Herod Antipas

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For other uses of "Antipas", see Antipas (disambiguation).

Herod Antipas (short for Antipatros) was an ancient leader (tetrarch, meaning "ruler of a quarter") of Galilee and Perea.

Born in 20 BC, Antipas was a son of Herod the Great, who had become king of Judea; and Malthace, who was from Samaria. He and full-brother Archelaus and his half-brother Herod Philip were educated in Rome, as a kind of friendly hostage situation in order to maintain Herod the Great's compliance with Augustus Caesar. (Herod the Great was also notorious for killing family members, having killed his older sons Aristobulus and Antipater in 7 BC and 4 BC.)

When Herod the Great died in 4 BC, his will divided Israel into four parts, with Antipas placed over the Galilee and Parea, Philip over Gaulanitis (the Golan Heights), Batanaea (southern Syria), Trachonitis and Auranitis (Hauran); and Archelaus as "king of the Jews" over the bulk of Herod's mini-empire. (Archelaus was later deemed incompetent by Augustus and replaced with a procurator in AD 6.)

Antipas' first task was to restore order caused by the rebellion of the Jewish Feast of Pentecost (Shavuot) in 4 BC, which was a reaction to Herod the Great's death.

Antipas followed in his father's footsteps as a builder. He rebuilt Sepphoris in Galilee and Livia in Perea, but his most noted accomplishment was the construction of Tiberias as his capital on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in AD 17. The city was named to honor his patron, Emperor Tiberius. Originally, pious Jews refused to live in it because it was built atop a graveyard, but the city eventually became a great school and center of Jewish learning. The city gave its name to the sea.

He married Phasaelis, who was the daughter of Aretas IV Philopatris, king in Arabia Petrea Nabatea. He divorced her and married Herodias, the wife of his half-brother Herod Philip (not to be confused with yet another brother, the tetrarch Herod Philip) and daughter of his half-brother Aristobulus; for which he and Herodias were condemned by John the Baptist and blamed by Flavius Josephus (Jewish Antiquities, XVIII, v). The union with Herodias brought him to ruin, for it involved him in war with his original father-in-law, in which he lost an army. Josephus moralizes the calamity in his Antiquities: "as a punishment for what he did against John that was called the Baptist; for Herod slew him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism" (Antiquities, XVIII, v, 2). According to the New Testament Gospels, Herod was incited to behead John by Herodias his wife and her daughter, unnamed in the text but traditionally Salome.

The Gospel of Luke (Lk. 23:6-12) records that Herod was in Jerusalem during the Passion of Jesus of Nazareth. Upon inquiring Jesus' citizenship, Pilate was told that Jesus was a Galilean, thus under Herod's jurisdiction, and so Pilate sends Jesus to Herod. Initially, Herod was pleased to see Jesus, asking to see him perform a miracle based on what he'd heard of him, but Jesus refused to do so, and remained silent, even when questioned (cf. Isa. 53:7). After mocking and ridiculing Jesus, Herod sent him back to Pilate. This improved relations between Pilate and Herod, who had apparently been enemies previous to this occasion. Luke the Evangelist is the only New Testament author to record Jesus' trial before Herod, perhaps because, as Herod found Jesus innocent and simply sent him back to Pilate, they thought it acceptable to simply omit the pointless event. Luke refers to Herod in relation to the Passion again in Acts 4:27 in a prayer by the "people" of Peter the Apostle and John the Apostle as fulfilling Psalm 2:1,2. Skeptics, however, would argue that the other authors' silence is an inconsistency in the Bible.

Herod Antipas was exiled by the Roman Emperor Gaius Caesar Caligula to Lugdunum (modern Lyon), in Gaul in AD 39 according to Josephus (Antiquities Book 18, Chapter 7, item 2) who says, however, in the Jewish Wars (II, ix, 6) "So Herod died in Spain whither his wife had followed him". The mention of "Spain" is probably a mistaken copying correction, due to the confusion of "Lyon" in modern France with "León" in modern Spain. It should be acknowledged, in this particular point of historical discussion, that Lugdunum and the adjacent town of Vienne (not to be confused with the present capital of Austria) had been places of intense colonization by the Romans from emperor Tiberius time in government onwards, and that Herod Archelaus had himself been previously exiled to Vienna by emperor Augustus, always according to Josephus ( Wars, Book 2, Chapter 7, item 3, confirmed in Antiquities, Book 17, Chapter 13, item 2).

A much later spurious "letter of Herod Antipas" is sometimes naively cited as being in "records of the Roman senate." The reference itself is equally spurious; there are no such records of the Roman Senate.