patriotic Jews despised them as tools of the Romans.  Ordinary Jews had no love for them as harsh and violent rulers, routinely using massacres, with the help of the Romans, to maintain their authority.

Herod Antipas is a familiar figure in the New Testament, with Christ referring to him as “that Fox”, the preaching of John the Baptist against Herod Antipas because Herod married his brother’s wife, the execution of John purchased by the dance of Salome, the daughter of his wife, and Herod’s jesting reception of Jesus, quickly transferring that very hot potato back to Pilate.  We are better informed about Herod Antipas than we are about almost any other minor ruler in antiquity, due to the historical writings of Josephus, who wrote about fifty years after the events.  We are told in the Gospels that Herod felt the force of the words of John the Baptist but allowed his lechery to overwhelm any impulse to his moral reformation.

No doubt that Herod Antipas, who appeared to have very few illusions about where he ranked in the pecking order of his Roman dominated world, would have been astounded to learn that he would be remembered 21 centuries later.  Why he was remembered might not have astounded him quite as much.  He gives signs of understanding in the Gospels that great and mysterious forces were at work and that John the Baptist was near the center of what puzzled and frightened Herod.  It is a conceit of many Christians that if they had lived at the time of Christ they would have been firm followers of Jesus.  Perhaps.  But perhaps shorn of our after knowledge of the future, all too many of us would have reacted like Herod:  attracted initially by the message of John and Jesus, but ultimately unwilling to reform our lives, with all that trouble and peril that would have involved.  How many of us would have been, for example, repulsed rather than inspired, by Christ’s admonition to take up our cross, the dreaded Roman means of execution, and follow Him.  Perhaps it is just as well for most of us that we did not live in those exhilarating and perilous days.