Exposing the Truth About Jesus

In response to The Crusade for Truth's post Exposing the Truth About Jesus I'm posting an excerpt from the book James the Brother of Jesus .

It is a popular impression that Herod was a Jewish King. This is simply untrue. This mistake has been encouraged as much by New Testament caricature, as it has by titles like 'the King of the Jews', superficially employed in that literature, the significance of which has been lost on most people. To be in Roman parlance, for instance, 'King of the Jews' at this time, one did not necessarily have to be Jewish!

For their part, Jews too have both encouraged and misunderstood this picture, partly out of ignorance and partly because their Rabbis under the Herodians - who determined the course of Judaism after the fall of the Temple - and writers like Josephus, for their own political reasons, went to great pains to legitimitize these same Herodians. This is the obsequious thrust of the above episode about Agrippa I, too, and sycophantish, unctuous behaviour of this kind generally in this period.

The opposite side of this coin is the rough treatment accorded this same Agrippa I- who supposedly so loved Judaism and Jewish causes - by the Simon above who convened an Assembly in Jerusalem to have him barred from the Temple as a foreigner, despite the fact his grandfather Herod built it - not to mention how Agrippa I was seen by a host of other Jewish Revolutionaries, 'Innovators', and 'Zealots', most of whom come to a bad end.

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But Herod, the progenitor of this family along with his father, the Idumaean Antipater, as we have shown, is not a Jew. He was a foreigner. As explained, his father seems to have been of Greco-Idumaean background - what today in this region would simply be called 'Arab' and, if Acts is any measure, probably was then as well (or 'Ethiopian') - and, as Josephus' testimony above reveals, he was hated by the people, because:

He [Herod] was evil by nature, cruel in punishment, and merciless to those he hated, and everyone admitted that he was more friendly to Greeks than to Jews. For instance, he adorned foreign cities of foreigners with large gifts of money, building baths and theatres, erecting temples in some and porticoes in others, whereas there was not a single city of the Jews on which he deigned to bestow even minor restoration or any gift worth mentioning.