Herod Antipas: No King, No Land, No Hope

I have just finished Harold Hoehhner’s 1972 biography of Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee who had John the Baptist executed and before whom Jesus was partly tried. Although somewhat academic (for example, he quotes the original Hebrew, Latin and Greek scripts without bothering to translate, assuming his readers will be able to do it for themselves) he shed some interesting light upon this peculiar fox’s life and times. His father tried to kill Jesus while still a baby; the son threatened him but evidently left the matter of his death to the Romans under whose emperor’s rule he reigned.

Luke aloneg records Jesus’ appearing before Herod. It is likely that Pilate sent him as a diplomatic courtesy, they having previously fallen out over other matters, the emperor taking Herod’s side. Antipas was always jealous of his throne, and sought to nip any hint of insurrection and rebellion in the bud, hence his arrest of John. To have one before him who claimed, according to his enemies, to be a king, must have initially troubled him, and later amused him as he beheld the Lord’s gentle character and other-worldly emphases.

Herod was always somewhat miffed that he was a mere ‘tetrarch’ while his father, Herod the Great, and his rival-nephew, Herod Agrippa, were allowed to call themselves ‘kings’. In the summer of AD 39, less than ten years since the execution of ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, Herod sailed over to Rome to ask Emperor Gaius to allow him to be called ‘king’. Instead, he met a barrage of accusations from Fortunatus, Agrippa’s agent, and he was duly sentenced to exile in southern France. He was now a non-King with a non-kingdom. What he had, he lost. I wonder if he ever reflected in those years of emptiness about his meeting with Jesus, a real King, whose dominion was the entire cosmos, the Kingdom of Heaven. He appealed to the emperor to make him a king, but lost everything he had; Jesus would have made him a far more exalted personage with a far greater inheritance, but that, too, he forfeited.

What we lose for Jesus, we gain back a hundred-fold; what we gain instead of Jesus, we lose without trace.