The Days of Herod the King
The historical context of the first Christmas
Every Christmas, I remember the specific time and place where Jesus was born.
Beyond the traditional manger scene, and the scenes around it in the Bible, I remember the historical context.
Let’s start several centuries before Jesus, around 400 BC at the end of the Old Testament period, when the Persian Empire ruled Judea.
As readers of the Old Testament books of Ezra and Nehemiah remember, Judea was ruled by the Persian Empire under a congenial system where Persia appointed a governor (sometimes a local) who didn’t interfere with Jewish law or rituals. When the Persian Empire fell to Alexander the Great, this system stayed in place1; when Alexander died and his empire was divided up among the Diadochi, the coastal plain of Judea became a battleline between the Ptolemies and Seleucids, but Jerusalem up in the hills wasn’t much affected.
This friendly system ended with Antiochus IV Epiphanes. He took the title “Epiphanes,” meaning “the god manifest”; his contemporaries sometimes instead styled him “Epimanes,” “madman.” Provoked by a political dispute, he outlawed Jewish religious ritual and desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem. This spurred a revolt - the first religiously-motivated Jewish revolt. Styled the Maccabean Revolt after its leader, it overwhelmingly won. The Seleucids were defeated and cast out, and an independent Jewish state ruled by the High Priest conquered from Dan to Beersheba and from the Mediterranean beyond the Jordan.
This kingdom lasted about eighty or a hundred years: from 141 BC to 63 BC it was independent; then the Romans intervened due to another political dispute; then twenty years later (after more rebellion and unrest) the Romans overthrew the kingdom and installed Herod the Great as their own client king.
Herod was an Idumean - a people that weren’t ethnically Jewish, but had converted to Judaism. He’d risen to prominence as a Roman official devotedly loyal to Rome. Rome had first appointed him to oversee the last ruling High Priest; when the people and High Priest rebelled (with help from the rival Parthian Empire), Herod fled to Rome and pled his case before the Senate. On advice of Octavian (later Augustus) and Marc Antony (still Octavian’s ally at the time), the Roman Senate appointed Herod as King of the Jews and sent him with a Roman army to besiege Jerusalem and make his title reality.
That, Herod did.
Politically, Herod was a very competent monarch.
He wasn’t nice or peaceful; he was paranoid. He executed three of his nine sons, and one of his wives, on charges of rebellion. When Augustus heard of this, he quipped that he’d rather be Herod’s pig than his son2.
But, the charges of rebellion he’d levelled were well-grounded. Herod needed all his paranoia and political competence to keep his throne.
The incessant unrest was quite real. So many Jews never accepted the Roman yoke, even secondhand through Herod their puppet; and kept yearning for a Messiah to come and lead them to freedom. Many freedom-fighters, or terrorists, or bandits, depending on whose perspective you take, rose up to claim the Messianic staff. Most of them were quickly defeated and lost to history outside a brief listing by the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, but they were defeated due to the paranoid competence of Herod and his successors.
“False Messiahs will arise,” Jesus said later3. That was nothing new to his hearers; they had been arising, and abounding, for decades.
Herod ruled with a cooperative High Priest and Sanhedrin - but one cowed by threat of force. The High Priest was appointed by Herod, and by the Romans after his death, and regularly dismissed from office whenever Herod thought best. They remembered Herod’s siege; they did not even consider recognizing any of the so-called Messiahs. They would not, until Bar-Kokhba in the second century. Anything else would mean, as the Sanhedrin says in John 11, “the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”
Historians disagree about when Herod died. It should be clear, given that Josephus describes a lunar eclipse shortly before Herod’s death - but there were two lunar eclipses visible over Jerusalem at plausible dates. So, most historians say 4 BC, but a minority say 1 BC. I think 1 BC has the stronger case, given the dating of the eclipse and the number of events Josephus describes between Herod’s death and the Passover in that year - 4 BC would mean the eclipse, and thus Herod’s death, was too soon before Passover.
This also matters, of course, for when Jesus was born. Dionysius Exiguus of Rome, the sixth-century monk who invented our modern system of counting years from when he estimated Jesus was born, obviously believed Jesus was born in 1 AD4; and thus Herod died no earlier than that. He did have access to texts now lost, but nothing really depends on his estimate. The only actual number given in the Gospels is that “Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23).
Another complicating factor is the census described in Luke 2. The “census taken when Quirinius was governor of Syria” was in 6 AD, long after Herod died. Various theories have been proposed, including the supposition that Quirinius might have had some role in some other census before the census we know about in 6 AD. One other attractive proposal is that the Greek word typically translated “when” can also be rendered “before”, which would describe this as the “census taken before Quirinius was governor.”
(In fact, Jesus would most likely have been born some time before the year Herod died. The word used to describe the young Jesus when the Magi arrive in Matthew 2 implies he wasn’t a newborn anymore.)
Regardless, we read that when Herod heard the rumor of a baby born to be Messiah, “he was troubled”. That isn’t surprising. Magi coming from “the east” - the rival Parthian Empire, which had previously helped rebelling Jews - to see this purported Messiah would only make it more troubling. We read that Herod received the Parthian Magi politely, which is unsurprising; and that he ordered the babies of Bethlehem killed to end any claims of this purported Messiah - which also is not surprising.
But this wouldn’t be the last time Herod attempted to shed gallons of blood.
Shortly before his death, Herod had imprisoned a number of prominent rabbis. According to Josephus, he had given orders that they were to be killed immediately after he died, so that there would be people mourning. I suspect he was also afraid they would be fomenting unrest around his death, and he wanted to give them an incentive not to hasten his death.
And indeed, there was a riot immediately before his death, around a golden eagle statue put up at the entrance of the Temple which the people considered to be an unlawful idol. The riot was forcibly suppressed, and Herod dismissed the High Priest for not stopping it.
And then Herod died.
On order of his son and primary heir Archelaus, the imprisoned rabbis were freed. But, Archelaus massacred the crowd that had gathered in the Temple.
Herod’s kingdom would not completely survive his death.
He hadn’t expected it to. In his will, he divided his realm among the sons he’d let live: Archelaus would rule as king over Judea; Philip and Antipas would rule over Galilee and other regions of the north. Augustus (now Emperor) confirmed this division though denying Archelaus the title of king.
But after more complaints, ten years later, Augustus deposed Archelaus and put Judea under a governor sent out directly from Rome. Antipas and Philip, however, would continue reigning into the 30’s AD, through Jesus’ entire ministry. It was Antipas who would execute John the Baptist and decline to intervene in Jesus’ trial.
Meanwhile, we read in the Gospel that Joseph and Mary and the young Jesus had fled to Egypt ahead of Herod’s death squad. Even if one doesn’t believe the account of an angel warning Joseph, that would be mere prudence.
Later, when they heard that Herod was dead, they started back toward Israel; but when they heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in his place, they didn’t return to Bethlehem but instead went to Nazareth in Galilee - outside of Archelaus’s dominions, in the tetrarchy of Antipas. There Jesus would grow up, and thence would come his epithet “Jesus of Nazareth.”
Into this pressure-cooker of tension came Jesus.
He was heralded as Messiah, and I agree he was. But the crowds hoped - and the priests feared - that he would be a Messiah to lead them to war against Rome. When we read that he was accused before the Roman governor Pilate of “saying that he himself is Messiah a king,”5 that is what his accusers and Pilate understood it as meaning.
But Jesus didn’t.
One could say that Jesus instead took over Rome itself. It took several centuries, but soon - as world history goes - Rome was ruled by an Emperor pledging his allegiance to Messiah Jesus of Nazareth.
Yet Jesus didn’t do that by military force - but by the power of his teaching, and (I believe) his Spirit changing people’s hearts.
Jesus was executed somewhere between 29 and 33 AD; I believe 33 AD has the strongest case6.
A few decades later, in 70 AD, the Jewish rebels seized Jerusalem and cast out the Roman governor and army for the moment.
But it was a very temporary triumph. The next year the Romans were back, and - slowly and inexorably - they took one stronghold after another and finally destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the Temple itself. Never again would a Jewish Temple be rebuilt.
But, the followers of Jesus were not in Jerusalem. It is said7 that they were warned by a prophecy to flee. Regardless, they did, and were saved.
The way of the Jewish rebels had failed. The way of Jesus would triumph.
According to Josephus, the High Priest welcomed Alexander and read to him from the prophecies of Daniel; Alexander in turn thanked him and gave him presents.
Herod, as a sometimes-observant Jew, kept kosher.
Matthew 24:24. Most New Testament translations will say “Christs” here. “Christ” is, literally, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Messiah.” The New Testament is written in Greek so it uses the Greek word; I prefer the Hebrew here because it’s what the contemporary people used.
There is no year 0; the year after 1 BC is 1 AD.
Luke 23:2 - again, most English translations say “Christ”, but that is the Greek translation of “Messiah.”
This depends on several different lines of argument, from the start of Jesus’ ministry as dated in Luke 3, the death of Herod Agrippa I as recorded in Acts 12 which we know happened in 44 AD, and the dating of Passover with regards to days of the week.
According to the fourth-century church historian Eusebius.