The rotting king hoped he would recover in the warmth of his Jericho palace but, as his suffering increased, he was borne out to the warm sulphur baths at Callirhoe, which still exist on the Dead Sea, only for the suphur to aggravate the agony.i Treated with hot oil, he passed out and was carried back to Jericho where he ordered the summoning of the Temple elite from Jerusalem, whom he had locked en masse in the hippodrome. It is unlikely that he planned to slaughter them. Probably he wanted to finesse the succession while holding all troublemaking grandees in custody.
At around this time, a child named Joshua ben Joseph, or (in Aramaic) Jesus, was born. His parents were a carpenter, Joseph, and his teenaged betrothed, Mary (Mariamme in Hebrew), based in Nazareth, up in Galilee. They were not much richer than peasants, but it was said they were descended from the old Davidian house. They travelled down to Bethlehem where a child, Jesus, was born “that shall rule my people Israel.” After he had been circumcised on the eighth day, according to St. Luke, “they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord” and make the traditional sacrifice in the Temple. A wealthy family would sacrifice a sheep or even a cow, but Joseph could afford only two turtledoves or pigeons.
As Herod lay dying, Matthew’s Gospel claims, he ordered his forces to liquidate this Davidian child by massacring all newborn babies, but Joseph took refuge in Egypt until he heard that Herod had died. There were certainly messianic rumours afoot and Herod would have feared a Davidian pretender, but there is no evidence that the king ever heard of Jesus or massacred any innocents. It is ironic that this monster should be particularly remembered for the one crime he neglected to commit. As for the child from Nazareth, we do not hear of him again for about thirty years.j
ARCHELAUS: MESSIAHS AND MASSACRES
Emperor Augustus sent his reply to Herod: he had had Livia’s slave girl beaten to death and Herod was free to punish Prince Antipater. Yet Herod was now in such torment, he seized a dagger to kill himself. This fracas convinced Antipater, in his nearby cell, that the old tyrant was dead. He exuberantly called in his jailer to unlock the cell. Surely, finally, Antipater was King of the Jews? The jailer had heard the cries too. Hurrying to court, he found Herod was not dead, just demented. His servants had seized the knife from him. The jailer reported Antipater’s treason. This pustulous but living carcass of a king beat his own head, howled and ordered his guards to kill the hated son immediately. Then he rewrote his will, dividing the kingdom between three of his teenaged sons—with Jerusalem and Judaea going to Archelaus.
Five days later, in March 4 BC, after a reign of thirty-seven years, Herod the Great, who had survived “ten thousand dangers,” died. The eighteen-year-old Archelaus danced, sang and made merry as if an enemy, not a father, had died. Even Herod’s grotesque family were shocked. The body, wearing the crown and gripping the sceptre, was borne on a catafalque of purple-draped, bejewelled gold in a parade—led by Archelaus and followed by the German and Thracian guards, and by 500 servants carrying spices (the stink must have been pungent)—the 24 miles to the mountain fortress of Herodium. There Herod was buried in a tombk that was lost for 2,000 years.44
Archelaus returned to secure Jerusalem, ascending a golden throne in the Temple, where he announced the softening of his father’s severity. The city was filled with Passover pilgrims, many of whom, certain that the king’s death heralded an apocalyptic deliverance, ran amok in the Temple. Archelaus’ guards were stoned. Archelaus, although he had just promised an easing of the repression, sent in the cavalry: 3,000 people were slaughtered in the Temple.
This teenage despot left his steady brother Philip in charge and sailed for Rome to confirm his succession with Augustus. But his younger brother, Antipas, raced him to Rome, hoping to win the kingdom for himself. As soon as Archelaus was gone, Augustus’ local steward, Sabinus, ransacked Herod’s Jerusalem Palace to find his hidden fortune, sparking more riots. The Governor of Syria, Varus, marched down to restore order but gangs of Galileans and Idumeans, arriving for Pentecost, seized the Temple and massacred any Romans they could find as Sabinus cowered in Phasael’s Tower.
Outside Jerusalem, three rebels—ex-slaves—declared themselves king, burned Herodian palaces and marauded in a “wild fury.” These self-appointed kings were pseudo-prophets, proving that Jesus was indeed born at a time of intense religious speculation. Having spent all of Herod’s reign awaiting such leaders in vain, the Jews found that three arrived at once: Varus defeated and killed all three pretenders,l but henceforth pseudo-prophets kept coming and the Romans kept killing them. Varus crucified 2,000 rebels around Jerusalem.
In Rome, Augustus, now sixty, listened to the squabbles of the Herodians and confirmed Herod’s will but, withholding the title of king, appointed Archelaus as ethnarch of Judaea, Samaria and Idumea with Antipas as tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea (part of today’s Jordan), and their half-brother Philip as tetrarch of the rest.m The life of the rich in the Roman villas of Archelaus’ Jerusalem was louche, Grecian and extremely unJewish: a silver goblet, buried nearby, lost for two millennia before it was bought in 1911 by an American collector, depicts explicit homosexual couplings—on one side, a man lowers himself using a pulley onto a catamite as a voyeur slave peeps through the door, while on the other two lithe boys intertwine on a couch. But Archelaus turned out to be so vicious, inept and extravagant that, after ten years, Augustus deposed him, exiling him to Gaul. Judaea became a Roman province, and Jerusalem was ruled from Caesarea on the coast by a series of low-ranking prefects; it was now that the Romans held a census to register taxpayers. This submission to Roman power was humiliating enough to provoke a minor Jewish rebellion and was the census recalled by Luke, probably wrongly, as the reason that Jesus’ family came to Bethlehem.
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
a The murdered counsellors were probably buried in the ornate Sanhedrin tomb that still stands north of the Old City, decorated with pomegranates and acanthus leaves. As for his mountain strongholds, the most famous are: Masada, where the last Jewish fighters against Rome committed mass suicide in AD 73; Machaerus, where John the Baptist was beheaded by one of Herod’s sons; and the man-made mountain of Herodium, where Herod and his sons were buried.
b These were some of the most valuable luxury brands of the ancient Mediterranean: Jericho palms produced date wine; the balsam groves produced Balsam of Gilead, prized for its cures for headaches and cataracts but also for its most expensive scent. Cleopatra also annexed most of the coast including Joppa (Jaffa), leaving Herod with Gaza as his only port.
c This Syrian Greek scholar became Herod’s confidant as well as Augustus’ personal friend. He must have been a supple courtier indeed to survive the murderous courts of both Cleopatra and Herod. He later wrote biographies of both Augustus and Herod, for which his chief source was Herod himself. Nikolaus’ Herodian biography has vanished but it provided Josephus’ main source and it is hard to imagine a better one. As for Nikolaus’ former royal pupils, Augustus had Caesarion, the son of Caesar and Cleopatra, murdered. But the other three children were brought up in Rome by the emperor’s sister, Antony’s ex-wife Octavia. The eventual fate of the boys is unknown but the girl, Cleopatra Selene, married Juba II, King of Mauretania. Her son King Ptolemy of Mauretania was executed by Caligula. There ended the Ptolemaic dynasty 363 years after Alexander the Great.
d This might have been named after a later wife, also called Mariamme. But it must have reminded him and everyone else of the Maccabean princess. Today’s Tower of David, which has nothing to do with David, is based on Herod’s Hippicus Tower. After Titus’ destruction of the city, it remained until Ottoman times the chief stronghold of Jerusalem. No other building in Jerusalem so reveals the embroidered nature of the city’s development as the Citadel, where archaeologists have uncovered Judaean, Maccabean, Hero
dian, Roman, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman ruins.
e Herod’s wealth came from his landholdings all over the Middle East. These produced sheep, cattle (raised in Jordan and Judaea), wheat and barley from Galilee and Judaea, fish, olive oil, wine and fruit, lilies and onions from Ashkelon (hence shallots are Ashkelon onions), pomegranates from Geba, north of Jerusalem, figs from Joppa, date palms and balsam from Jericho. Herod owned a half to two-thirds of his kingdom; he taxed and exported Nabataean spices; and he was also a mining magnate, paying Augustus 300 talents for rights to half the copper mines of Cyprus. While he exported his local wines, he himself drank the Italian vintages. Even on his death, after a lifetime of building and giving Rome huge sums, he still left over 1,000 talents or a million drachmas to Augustus, and there was much more than that for his family.
f Herod would have used the latest technology. The Egyptians had known how to move vast stones to build the pyramids as early as 4000 BC. The Roman engineer Vitruvius had created enormous devices—wheels, sledges and cranes—to transport such stones. Large wheels over 13 feet in diameter served as axles pulled by teams of oxen. Then there were winches—horizontal rotating beams with attached poles and cranks which enabled teams of ten men or fewer to use them. This way, eight men could lift 1 ½ tons.
g “Speak unto the children of Israel,” said God to Moses and Aaron in Numbers 19, “that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish.” The heifer would be sacrificed on a pyre of cedar and hyssop overlaid with a strand of scarlet thread and its ashes mixed with holy water. According to the Mishnah, this had only happened nine times, and on the tenth, the Messiah would come. Since the millennial excitement of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, fundamentalist Christian evangelists and Jewish redemptionists believe that two of the three essential preconditions for the Apocalypse and coming of the Messiah (or the Second Coming for the Christians) have been met: Israel has been restored and Jerusalem is Jewish. The third precondition is the restoration of the Temple. Some Christian fundamentalists and the tiny factions of redemptionist Orthodox Jews, such as those of the Temple Institute, believe that this is possible only when the Temple Mount is purified with the sacrifice of the red heifer. Therefore even today a Pentecostal preacher from Mississippi named Clyde Lott is, in alliance with Rabbi Richman of the Temple Institute, trying to breed the red heifer from a herd of 500 Red Angus imported from Nebraska to a farm in the Jordan Valley. They believe they will breed the “heifer that will change the world.”
h Herod’s family tree is complicated because the family were so endogamous, repeatedly intermarrying and remarrying within the Herodian and Maccabee clans trying to reconcile them: he married his brother Pheroras to Mariamme’s sister and his eldest son Antipater to the daughter of the last King Antigonos (beheaded at his request by Antony). But the marriages were interspersed with executions: Salome’s first two husbands were killed by Herod. Herodians also married into the royal families of Cappadocia, Emesa, Pontus, Nabataea and Cilicia, all Roman allies. At least two marriages were cancelled because the husband would not convert to Judaism and be circumcised.
i Doctors have debated his symptoms ever since. The most likely diagnosis is that Herod suffered hypertension and arteriosclerosis complicated by progressive dementia and by congestive heart and kidney failure. The arteriosclerosis led to venous congestion, aggravated by gravity, so that fluid collected in his feet and genitals, becoming so severe that the fluid bubbled through the skin; the blood flow became so poor that necrosis of the flesh—gangrene—developed. The bad breath and itching were caused by kidney failure. The penile/scrotal gangrene provided ideal material for the laying of eggs by flies that hatched as maggots. It is possible that the genital worms were hostile propaganda, symbolizing divine vengeance on an evil king: Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Herod’s grandson, Agrippa I, and many other sinners including Judas Iscariot, were assigned similar worm-infested, bowel- and scrotum-exploding exits.
j Jesus’ birth is historically challenging, the Gospels contradictory. No one knows the date but it was probably before Herod’s death, in 4 BC, which means Jesus died in his early thirties if he was crucified in AD 29–30, forty if it was AD 36. The story of the census summoning the family to Bethlehem is not historical because Quirinius’ census took place after Herod’s successor, Archelaus, was deposed in AD 6, almost ten years after Jesus’ birth. In recounting the journey to Bethlehem and his Davidic genealogy, Matthew’s Gospel provides Jesus with royal birth and fulfilment of prophecy—“for thus it is written by the prophet.” The Massacre of the Innocents and the escape to Egypt are clearly inspired by the Passover story: one of the Ten Plagues was the Killing of the First Born. Wherever Jesus was born, it is likely that the family did travel to the Temple for the sacrifice. Muslim tradition, expanded on by the Crusaders, believes that Jesus was raised in the chapel beneath al-Aqsa Mosque, Jesus’ Cradle. Jesus’ family is mysterious: after the birth, Joseph simply disappears from the Gospels. Matthew and Luke state that Mary remained a virgin and Jesus was fathered by God (an idea familiar in Roman and Greek theology, and also suggested in Isaiah’s prophecy of Emmanuel). But Matthew, Mark and John name Jesus’ brothers: James, Joses, Judas and Simon along with a sister, Salome. When Mary’s virginity became Christian dogma, the existence of these other children became inconvenient. John mentions “Mary the wife of Cleophas.” If Joseph died young, Mary may have married this Cleophas and had more children because, after the Crucifixion, Jesus was succeeded as leader first by his brother James then by “Simon son of Cleophas.”
k Herod’s tomb was discovered in 2007 by Professor Ehud Netzer who found an ornate red sarcophagus, decorated with flowers, smashed to pieces almost certainly by the anti-Herodian Jewish rebels of AD 66–70. Two other sarcophagi are white, decorated with flowers: do they belong to his sons? Herodium was another miracle of Herod’s construction—a man-made mountain 210 feet in diameter with a massive luxurious palace on top containing a domed bathhouse, towers, frescoes and pools. Herod’s pyramidal tomb was on the Herodium Hill below the eastern tower of the fortress, also destroyed in 66–70.
l One of these “kings” was Simon, a hulking slave belonging to Herod, soon beheaded by the Romans. Simon may be the subject of the so-called Gabriel’s Revelation, a stone inscription found in southern Jordan in which the Archangel Gabriel acclaims a “prince of princes” called Simon who will be killed but will rise again “in three days” when “you will know that evil will be defeated by justice. In three days you will live, I, Gabriel, command you.” The details—resurrection and judgement three days after a prophet’s death—predate Jesus’ crucifixion by over thirty years. After killing Simon, Publius Quinctilius Varus commanded the German frontier. Some ten years later, in AD 9, he was ambushed, losing three legions. This disaster spoiled the last years of Augustus, who supposedly wandered his palace crying, “Varus, give me back my legions!”
m All three sons adopted the name “Herod,” causing much confusion in the Gospels. Archelaus was married but fell in love with Glaphyra, that daughter of the King of Cappadocia who had been married to Herod and Mariamme’s son Alexander. After Alexander was executed, she married King Juba of Mauretania and after his death returned to Cappadocia. Now she married Archelaus.
CHAPTER 11
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 whe
ther 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.
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