The Romans, administration of the Holy Land, and the Crucifixion

Factual Questions
1

I’m not entirely sure how to phrase thes questions, but I hope it gets clear what I mean.

  1. According to Luke, Jesus was first brought to the Roman governor Pilate after his arrest. When Pilate heard that Jesus was a Galilean, he sent him to Herod Antipas to be judged. Presumably he did this because Pilate felt he had no jurisdiction over Jesus: I gather from looking at maps in my Bible edition that what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories used to be divided during the time of Christ: Judea was governed directly by the Roman governor, while the northern region of Galilee was under control of the Jewish king Herod Antipas (who happened to be in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus’s trial - presumably to celebrate Passover there). I understand that “king” in this context does not mean he was a sovereign ruler; in fact, Herod seems to have been some kind of vassal to the Roman empire. Yet I wonder why the Romas employed this strange scheme of government: In contrast to Galilee, Judea was ruled by Pilate directly, without any Jewish kings in between, yet Galilee was a Jewish king, who was, however, subject tothe Roman governor of Judea. What am I getting wrong here?

  2. All four gospels point out that the Jews, according to Roman law, did not have authority to put people to death without Roman approval. Yet we read about stonings of people for religious offenses all the time in the New Testament; John the Baptist was killed upon the demand of Herod’s wife and daughter without any Roamn official approving this execution. Why this discrepancy?

2

In the Roman Empire, the land was administered by the Romans directly, as provinces. So, you have Pilate as procurator of Judea.

However, Rome also had a series of alliances with other states; client kingdoms, where Rome promised to protect the state in exchange for good relations and the paying of annual tribute. So, you had Herod Antipas, who was king of Galilee.

To make a long story short, here’s how this came about. When the Hasmonean kingdom of Israel was founded, they knew they’d need friends, so they allied themselves with Rome. Eventually, after all sorts of civil unrest in Israel (and the civil war in Rome) the last member of the Hasmonean dynasty was overthrown by his prime minister, a guy named Antipater. Antipater was then poisoned by somebody who didn’t like him, and his son Herod married a princess from the old Hasmonean dynasty, and got the Roman senate to back him, and name him “King of the Jews”.

Herod then rules for about 35 years, becomes good friends with the Emperor Augustus, becomes increasingly loopy, gets convinced his sons are trying to kill him, executes three of them (including his heir), and then dies. There is, of course, a problem with the will, because Herod has killed his heir, and a bunch of his sons want to become king. Augustus then decides he’s going to settle the matter by dividing up the kingdom, and making the three sons who all want the kingdom “tetrarchs”…rulers of a third.

So, his son Archelaus gets Judea and Samaria, his son Antipas gets the Galilee and Perea, and his son Phillip gets Ituraea and Trachontis (which you’ve probably never heard of. It’s what’s now part of Syria and Jordan).

Archelaus proves to be a disaster as ruler. He’s cruel and arbitrary, but also really weak. Finally, the people beg Rome to save them. The Romans depose Archelaus and turn Judea and Samaria into a Roman province. Meanwhile, Antipas and Phillip, who are better rulers, are able to continue to hold onto their tetrarchies and rule more or less independently.

3

Very close. The Roman Empire included provinces (divided into imperial and senatorial, a distinction we don’t need to deal with) and tributary kingdoms. The latter were much like the “protectorates” of the British and French Empires: states with internal self-government under their own kings, who understood that the only acceptable question when Caesar said “Jump!” was “How high?”

The Holy Land had been an independent kingdom under the Maccabees, and the King of Idumaea (Old Testament Edom), Antipater, had married into the Maccabee line and schemed to become the successor of the last Maccabee prince. His son Herod the Great was king over the whole schmear at the probable time of Jesus’s birth. However, factions among the Maccabees had brought the Romans in, and they were not about to leave. On Herod’s death, the kingdom was divided between three of his sons: Archelaus, who got Judaea; Herod Antipas, who got Galilee; and Herod Philip (who got the lands across the Jordan River in the northeast, and doesn’t figure into this). Archelaus was an incompetent tyrant, and when he was assassinated, the Romans took direct control of Judaea, placing it under a sub-governor (procurator) of the Governor of Syria. At the time of Jesus’s death, this was Pontius Pilate. But Herod Antipas remained the subject king in Galilee. This is why, when Pilate found out that Jesus was from Nazareth in Galilee, he sent him to Herod for judgment. It cost nothing to give your vassal king his prerogatives; in fact, it helped keep him in line, by showing a modicum of respect for him. So, faced with a Galilean citizen, arrested in Jerusalem for what were effectively trumped-up charges brought by the influential religious elite – Pilate saw an easy way out of having to judge a tricky situation by sending him to Herod.

4

My “very close” by the way was in reference to Schitte’s guesses about the situation. I suspect Captain Amazing is more accurate than I on the couple of details we disagreed on in our nearly-identical accounts; I was posting from memory.

5

Literally, of a fourth or one of four: tetr-, not some form of tri-. But it was loosely applied to subordinate kings or princes. Tetrarch - Wikipedia