Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

In this way, the baptized
     became the
new
nation of Israel: repentant, redeemed, and ready to receive the Kingdom of God.
    As the crowds who flocked to the Jordan grew larger, the Baptist’s activities caught
     the attention of Herod the Great’s son, Antipas (“the Fox”), whose tetrarchy included
     the region of Peraea, on the eastern bank of the river. If the gospel account is to
     be believed, Antipas imprisoned John because he criticized his marriage to Herodias,
     who was the wife of Antipas’s half brother (also named Herod). Not satisfied with
     merely locking John up, the wily Herodias hatched a plot to put him to death. On the
     occasion of Antipas’s birthday, Herodias obliged her daughter, the sultry temptress
     Salome, to perform a lascivious dance for her uncle and stepfather. So aroused was
     the libidinous old tetrarch by Salome’s gyrations that he at once made her a fateful
     promise.
    “Ask of me whatever you wish,” Antipas huffed, “and I will give it to you, even half
     my kingdom.”
    Salome consulted her mother. “What shall I ask for?”
    “The head of John the Baptist,” Herodias replied.
    Alas, the gospel account is not to be believed. As deliciously scandalous as the story
     of John’s execution may be, it is riddled with errors and historical inaccuracies.
     The evangelists mistakenly identify Herodias’s first husband as Philip, and they seem
     to confusethe place of John’s execution, the fortress of Machaerus, with Antipas’s court in
     the city of Tiberias. The entire gospel story reads like a fanciful folktale with
     deliberate echoes in the biblical account of Elijah’s conflict with Jezebel, the wife
     of King Ahab.
    A more prosaic yet reliable account of the death of John the Baptist can be found
     in Josephus’s
Antiquities
. According to Josephus, Antipas feared that John’s growing popularity among the people
     would lead to an insurrection, “for they seemed ready to do anything that he should
     advise.” That may have been true. John’s warning of the coming wrath of God might
     not have been new or unique in first-century Palestine, but the hope he offered those
     who cleansed themselves, who made themselves anew and pursued the path of righteousness,
     had enormous appeal. John promised the Jews who came to him a new world order, the
     Kingdom of God. And while he never developed the concept beyond a vague notion of
     equality and justice, the promise itself was enough in those dark, turbulent times
     to draw to him a wave of Jews from all walks of life—the rich and the poor, the mighty
     and the weak. Antipas was right to fear John; even his own soldiers were flocking
     to him. He therefore seized John, charged him with sedition, and sent him to the fortress
     of Machaerus, where the Baptist was quietly put to death sometime between 28 and 30 C.E .
    Yet John’s fame far outlived him. Indeed, John’s fame outlived Antipas, for it was
     widely believed that the tetrarch’s defeat at the hands of the Nabataean king Aretas
     IV in 36 C.E ., his subsequent exile, and the loss of his title and property were all God’s divine
     punishment for executing John. Long after his death, the Jews were still mulling over
     the meaning of John’s words and deeds; John’s disciples were still wandering Judea
     and Galilee, baptizing people in his name. John’s life and legend were preserved in
     independent “Baptist traditions” composed in Hebrew and Aramaic and passed around
     from town to town. Many assumed he was the messiah. Some thought he would rise from
     the dead.
    Despite his fame, however, no one seems to have known then—justas no one knows now—who, exactly, John the Baptist was or where he had come from.
     The gospel of Luke provides a fantastical account of John’s lineage and miraculous
     birth, which most scholars dismiss out of hand. If there is any historical information
     to be gleaned from Luke’s gospel, however, it is that John may have come from a priestly
     family; his father, Luke says, belonged to the priestly order of Abijah (Luke 1:5).
     If that is true, John would have been expected to join the priestly line of his father,
     though the apocalyptic preacher who walked out of the desert “eating no bread and
     drinking no wine” had quite clearly rejected his family obligations and his duties
     to the Temple for a life of asceticism in the wilderness. Perhaps this was the source
     of John’s immense popularity among the