The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus' Marriage to Mary the Magdalene by Simcha Jacobovici & Barrie Wilson

Author:Simcha Jacobovici & Barrie Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2014-11-11T23:00:00+00:00

14

THE VILLAIN

We have seen that the main political player in the Galilee during Jesus’ entire life was a man named Herod Antipas. We have also seen that Jesus was intimately connected to him in many ways. According to the Gospel of Luke, they met face to face just prior to Jesus’ crucifixion.1 Luke tells us that, at the end of the day, it was Antipas who turned Jesus over to Pilate. Earlier in the story, Luke also reports that while Jesus was still in the Galilee, Antipas had conspired to kill him.2 All this is in keeping with what we know of Antipas’ character. After all, he is the man who arrested and executed Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptizer. Interestingly, Antipas seems to change his mind about going after Jesus. Perhaps this change of heart had something to do with the fact that one of Jesus’ main supporters was a woman named Joanna who was married to Herod Antipas’ “steward”—that is, his chief of staff.3 Perhaps also, for reasons that will become clear later, Jesus changed his message and became less of a threat to Antipas. Maybe that’s why Joanna and her husband Chuza were able to get Antipas off Jesus’ back. Ironically, it was a woman connected to Antipas, Herodias, who sealed John the Baptizer’s fate, and it seems that it was a woman connected to Antipas, Joanna, who saved Jesus’ life while he was still in the Galilee.

Herod Antipas played the game of politics very well. During extremely volatile times, he managed to rule the Galilee and Peraea for over forty-two years. Not only that, when he finally went down, he managed to get himself exiled and not killed. Not bad, at a time when Roman emperors were being routinely murdered and poisoned, sometimes by their own families.

Antipas’ demise seems to have been caused by two factors—his wife Herodias and his nephew Agrippa. Herodias was Antipas’ niece and his brother Herod’s former wife.4 When she dumped Herod and married Antipas, Herodias was determined to trade upward. So she constantly pushed Antipas to get Rome to declare him King of the Jews,5 instead of his more lowly title Tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea. After the death of Emperor Tiberius and his replacement with the infamous Caligula, she urged Antipas to once again raise the king issue in Rome—this time with the new emperor. It turned out to be a big mistake. Not only was Antipas not upgraded to king, he was removed from his position as Tetrarch and sent into permanent exile.

Herodias and Antipas had miscalculated the influence of Antipas’ nephew, Herod Agrippa. The latter grew up in Rome with Caligula, so when Tiberius died and Caligula took over, Agrippa’s stock went soaring. For his part, Agrippa had something of a strange relationship with his sister Bernice. A celebrated knockout, she had young men and emperors falling for her well into her late forties and early fifties. Her main interest, however, was coaching her brother Agrippa and sponsoring his career.

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