This message from his wife strengthened Pilate’s reluctance, inclined as he already was to neutrality, if not to clemency, through his animosity to Caiaphas, and perhaps through the words of the Accused. Claudia Procula had not said, “Save Him”—but: “Have thou nothing to do with that just man.” This was Pilate’s idea, also; as if he had a confused divination of the importance of this mysterious beggar who called Himself King. At the very first he had ordered the Jews to judge Him, themselves, but they had not been willing to do this. Then another way to evade the responsibility occurred to him. He went back to Jesus and asked whether He were a Galilean.
This evasion seemed to promise success. Jesus did not belong to his jurisdiction, but to that of Herod Antipas. By good luck Herod was there at Jerusalem at that very time, come as was his wont for the Passover. The Procurator had found a legitimate subterfuge to satisfy his wife—and to free himself from this troublesome perplexity. With one stroke he would ingratiate himself with the Jews, leaving to one of their own race the decisive judgment, and at the same time he would do a bad turn to the patriarch whom he hated with all his heart because he suspected him with good reason of spying on him and tale-bearing to Tiberius. So, losing no time, he ordered the soldiers to take Jesus before Herod.
THE WHITE CLOAK
The third judge before whom Jesus was led was a son of that bloody-minded hog, Herod the Great, by one of his five wives. He was the true son of his father because he wronged his brothers as his father had wronged his sons. When his brother Archelaus, his own half-brother, was accused by his subjects, he managed to have him exiled. He robbed his other brother Herod of his wife. When he was seventeen years old he began to reign as Tetrarch over Galilee and over Berea, and to ingratiate himself with Tiberius, offered himself as a secret tale-bearer of the sayings and doings of his brothers and of the Roman officials in Judea. On a voyage to Rome he fell in love with Herodias, who was both his niece and his sister-in-law, since she was the daughter of his brother Aristobulus, and wife of his brother Herod, and not shrinking from the double incest, he persuaded her to follow him, together with Salome, the daughter of the adulteress. His first wife, daughter of Aretas, king of the Nabatei, went back to her father, who declared war on Antipas and defeated him.
This happened while John the Baptist was beginning to be talked about among the people. The prophet let slip some words of condemnation against these two incestuous adulterers, and this was enough for Herodias to persuade her new husband to have him taken and shut up in the fortress of Machærus. Every one knows how the foul Tetrarch, inflamed by cruel Salome’s lascivious arts, and perhaps meditating a new incest, was forced to offer her the bearded head of the Prophet of Fire on a golden platter.
But even after his decapitation John’s shade disturbed Herod, and when he began to hear talk of Jesus and of His miracles he said to his courtiers, “This is John the Baptist; he is risen from the dead.”
It seems that he kept his eye on the new prophet, and that at one time he thought of serving Him as he had his precursor; but either for political or superstitious reasons, deciding that he would have no more to do with prophets, he saw that the best way was to force Jesus to leave his Tetrarchy. One day some Pharisees, very probably acting on Herod’s instructions, went to say to Jesus: “Get thee out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill thee.”
“And he said unto them, Go ye and tell that fox ... nevertheless I must walk to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following; for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.”
And now at Jerusalem near His death, He appeared before that fox. That traitor and spy, incestuous adulterer, assassin of John and enemy of the prophets was the most fitting person to condemn innocence. But Jesus had named him well: he was more fox than tiger, and he shrank from being a substitute for Pilate. Luke tells us, “When Herod saw Jesus he was exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see him of a long season, because he had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him.”
The son of the Idumean and the Samaritan woman had scorched himself in John’s fire, and he received Jesus as an old tamer of animals, with the marks of the lion’s teeth still on his arm, looks at a new wild animal brought for him to see. But, like all Oriental barbarians, his mind was obsessed by prodigies, and he imagined Jesus to be a wandering wizard who could, whenever He wished, repeat some of His sorcery. Herod hated Him as he had hated John, but he hated Him partly because he feared Him; the prophets had a power which Herod did not understand and which intimidated him: perhaps the beheading of John had brought him bad luck. He too wished Jesus to be killed, but he had no mind to be in any way responsible for His death.