with Rome and overcome the continuing hostility of some members of the Hasmonaean family. Remaining on good terms with Mark Antony became rather tricky because of the influence of Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen, on Herod’s patron. This femme fatale, first the lover and later the wife of Antony, had cast an envious eye on the Judaean kingdom. Herod succeeded in minimizing his territorial losses, only some coastal towns and the area of Jericho were annexed to Egypt, while briefly contemplating, but wisely abandoning, the idea of a love affair with Cleopatra which he thought might provide him with an opportunity to get rid of her. The deteriorating relationship between Antony and Octavian, the future Augustus, created a new dilemma for Herod, but with his customary good luck he contrived to gain first the trust and later the close friendship of Augustus.
His feud with the Hasmonaean royalty was harder to settle as it was kept alive by the continuous intrigues of the female members of the court led by the king’s Idumaean mother Cyprus and his sister Salome on the one hand and, on the other, his Hasmonaean wife Mariamme, with whom he was passionately in love, and her mother Alexandra. The outcome was bloody for the Hasmonaeans. The long list of family members executed by Herod include his beloved wife Mariamme and her two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus; her brother, the young high priest Aristobulus III, drowned in an arranged swimming pool accident; Mariamme’s mother and her old grandfather, the harmless former high priest Hyrcanus II. The king’s sister Salome also used her brother’s good services to get rid of three of her husbands, one of them Herod’s own uncle. Nevertheless, shortly after the execution in 4 BCE of Antipater, Herod’s eldest son by the first of his ten wives, Salome and her fourth husband frustrated the dying king’s final mad murder project by setting free a large group of Jewish notables whom they had been instructed by Herod to assassinate on his death so as to guarantee widespread mourning at the moment of the royal funeral in 4 BCE.
Herod the Murderer, a suitable model for the man who stands behind the Gospel legend of the massacre of the innocents, was nonetheless also Herod the Great. His foreign policy was outstandingly successful despite the fluctuations of fortune in the Roman world, and he was quite often solicitous and generous towards his Jewish subjects too. He went so far as to introduce substantial tax cuts to help the national economy after the severe famine of 25 BCE! He was a great promoter of Greek culture and, above all, he excelled in grandiose building projects at home and abroad. Among his achievements with New Testament relevance should be mentioned the construction of the port and the city of Caesarea, named after Caesar Augustus, the seat of the Roman governors of Judaea in the first century CE where St Paul spent two years in prison. He restored the city of Samaria and renamed it Sebaste, again in honour of Augustus. He erected a pagan temple in Caesarea Philippi, the city where the apostle Peter was to confess the Messiahship of Jesus. But above all, his greatest architectural memorial was the rebuilding of the Jerusalem sanctuary, known as Herod’s Temple, some of whose remains, especially the Western or Wailing Wall, still stand today.
The life of Jesus began in the closing years of the reign of Herod the Great; this is one of the few points on which the Infancy Gospels of Matthew and Luke agree. But the main events which happened during the final year of Jesus’ career (29/30 CE) belong to the next period of Jewish history.
Herod Archelaus – Herod Antipas – Roman prefects (4 BCE–41 CE) – The Public Career and Death of Jesus (29/30 CE)
Jesus did not bring peace into his world. His early years coincided with quarrels about who would be the heir of Herod and with political turmoil caused by a series of uprisings. The succession, confused by contradictory wills of the dying king, was decided by Augustus: the realm was divided into three parts among the surviving sons of Herod with Archelaus being put in charge of Judaea, Idumaea and Samaria (4 BCE– 6 CE), Antipas of Galilee (4 BCE–39 CE), and Philip of the territories north and east of Galilee (4 BCE–33/4 CE). None of them inherited the royal title. Archelaus was made an ethnarch and the other two were given the lower rank of tetrarch. But while the settlement was still in the making, the death of the strong ruler encouraged revolutionary forces to come into the open. The Peraean Simon, the giant shepherd, Athronges, and especially Judas’ son Ezechias revolted, but they were soon overcome by the army of Archelaus and especially by the legions of Varus, the Roman governor of Syria, who after crushing the rebellion crucified 2,000 Jewish revolutionaries outside Jerusalem, thus foreshadowing the harsher times to come in the first century CE.
No doubt this same Judas from Gamala, nicknamed Judas the Galilean, raised again the flag of rebellion in 6 CE, when as a preliminary to the annexation of Judaea as a Roman province after Archelaus’s dismissal, Quirinius, the governor of Syria, organized a property registration with a view to reassessing taxes. This is the census of 6 CE, the date of which is clearly stated by the Jewish historian Josephus. Quirinius’s census is the event that the Gospel of Luke wrongly places to the reign of Herod the Great in association with the legendary journey of the parents of Jesus, Joseph and Mary, from Nazareth to Bethlehem. The uprising of Judas the Galilean petered out, but the Zealot movement, which he launched in association with a Pharisee called Zadok, persisted throughout the next 60 years; it was responsible for most of the subsequent political unrest among Jews, and culminated in the catastrophic war, which between 66 and 70 CE devastated the country and destroyed Jerusalem together with all the Jewish state institutions. The eschatological discourse attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark 13; Matt. 24; Luke 21) is the echo of those dreadful events.
In 6 CE the political landscape of Palestine underwent a marked change. Galilee, where Jesus was growing up, continued its apparent political independence. As long as its ruler Herod Antipas maintained peace and paid his tribute to the emperor, he was allowed to rule unmolested. In Judaea, by contrast, after the deposition and banishment of Archelaus the government of the country was transferred to a Roman prefect, appointed by the emperor.
Rome in general preferred to delegate administrative power (the keeping of the peace and the collection of taxes) to the Jewish ruling classes, the chief priests and the Sanhedrin. Rome also abstained from direct interference with Jewish religious life. Indirectly the extensive powers of Roman governors included the appointment and dismissal of Jewish high priests. Most of them remained in office only for a short period, one year or a couple of years, with the exception of two, both of whom played an important part in the trial of Jesus: the former high priest Annas (6–15 CE) and his son-in-law Joseph Caiaphas, who sat on the pontifical throne from 18 to 36/7 CE. Annas interrogated Jesus and Caiaphas delivered him to Pilate. The Roman governors kept also the vestments of the high priest under their custody and thereby controlled the functions, which required the wearing of certain ceremonial robes. The Pharisee teachers, mostly active in Jerusalem and in the Judaean cities, enjoyed full freedom. Three famous masters, Hillel, some of whose ideas are reflected in the teaching of Jesus, Shammai, Hillel’s opposite number, and Gamaliel the Elder, who is mentioned with approval in the Acts of the Apostles, flourished during the life time of Jesus in the early decades of the first century CE. There is no doubt that the ascetic Essenes, described by the writers Philo of Alexandria and Josephus, and represented by the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, were pursuing their reclusive religious existence at Qumran and elsewhere. They influenced Jewish life more by their fame and moral authority than by direct impact: the instruction of non-members was forbidden by their rules. Nevertheless their community may have served as a model for the organization of the first Christian church in Jerusalem, which like the Essene sect described by Josephus, Philo, Pliny the Elder and the Community Rule of Qumran, lived out of a common kitty administered by the apostles. Some of the charismatic rain makers and healers-exorcists like the grandsons of Honi, Abba Hilkiah and Hanan, and the Galilean man of God Hanina ben Dosa, also belonged to the same century, and lived in the period preceding the first Jewish war.
The public activity of Jesus neatly fits into the reign of the emperor Tiberius (14–37 CE). It occurred during the governorship of Pontius Pilate (26–36 CE) and the high priesthood of Caiaphas (18–36/7 CE). According to Luke, John the Baptist appeared on the scene in the fifteenth year of Tiberius (29 CE), and was soon followed by Jesus. Of the two great Jewish authors of the first century CE, Philo (20 BCE–40 CE) was Jesus’ contemporary and Flavius Josephus (37–c. 100 CE) belonged
