I have always been struck, however, by that line: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Apparently taken in the above context for a kind of “bowing-out” line, as John practically volunteers to leave the scene, this luminous logion may have been lifted from a very different context. As it stands of course, it is straight propaganda against anyone still under the sorry impression that John was to be preferred to Jesus. Again, John testifies to his own alleged deficiency. Whether he did or not, it is impossible, on the basis of the evidence to tell for sure. I suspect he did not, though he may have had “plans” for Jesus, and there may have been some kind of key assignation of roles, as we shall examine in due course.
The saying “He must increase, but I must decrease” seems to me a straightforward piece of mystical advice on the lines of “He who tries to save his life will lose it, he who loses his life for my sake will save it.” The aphorism appears as an authentic insight of contemporary wisdom. If we swap the word ego for life we get near the mark, I think. “He” (God) must increase, but I (ego) must decrease. The carnal mind is enmity against God, as St. Paul knew. The rational mind cannot reach the spiritual mind of its own will. The True Will, of which we are unconscious, knows best. That is where the “call” comes from. God cannot be present when the “I” is raving, nor can we be in the divine presence. The true “I” is in fact “he,” but men cannot see it. He stands among us and we know him not. “He” is the voice crying in the wilderness. He is the still small voice that Elijah heard amid the earthquake, wind, and fire. He becomes flesh and dwells among us. So long as we live below, he will come from above.
John points the way.
Chapter Six
WHY MUST JOHN DIE?
MANY OF US ARE FAMILIAR with the story of how John the Baptist’s head came to be on a blood-soaked platter at the behest of the slimy Salome and the harridan Herodias, the maiden’s malevolent mother. Coming as it does with the archetypal striptease, the legendary (and unbiblical) Dance of the Seven Veils, it is a legend that has cut its way into films, orchestral scores, a play by Oscar Wilde, and an opera based on Wilde’s play by Richard Strauss.
There’s something about it we like.
Looking at the description above you will realize that we are not going to run away on a romantic quest. We are going to do something far more interesting. We are going to find out how the romance has been triggered by some seriously exciting history, history that, when taken to its logical conclusion, will surprise us all. It should lead to a fundamental rethink on how we view John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul: the “Big Three” of the New Testament. We might even get some insight into the hectoring of Herodias and saucy Salome too.
One might have thought that Luke would have been the Gospel with the most to gain from the gory story of John’s beheading. Luke’s has been called the “romantic Gospel,” and it tends to fill out Mark or Mark’s source where it can. But no, Luke eschews virtually the entire story. Perhaps he did not believe all that stuff about Salome. Anyhow, he reports merely that Herod Antipas, reproved by John for marrying his brother’s wife, added to “all the evil things” he’d done by shutting up John in prison. Luke does not even commit himself to a motive for imprisonment. There is no causative link between John’s reproving Herod and his being shut away (Luke 3:19–20). John’s beheading is only mentioned in passing later on. Perhaps Luke knows the true story and finds it too strong, too politically sensitive, for his Gentile audience. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that Luke is avoiding both the story as related in Mark and what he might have been informed to be the true story, or something like it.
So we must turn to Mark for the juicy tale, for Mark’s is the longest account, even though it appears in what is the shortest Gospel and probably the earliest. Matthew’s telling condenses Mark’s nourishing draught into a hasty dram.
Mark’s story starts with Herod Antipas being so surprised to hear of all the miraculous things Jesus is doing, and especially the numbers of people who are following him, that he declares John the Baptist returned from the dead. Herod has no problem with the idea of resurrection—or is it reincarnation?—unlike the temple Sadducees who, as a group, were sceptical of the soul’s immortality. Others opine to Herod that the latest Galilean phenomenon must be Elijah or one of the prophets, or someone like a prophet. Herod says “No, you’re all wrong”; he can tell: it’s John the Baptist all right, “whom I beheaded: he is risen from the dead” (6:16). Matthew 14:2 adds an intriguing little detail to Herod’s firm conviction: “That is why these powers are at work in him.” It is because John is in a risen state that he can now do miracles: most interesting. If Elijah departed with fire, John has returned with it. John has returned with power. Might one wonder whether John had himself told Herod that such was the likely outcome of chopping his head off?—something on the lines of, “You won’t see the back of me that easily, Herod. I shall be raised!” Had the beheading truly set the real John free? As far as the Tetrarch of Galilee was concerned, John was now more alive than ever! Cut at the head, he was back from the dead!
It is a great story, but it has been won by the complete annihilation of the political context and the concrete historical forces at work on the issue. Was this because the readers were not interested in the politics of the situation, being removed from them by many years, or because the facts were too embarrassing, or because Mark himself was ignorant of them? Whatever the real reason, we lose a great deal by not attending to the political realities.
The missing context here is that Herod Antipas was about to fight a war.
And the war had quite a lot to do with his marriage.
Mark has to backtrack to explain how it came to be that John was beheaded. After all, Mark had been following Jesus’s operation, not John’s. Unlike Luke, Mark lays most of the blame on the women of the story. Herod himself is “exceeding sorry.” He knew better than to chop a popular zaddik:
For Herod himself had sent forth and laid hold upon John, and bound him in prison for Herodias’ sake, his brother Philip’s wife: for he had married her. For John had said unto Herod, “It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife.” Therefore Herodias had a quarrel against him, and would have killed him; but she could not: For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him; and when he heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly.
And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, “Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee.” And he sware unto her, “Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.”
And she went forth, and said unto her mother, “What shall I ask?” And she said, “The head of John the Baptist.” And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, “I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist.” And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath’s sake, and for their sakes, which sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison. And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother.
And when his disciples heard of it, they came and took up his corpse, and laid it in a tomb. (Mark 6:17–29)
Let us look first at Herod Antipas’s marital situation, the only real clue we get from the gospel records. What do we find? Well, if this were a soap opera, rather than a blood opera, we might be forgiven for describing the situation as a mess.
Herod Antipas’s father, Herod the Great, died in 4 BCE. Having enjoyed numerous wives, as Arab custom permitted, and having executed one of them, as well as the two sons issuing from that marriage, he left many children and grandchildren. Let us look at the children and gran
dchildren of just four of Herod’s marriages, inheritors of pieces of his great kingdom.
Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea (4 BCE–39 CE) issued from Herod’s marriage to Malthace, a Samaritan. Antipas’s half-brother, also called “Herod” but confusingly named “Philip” in the Gospels, was the son of Herod the Great and Mariamme, the daughter of High Priest Boethus, who came from Egypt. Another half-brother of Antipas was properly called Philip. Philip was Tetrarch of Trachonitis and Batanea, the region north and east of the Sea of Galilee. Philip gave his name to the new city Ceasarea Philippi, built near Paneas, the biblical “Dan.” Philip died in 34 CE, not long before the following drama began.
Herod the Great had another wife of the name Mariamme (Mary). Mariamme was the granddaughter of the Maccabean King and High Priest Aristobulus II. Aristobulus II was poisoned by Cassius and Brutus in 49 BCE. This equally unfortunate Maccabean princess was executed by Herod in 29 BCE, having borne him two sons, both of whom were executed by their father. One of these sons, Aristobulus, half-brother to Herod Antipas, Herod, and Philip, married Bernice, his half-sister from Herod the Great’s marriage to Costobarus, an Idumaean. Aristobulus and Bernice’s children included their daughter Herodias.
Herodias was thus the “half-niece” of Herod Antipas, Philip, and Herod.
Herodias married her “half-uncle” Herod (“Philip” in the Gospels) and they had a daughter, Salome. Salome, in her turn, married her father’s half-brother, Philip, who died in 34 CE. Salome would go on to marry her mother’s brother’s son, that is to say, her cousin.
Now things start to get a little complicated.
The strict chronology vouchsafed by Josephus is a little hazy as to when precisely the following event took place, but it looks most likely to have been some time after Philip’s death in 34 CE. Herod Antipas was in Rome, presumably trying to settle his late half-brother’s legacy with the emperor, Tiberius. Herod the Great’s sons and grandsons always had to travel to Rome to discuss any redistribution of the Herodian inheritance, and these occasions always involved the plotting of brother against brother or half-brother against half-brother. Whatever the sons or grandsons of Herod the Great deliberated, the emperor always got his way.
On this occasion, Antipas was lodging with his half-brother, Herod, who was living the high life in Rome, having had no share of his father’s kingdom. The married Antipas “fell in love” (as Josephus puts it) with Herod’s wife, Herodias, and it was agreed between the lovers, and Herodias’s husband, that if she was to be divorced from Herod, Herod Antipas would divorce his own wife, Phasaelis. Herodias was not prepared, apparently, to be part of a coterie, like her grandmother. It may not have been an altogether romantic liaison; Herodias stood to secure real territory for herself and her now widowed daughter, Salome.
Herod Antipas returned to his tetrarchy, probably to his sparkling new city, Tiberias, named in honor of the emperor, on the western coast of the Sea of Galilee.
He had a problem.
His wife.
Phasaelis, the daughter of Aretas IV, the King of Nabataea, had been Herod Antipas’s wife for many years. A wealthy Arab kingdom, supplying the empire with incense from its lucrative contacts in southern Arabia, Nabataea bounded Herod Antipas’s tetrarchy to the south, east, and northeast. What was more, Aretas (the Greek form of “Haritha”) did not respect the borders of the late Philip’s tetrarchy, especially in the region of Gamala, due east of Galilee. In short, Aretas had an interest in who should rule “Gamalitis,” as Josephus describes a large chunk of Philip’s old tetrarchy, right up to its border with the Roman province of Syria. Wanting it for his own kin, Aretas was suspicious of his son-in-law’s intentions in the region now that Philip was dead. The son-in-law was equally suspicious of the father-in-law. Antipas’s wife Phasaelis had every reason to be suspicious of her husband.
Antipas found himself on the horns of a dilemma, a political dilemma aggravated by the fact that his marriage to Phasaelis had been secured by his half-Nabataean father, Herod the Great. The marriage had settled long-running conflicts between his kingdom and Nabataea. Maintaining reasonable relations with Nabataea suited the Romans. The Romans knew the Nabataeans duplicitous in protection of their trade with Arabia but appreciated that they could, occasionally, be useful. For example, the Nabataean King Aretas IV had offered his army to Quintilius Varus, governor of Syria, when Varus invaded Judea in 4 BCE after Herod’s death, an act of not entirely unselfish generosity to be expected from one whose father Obodas had fought against Herod five years earlier over the still disputed territory of Trachonitis, after Nabataea gave asylum to some forty “bandit chiefs” who raided Judea and Syria.
King Aretas was no pushover. Known as Philopatrus, “lover of his people,” Antipas’s father-in-law considered himself no one’s subject. During Aretas’s long reign (9 BCE–40 CE), his capital Petra’s embellishments flourished as Nabataea’s wealth increased. Visitors to Petra today are astonished by the extraordinary carving of a temple out of rose-red rock undertaken during Nabataea’s golden age under Aretas IV. It was used for the climax of the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Aretas IV would, perhaps, have been flattered.
Herod Antipas might have chosen a less able opponent. He felt, however, that he could rely on qualified Roman support, as well as the will of his wife-to-be, the formidable Herodias, a woman who knew what she wanted, regardless of consequences.
It must have been hard to keep the affair between Herodias and Antipas a secret because without Antipas’s knowledge, Phasaelis, daughter of the Nabataean king, got wind of her husband’s plans to divorce her and, without letting on, asked her husband if she might go for respite to their “all-mod-cons” palace at Macherus, high on a crag five miles inland from the Dead Sea’s eastern shore, some eighty miles to the south of Tiberias: her home away from home so to speak. Macherus was barely a half-hour’s walk from Nabataea. Before departing for the mountain palace, Phasaelis organized her “lifting” from Macherus, an exercise accomplished by Aretas’s general-in-chief, who ordered his officers to convey Phasaelis southward to Petra in stages.
Having secured his daughter’s safety and acquired all the facts, Aretas announced to his son-in-law that divorce meant war. We may assume that it was about this time (35–36 CE) that the news hit the streets that Herod Antipas was divorcing his wife to marry his half-brother’s wife, who was herself his half-brother’s daughter, whose own daughter had been his half-brother’s wife, with the likely consequence that a war would ensue involving Galileans and Nabataeans—and most likely Romans—in slaughter and destruction.
Into this historical picture walks a man called John. And John, a popular and powerful figure, declares that Herod Antipas, having done the deed, is a sinner before God. He should repent and put off the sinful woman. At least, that is the gospel account; it is not the account of Josephus the historian.
We now observe a curious coincidence. The gospel record informs us that John, for opposing the marriage of Antipas to Herodias, and for hurting Herodias’s pride thereby, was sent to Macherus a prisoner. Since there is no talk of a dungeon, he was probably under “house arrest” in a gilded cage: a precautionary, politically sensitive measure. According to Matthew 11:2, John, in custody, was able to send messengers to Jesus, enquiring as to who he (Jesus) thought he was.
Ten miles due west across the Dead Sea from the vicinity of Macherus is the wilderness of Judea. Some ten miles north of those shores is Qumran; ten miles to the south is En-gedi, both sites linked to the Essenes and to the New Covenanters.
According to Matthew (4:1ff.), after being baptized by John, Jesus was led into the “wilderness,” where he was tempted. One of the temptations was that Jesus should seize power, take on the world, and win. “Then the devil leaveth him, and behold, angels [or messengers] came and ministered unto him.”
“Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he departed into Galilee.” Jesus quit the wilderness, apparently
, on hearing of John’s imprisonment. He headed north: a move suggesting a variety of possible motives. According to Matthew, it was, “From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (4:17). He seems to have picked up where John left off. The obvious conclusion to the objective historian from these coincidences would be that Jesus was in some sense deputizing for his arrested comrade: carrying on the struggle, with a possible hint of “mission creep.”
To recap: John is arrested; Jesus starts up on his own, with John’s message. And by the way, New Covenanter documents suggest the purest of the community in the wilderness camps were to be in some way “angels” that they might involve celestial angels in their struggle (viz: War Scroll VI:3–6; 4Q274; CD XV). Jesus experienced a profound crisis in the wilderness, then “angels” came and ministered to him. This is all very curious in the light of the historical resources now available to us.
If we put Matthew’s account into historical context, we must add significant facts. When the war broke out between Herod and Aretas, Aretas’s army poured into Gamalitis and Perea and raided even as far as the western banks of the Dead Sea in the region of Qumran. Such events would have provided ample incentive for Jesus to hotfoot it north to Galilee. Judea was in the bottleneck of a crisis: “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The cry makes sudden sense.
This is it!
The war was possibly taken as a sign. If so, it was a mistaken one, as events transpired, though as we shall see, this war was not without long-term significance. Its complexities, however, were of no use to the gospel writers; it was “off-message.”
One astonishing fact is that the very case that the Gospels insist John laid against Herodias and her new husband was one made in an important New Covenanter text called the Damascus Document found in the caves of Qumran just across the water from the palace where John was to be executed. The precise sin John is reported to have criticized Herod for, namely marrying his brother’s wife, Herodias, and, according to Mark, lusting after her daughter, Salome, is related in the Damascus Document as being that sin that defiles “their holy spirit,” opening the sinners’ mouths “with a blaspheming tongue against the laws of the Covenant of God, saying, ‘They are not sure.’” This latter phrase refers to princes who claimed to interpret the Law as they found fit:
The Mysteries of John the Baptist Page 14