Selections from Josephus - Audiolibro Gratis

III. Note on § (29). The First Husband of Herodias

Josephus calls the injured husband simply Herod. The first two Gospels give him the name Philip (“Herodias his brother Philip’s wife,” Matt. xiv. 3, Mark vi. 17). The name stands in all the MSS in Mark; in Matthew it is omitted by the “Western text” (cod. D and Latin versions); in Luke (iii. 19) it is absent from all the best MSS and in those which insert it is undoubtedly an interpolation from the other Gospels. It is clear from Josephus that the first husband of Herodias was not Philip the Tetrarch, but his half-brother who paid the penalty for his mother’s complicity in a plot by having his name removed from Herod’s will, and lived as a private individual, apparently in Jerusalem (cf. B.J. I. 30. 7 [600]). Either then Herod the Great had two sons named Philip (1) by Mariamne II (daughter of Simon the High Priest), the husband of Herodias, and (2) by Cleopatra, Philip the Tetrarch, who married Salome the daughter of Herodias; or, more probably, the name Philip in the first two Gospels is a primitive error, due to confusion between the husband and the son-in-law of Herodias. That two sons should have borne the name Philip is improbable; no argument can be drawn from the appropriation of the dynastic or family name Herod by more than one member of the family. The omission of the name Philip by St. Luke, who shows special acquaintance with the Herodian court, is very significant. The confusion with Philip the Tetrarch appears elsewhere, notably in the eccentric account of the Baptist’s denunciation of the second marriage of Herodias in the Slavonic version of the Jewish War (Note II above).