Recently, I was working on an endnote for a book review. That note was about the ways in which Luke corrected things he found problematic in Mark. I gave two examples: Luke 6:4’s correction of Mark 2:6 and its incorrect reference to Abiathar the high priest, and Luke’s consistent labeling of Herod Antipas as “tetrarch” (e.g., Luke 3:1) rather than Mark’s incorrect “king” (Mark 6:14). The latter example triggered a memory of a blog post I read a few years ago by Erik Manning entitled “3 Times Archaeology Has Confirmed the Gospels and Shut the Mouths of Skeptics.” In that short piece, Manning tackles claims surrounding three issues: the synagogue at Capernaum, the pool of Bethesda, and, the subject of this post, “King” Herod.
Erik Manning vs. Thomas Paine
The apologist quotes the (in)famous American skeptic Thomas Paine (sans citation).1 Here is the quote as Manning offers it.
“There could be no such person as a King Herod because the Jews and their country were then under the dominion of the Roman Emperors who governed then by tetrarchs, or governors.”
Manning’s response is brief and to the point. He writes, “Centuries later, Paine would be proven wrong with some hard evidence in the form of coins.” To support this, the apologist provides this image of some coins.2
Manning then states that these coins feature the inscription βασιλιάς αγριπάπα (basilias Agripapa) – “King Agrippa.” Coupled with the other two skeptical failures he refutes in the post, the apologist says, “That’s strike three. The critics are out.” The clever baseball analogy notwithstanding, is Manning right? Is this objection from Paine a swing and a miss?
Doubting Thomas
Let’s begin with the larger context of the quote from Paine. It appears in An Examination of the Passages in the New Testament Quoted from the Old and Called Prophecies Concerning Jesus Christ.3 Originally published in 1807, this particular work tackles material found in the canonical Gospels, beginning (naturally) with the Gospel of Matthew. However, it is the section on the Gospel of Luke from which the material in question comes.
Paine seems keen on contrasting the work of the Lukan Evangelist with that of the Matthean. As he begins the section, he notes that whereas Matthew connects a prophetic text to Mary’s unexpected pregnancy (i.e., Matthew 1:22-23) and Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem by beasts of burden (Matthew 21:5), Luke does not. With this out of the way, the skeptic moves on to what comprises the bulk of his examination: the person of Herod in the Matthean and Lukan Gospels.
He sets up the discussion by quoting Luke 13:31-32 (KJV), a text wherein the Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod is out to kill him and he should leave the region. In the next paragraph, Paine turns to the Gospel of Matthew and notes that, per the Matthean Evangelist, Herod died while Jesus was in exile in Egypt as a child (cf. Matthew 2:13-15, 19-20). For the ever-skeptical Founding Father, this presents a difficulty. How could Herod, who sought to kill Jesus when he was but a mere toddler (Matthew 2:16-18) and died shortly thereafter, be alive to try and kill him when the Nazarene was a grown man (cf. Luke 3:23)?
At this juncture, Paine introduces an apologetic offered by “priests and commentators” to address the issue. Prompted by the “obscurity” surrounding Herod found in the “historical part of the New Testament,” these defenders of the integrity of the Bible claim that Matthew’s Herod and Luke’s Herod are not one but two individuals. Unimpressed, he utters the lines highlighted by Manning. In the paragraph that follows, Paine points to Luke 2:2 which places Jesus’s birth during the time when Quirinius governed Syria and writes that “according to this, Jesus was not born in the time of Herod.” He also notes that Luke fails to mention Matthew’s slaughter of the Bethlehemite babies, the flight to Egypt, or the return to Galilee. “On the contrary,” Paine writes, “the book of Luke speaks as if the person it calls Christ had never been out of Judea, and that Herod sought his life after he commenced preaching, as is before stated.” Drawing attention to, as it were, comparable places wherein the Matthean and Lukan texts disagree, Paine finds a further example, treated in another section of the volume, wherein the two are in disagreement about the actions of Judas Iscariot. He concludes:
As it is impossible the wisdom of God could err, so it is impossible that those books could have been written by divine inspiration. Our belief in God, and his unerring wisdom, forbids us to believe it. As for myself, I feel religiously happy in the total disbelief of it.
What do we make of Paine’s attack on the New Testament here?
Getting Paine Right
A fuller reading of Paine’s words helps to sharpen our focus on what he is getting at here. He is intentionally drawing his readers to a historical implausibility. To appreciate this, it helps to understand the broad contours of the governing of Judea in this period. The key text with regards to Paine’s objections is Luke 2:1-2: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria” (NRSV). These references are by no means accidental to the Lukan narrative.
To begin with, Luke situates Jesus’s birth “against the oppressive backdrop of Caesar Augustus’s imperial reign.”4 Augustus was the adopted son of Julius Caesar and rose to power after an internal struggle that saw him at war with Antony and Cleopatra VII.5 His reign spanned over four decades, beginning in 30 BCE and ending in 14 CE. But this time frame is too large and so Luke narrows it down further, referring to a decree made by the emperor that “all the world should be registered.” Such registration would have been for the purposes of counting people, i.e., a census. Contrary to what Luke suggests (cf. vv. 3-5), it would have required people be counted where they lived, not where their ancestors had.6 Thus, Joseph and Mary – both from Nazareth – would have stayed in Galilee to be counted.
The idea of an empire-wide census beggars belief, especially as Luke depicts it. In truth, it is in part the Evangelist’s invention to get Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem so that Jesus can be born there.7 I say “in part” because v. 2 narrows down the time frame considerably more: “This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.” The reference to Quirinius being governor of Syria gives us a fairly stable date: 6 CE. According to Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 17.342-344), one of the sons of Herod the Great, Archelaus,8 was a tyrant and had been warned by Caesar to behave himself with regards to the populace under his control in Judea. Upon discovery of the ethnarch’s disobedience, the emperor summoned Archelaus to Rome and banished him to Vienna in Gaul. As a consequence, writes the Jewish historian, “Archelaus’s country was laid to the province of Syria; and [Quirinius], one that had been consul, was sent by Caesar to take account of people’s effects in Syria, and to sell the house of Archelaus” (Antiquities 17.354).9 This all happened, per Josephus, some thirty-seven years after Augustus’s defeat of Antony (Antiquities 18.26), or roughly 6 CE.10
Now comes the historical implausibility that Paine highlights. This registration connected to the governing of Quirinius over Syria mentioned by Luke situates Jesus’s birth in a time period when there was no “King Herod” (cf. Luke 1:5). Archelaus, now deposed and in exile, had been an ethnarch, never a king. Paine, therefore, is absolutely correct on this issue! As Luke portrays the circumstances surrounding Jesus’s birth, there was no “king Herod,” for, as Paine explains, “the Jews and their country were then [when Quirinius ruled in Syria] under the dominion of the Roman Emperors who governed them by Tetrarchs or Governors.” This naturally conflicts with the timeline offered by the Matthean Evangelist whose Herod is the father of Archelaus (cf. Matthew 2:22), Herod the Great. That Herod had been appointed king by the Roman Senate in 40 BCE and, through Roman-backed military campaigns that vanquished his enemies, began his reign in 37 BCE.11 Upon his death in 4 BCE, Rome divided Herod’s territories between his sons Philip, Antipas, and Archelaus. When Archelaus was removed from power, the territories that he governed became part of Roman Syria “and consequently fell under the authority of a succession of Roman governors.”12
The question that Paine is forcing readers to ask is this: Was there a “king” Herod when Jesus was born or not? If you accept Luke’s timeline of events, the answer is a resounding no. Quirinius was governor at a time when Herod the Great – the client king of Rome – was long dead and his son Archelaus had been removed as ethnarch, not king. If you accept Matthew’s timeline, the answer is yes. Jesus was born at a time when Herod the Great ruled from Jerusalem. These two accounts contradict and thus, in Paine’s estimation, cannot have been “written by divine inspiration.”
Manning’s Apologetic
What then do we make of Manning’s response to Paine’s words? In short, he has missed the point. This is obvious in two ways. The first is what Manning does at the end of his section on Thomas Paine’s objection: he provides as evidence of a “king” Herod coins with an inscription reading “King Agrippa” (i.e., Agrippa I) on them. That Agrippa was a king is substantiated not only by the coins but also by Josephus. Per the Jewish historian, the Roman emperor Claudius restored to him the territory belonging to Herod the Great (Antiquities 19.274-276) and in general Agrippa was admired by those under his domain (Antiquities 19.328-331). The problem here is that Agrippa rose to power in a time period outside that period to which Paine is referring. Paine is thinking of 6 CE; Agrippa became king over three decades later in 41 CE. The coins proffered by the apologist to counter Paine’s attacks are irrelevant.
The second way in which Manning has missed Paine’s point is that it is clear that he did not read Paine in context but was parroting the claims of one of his favorite apologists, the philosopher Timothy McGrew. At the end of the post, Manning is forthright in confessing his dependence on McGrew for all the examples in that piece, including this one involving Thomas Paine. In a talk entitled “The Gospels and Acts as History,” McGrew quotes the words from Paine that Manning alerted his readers to in his post, but he offers a fuller defense of the Gospels against Paine. However, because McGrew has cherry-picked from Paine’s words, failing to read them in context, he, like his protege, has misunderstood the point of the Founder’s “accusation.”
A Paine-ful Lesson
I suppose the moral of the story is that in trying to argue for the Bible’s accuracy it would behoove apologists like Manning to accurately assess their sources. Rather than draw from Paine directly, it’s clear he lifted the Founder’s quote from Timothy McGrew and, without checking to see if McGrew was representing the context of Paine’s words correctly, simply took for granted that his assessment was right. Had Manning taken the time to read Paine in full, he would have discovered that the objection raised by the skeptic was about a specific time period and that Paine is highlighting the contradiction between the Matthean and Lukan accounts.
ENDNOTES
1 One of the more frustrating things about Manning’s work on his blog is that, despite being an excellent and organized writer, he often fails to provide citations for material to which he refers. Some readers may find such information superfluous. Why provide that information at all when it doesn’t contribute to the point being made? There are many reasons why a proper citation – at least a title, author, publisher, and page number – should be included. One is that it says to your audience, “Please, keep me honest.” An interested reader may be curious if the quote is accurate or if the reference you provide substantiates the point being made. A citation provides them with the information needed to check your work. Another is that a citation shows you’ve done the research, tracking down references, reading them, and ensuring their accuracy, relevance, and applicability. You haven’t merely relied upon or parroted another uncritically. Citations, thus, lend an air of, though not a guarantee of, credibility.
2 This image is taken directly from Manning’s website.
3 Thomas Paine, An Examination of the Passages in the New Testament Quoted from the Old and Called Prophecies Concerning Jesus Christ (London: R. Charlie, 1826), 39-40.
4 Seyoon Kim, Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008), 79.
5 For a brief overview of Augustus’s rise to power and reign, especially as it pertains to Palestine, see Thomas R. Hatina, “Rome and Its Provinces,” in The World of the New Testament: Cultural, Social, and Historical Contexts, edited by Joel B. Green and Lee Martin McDonald (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 558-560.
6 Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible (New York, Doubleday: 1981), 405. Fitzmyer notes that Roman censuses were typically for the purpose of taxation and military conscription. It would therefore make no sense to count people from one region as belonging to one wherein they did not make their home.
7 Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, second edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 414-418.
8 Interestingly, Archelaus is mentioned in Matthew’s Gospel. There, in 2:22, Archelaus serves as the reason Joseph decides to not return to Bethlehem in Judea and instead chooses to settle in Nazareth of Galilee.
9 Translation taken from The New Complete Works of Josephus, translated by William Whiston (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1999).
10 Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, 402.
11 Amy-Jill Levine, “Visions of Kingdoms: From Pompey to the First Jewish Revolt,” in The Oxford History of the Biblical World, edited by Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 356.
12 Levine, “Visions of Kingdoms,” 360.
The Amateur Exegete 
2 thoughts on “A Paine-ful Misreading: Erik Manning, Thomas Paine, and “King” Herod”
Comments are closed.