Jerusalem: The Biography

For thirty years, Herod Antipas ruled Galilee, dreaming of his father’s kingdom which he had almost inherited, until John the Baptist, a charismatic new prophet, burst out of the desert to mock and challenge him.⁴⁵

JESUS CHRIST

AD 10–40

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND THE FOX OF GALILEE

John’s parents, Zacharias, a priest in the Temple, and Elizabeth lived in the village of Ein Kerem, just outside the city. Zacharias was probably one of the humble priests who drew lots for their duties in the Temple, a far cry from the Temple grandees. But John would often have visited the Temple as a boy. There were many ways to be a good Jew and he chose to live ascetically in the wilderness as Isaiah had urged: ‘Prepare the way of Yahweh in the desert.’

In the late 20S AD, John started to win a following first in the deserts not far from Jerusalem – ‘all men mused in their hearts of John whether he were the Christ or not’ – and then later further north in Herod Antipas’ Galilee, where he had family. Mary was a cousin of John’s mother. When she was pregnant with her son Jesus, she stayed with John’s parents. Jesus came from Nazareth to hear his cousin preach and John baptized him in the Jordan. The cousins started to preach together, offering remission of sin in baptism, their new ceremony adapted from the Jewish tradition of ritual bathing in the mikvah. However, John also started to denounce Herod Antipas.

The Tetrarch of Galilee lived majestically, his luxuries funded by tax-collectors who were widely hated. Antipas constantly lobbied the new Roman emperor, Tiberius, Augustus’ morose stepson, to grant him his father’s full kingdom. He named his capital ‘Livias’ after Augustus’ widow, Tiberius’ mother, a friend of the family. Then in AD 18, he founded a new city on the Sea of Galilee named Tiberias. Jesus, like John, despised Antipas as a venal debauchee and Roman stooge: ‘that fox’, Jesus called him.

Antipas had married the daughter of the Nabataean Arab king Aretas IV, an alliance designed to ensure peace between Jewish and Arab neighbours. After thirty years on his little throne, the middle-aged Antipas fell fatally in love with his niece, Herodias. She was the daughter of Herod the Great’s executed son Aristobulos and was already married to a half-brother. Now she demanded that Antipas divorce his Arab wife. Antipas foolishly agreed, but the Nabataean princess did not go quietly. To huge crowds, John the Baptist taunted this adulterous couple as a latter-day Ahab and Jezebel until Antipas ordered his arrest. The prophet was imprisoned in Herod the Great’s Machaerus Fortress across the Jordan, 2,300 feet above the Dead Sea. John was not alone in these dungeons for there was another celebrity prisoner: Antipas’ Arab wife.

Antipas and his courtiers celebrated his birthday at a banquet with Herodias and her daughter, Salome, who was married to the tetrarch Philip. (The mosaic floors of Machaerus’ banqueting hall are still partly intact – as are some of the cells beneath.) Salome ‘came in and she danced and pleased Herod’, perhaps even performing a striptease of the seven veils,^* so gracefully that he said: ‘Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt and I will give it thee.’ Prompted by her mother, Salome replied, ‘The head of John the Baptist.’ Moments later, the head was brought up from the dungeons, borne into the banquet on a charger and given ‘to the damsel and the damsel gave it to her mother’.