James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls II (101 page)

In the course of our previous discussions we have had occasion to point out the motif of
circumcision
or the lack thereof in the marriages of these Herodian Princesses in Asia Minor and Syria, a motif figuring prominently in Paul’s activities in these same areas as well.
65
But the
announced goal of much of his missionary ‘
work
’ in these areas, that is to found a community where Greeks and Jews could live in harmony and equality (1 Corinthians 1:24, Galatians 3:28, etc.), however noble, was also very much in line with
Herodian family interests
or
designs in many of these regions
.
66

In fact, even after the fall of the Temple, Antiochus of Commagene, on the border west of Edessa, ran afoul of the R
o
mans, as Agrippa I seems to have done a quarter of a century earlier, for precisely such ‘
imperial
’ ambitions.
67
Antiochus’ son Epiphanes, who actually fought on the Roman side with his aptly-named ‘
Macedonian Legion
’ in the Jewish War and was even decorated for bravery in the siege of Jerusalem, had himself originally been betrothed to Agrippa I’s second daughter Drusilla. This was the same Drusilla who later married the brutal Roman Governor Felix.
68
Epiphanes’ marriage with Drusilla, presu
m
ably because her more ‘
Pious
’ father Agrippa I was still alive, foundered on precisely this issue of
circumcision
and
Epiphanes
’
refusal to circumcise himself
!
69
One might opine that in view of Drusilla’s later history, her father Agrippa I needn’t have bothered.

For her part, Drusilla was then promptly married to the King of Emesa (present-day
Homs
in Syria),
who had circumcised himself specifically in order to contract this marriage
, only finally to desert with the Roman Governor Felix to Rome – her father Agrippa I by this time having died – doubtlessly laying the groundwork to some extent for Paul’s own eventual ‘
appeal
’ and escape to Rome, which might explain why he was received so well there.
70

For his part, this Antiochus of Commagene also had a daughter, Jotape, who was married to another Herodian,
Alexa
n
der
, the son of Tigranes, King of Armenia. Tigranes was the grandson of the second of Herod’s two sons by his Maccabean wife Mariamme, the original ‘
Alexander
’ in this line – a line that was clearly favored because
it was considered of royal blood
or
the most Kingly
.
71
Josephus tells us that after the War, Vespasian made Alexander
King of Cilicia
, presumably for services rendered either by him or his father, ‘
Cilicia
’ of course also being Paul’s
own alleged place of origin.
72
Though all of this is ci
r
cumstantial, nevertheless it is instructive.

Tigranes’ uncle – also named Tigranes – was a descendant of this same Maccabean royal wife of Herod,
Mariamme
. He had also been appointed
King of Armenia
by the Romans, the first so designated – more confirmation of Herodians as ‘
the Kings of the Peoples
’ we have been emphasizing above in the Eastern areas of the Roman Empire. Josephus pictures this later nephew of the first
Tigranes
as spending a long and agreeable period as a hostage in Rome, so much so that it became his vi
r
tual home, as it seems to have done for so many of the persons we are labeling as
Herodians
above. There, he and many ot
h
ers like him – Agrippa II, for instance, Aristobulus and Salome, whose faces appear on the reverse of coinage proclaiming them ‘
Great Lovers of Caesar
’, and Julius Archelaus – clearly formed part of a sophisticated circle of Greek-speaking, pro-Roman intellectuals with a lot of time on their hands. In earlier work, I have singled out this circle as possibly being the source of much of the material that ultimately ended up being incorporated – along with a good deal of Alexandrian Greco-Roman ‘
anti-Semitism
’ – in what we now call ‘
the Gospels
’.
73
In any event, like Drusilla with Felix and her sister Bernice with her lover Titus, Josephus tells us fairly matter-of-factly that this latter generation of Herodians ‘
deserted the Jewish religion altogether and went over to that of the Greeks
’.
74

Be this as it may, aside from the general atmosphere in the Habakkuk
Pesher
signaling a ‘
conspiracy
’ of some kind su
r
rounding the destruction or death of the Righteous Teacher in which ‘
the Wicked Priest
’ (if not ‘
the Liar
’ too), was involved,
75
there is material in Paul’s own letters, as we saw, that would suggest more than just a casual relationship with the Herodian family and its representatives –
in fact
,
a genealogical one
. This by itself would explain his rather peculiar idea of Judaism and schizophrenic attitude towards it.

‘
The Littlest Herod
’ and Paul’s Roman Citizenship

We have already called attention to the greetings Paul sends to his ‘
kinsman Herodion
’, ‘
the Littlest Herod
’, at the end of Romans 16:11 – ‘
Herod
’, of course, not being a commonplace name in this period. This was probably the son of the ‘
Aristobulus
’, the evocation of whose ‘
household
’ just precedes it in Romans 16:10 and that ‘
Salome
’ involved in the execution of John the Baptist. We have also called attention to the greetings Paul sends to ‘
the Saints
’
in
‘
the household of Caesar
’ in Philippians (presumably Nero) where he mentions his close collaborator and ‘
comrade
-
in
-
arms
’, Epaphroditus (2:25 and 4:22), who was Nero’s secretary for Greek Letters and held a similar office later under Domitian.
76
Expediently or otherwise, Dom
i
tian accused him of having ‘
raised his hand against an Emperor
’, but these charges against Epaphroditus were most likely trumped up in the general crackdown against alleged ‘
Christians
’ in the later years of Domitian’s reign.
77

The last notice Josephus provides about the ‘
kinsman of Agrippa
’ he calls ‘
Saulos
’ was his trip to Corinth where Nero was apparently quartered while he was having a canal dug there. The year is 66
CE
and, after
Saulos
informs Nero of the situation in Palestine, Vespasian and Titus are sent out as commanders to deal with
the situation.
78
Just as eight years before, ‘
Paul’
was under house arrest or, as the case may have been, ‘
protective custody
’ in Agrippa II’s Palace in Caesarea, at the outbreak of the disturbances leading up to the Uprising against Rome, ‘
Saulos
’ too – along with his
cousins
,
Antipas, Costobarus
, and
Philip
– seems to have been in this same Agrippa II’s Palace in Jerusalem. Not only was this ‘
Philip
’ one of Agrippa II’s military co
m
manders and another name overlapping those of either ‘
Apostles
’ or ‘
Disciples
’ in the New Testament (the name of Agrippa I’s
Strategos
or
Military Commander
was ‘
Silas
’
79
), but he too, as Saulos had done,
appealed to Caesar
when he was blamed in some manner for surrendering either this Palace or the Citadel to the Revolutionaries.
80

For his part, everyone knows that Acts 26:32 pictures ‘
Paul
’ as going – apparently on his own recognizance – to appeal to Nero as
a
Roman citizen
at the beginning of the Governorship of Festus in 60
CE
. Aside from a two-year further stay in Rome, where he supposedly hired his ‘
own house
’ (Acts 28:30), nothing more can be said with any certainty about Paul – not even the date of his death, which does not appear to have occurred until about the time of the final visit this ‘
Saulos
’ in Josephus also makes to Nero when he, too,
just drops out of sight
!

The name ‘
Aristobulus
’ makes the several greetings Paul sends to these kinds of individuals at the end of Romans even more interesting. Not only was ‘
Aristobulus
’ originally a name used by Maccabeans, it turns into an
Herodian
name after these latter are
grafted
on the tree of the former, as Paul would have it in Romans 11:19, and there were at least four important
Herodians
with this name mentioned by Josephus at this time.

Where the identity of the ‘
Aristobulus’
mentioned by Paul in Romans 16:10 is concerned, probably the only Herodian ‘
Aristobulus
’ this could be in the mid- to late Fifties in Rome was Aristobulus the son of Herod of Chalcis, to whom Claudius gave the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia in Asia Minor.
81
Lesser Armenia would be contiguous to or carved out of areas belon
g
ing to the Osrhoeans around Edessa and Adiabene, which had fallen by this time to Roman control.
Tigranes
had already been given Armenia proper or Greater Armenia. Aristobulus’ wife
Salome
had, as we have pointed out, previously been the wife of
the
real
Philip
. Not only was he the half brother of Herod Antipas and the Tetrarch of the area around the Gaulon and across into Syria called Trachonitus, but it was he who had ‘
died childless
’ which was to say nothing about either
Herod Antipas
or
Herodias
.

This couple, Aristobulus and Salome, both advertised themselves as ‘
Great Lovers of Caesar
’ which, no doubt, they were. They obviously spent a lot of time in Rome, as did a good many of these Herodians brought up under or with Claudius. But, even more interestingly, they also had this son, named ‘
Herod
’ who, in this period of the Fifties and Sixties
CE
, would have been ‘
the Youngest
’ or ‘
Littlest Herod
’. Nor is this to say anything about the question of collusion between Paul (‘
Saulos
’) and Herod the Tetrarch (‘
Herod Antipas
’, Salome’s mother Herodias’ second husband) in the matter of his (Paul’s) activities ‘
in Damascus
’ that so disturbed ‘
Aretas
’
Governor
’ in 2 Corinthians 11:32 and, therefore, in some manner too perhaps, the death of John the Baptist. Though greetings such as these to ‘
Herodion
’ or ‘
the household of Aristobulus
’ in Romans 16:10–11 in themselves prove nothing, they constitute very strong collateral evidence for the proposition we are arguing of
Paul
’
s conne
c
tion to the Herodian family
.
All these relationships provide a very good reason for the fact of Paul’s Roman citizenship, of which our sources make so much.

Herod’s father Antipater, who was so instrumental in the Roman takeover of Palestine – instrumental to the extent that his son, even though he was not Jewish by birth, supplanted its
Jewish Dynasty
– received this citizenship for himself and his descendants in perpetuity for services rendered to the
Imperium Romanum
.
82
Antipater, in fact, was the first Roman Prefect in Palestine and what he did was turn a regional governorship into a family dynasty. Family connections of this kind to the hig
h
est circles of power in Palestine easily explain the fact of Paul’s influential sister and nephew living in Jerusalem according to Acts 23:16.
They also explain how Paul could have received the powers he did at such a tender age ‘
from the High Priest
’ – to exercise them as far as Damascus which was not, seemingly, even under his control at the time
83
– if this picture of his activ
i
ties in Acts (echoed in the Pseudoclementine
Recognitions
84
) is even partially correct.