Implicating Herodias and Her Daughter in the Death of John the Baptizer: A (Christian) Theological Strategy?

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) (ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes formulae omitted.) Our earliest ancient narratives of the death of John the Baptizer are found in Mark 6:14-29; Matt 14:1-12; and Josephus, Ant. 18.116-19. Interestingly, the Gospel according to John contains no account of the Baptizer s death, nor does the Gospel according to Luke, which does note, more or less in passing, that Herod acknowledged having beheaded John (9:9). Q appears to lack an account of John's death, which is also, if unsurprisingly, absent from the Gospel of Thomas and from the extant portions of the Gospel of Peter. While both the Gospel narratives and Josephus's account appear relatively straightforward, there are serious, long-noted discrepancies between Josephus, on the one hand, and the Gospels, on the other, as well as striking if subtle differences between Mark and Matthew. Further, and less well noted, aspects of Josephus's narrative are egregiously and perhaps irresolvably at odds with claims he makes elsewhere about Herod Antipas and his wife, Herodias. Unsurprisingly, then, there is an extensive secondary literature on the death of John, so much so that one might wonder what else remains to be said on the subject.1 Understanding that the nature of the evidence does not allow us to know with absolute certainty that this is the case, I argue in this article that the extant accounts in Josephus and the Gospels are best regarded as separate narratives that both cannot and should not be amalgamated, with the conclusion that the assignment of blame to a young dancer, commonly taken to be Salome, and her mother, Herodias, is historically suspect and highly unlikely. While my argument to segregate Josephus and the Gospels is unusual, numerous scholars concur that the banquet story, and thus the role of the daughter, at least is likely to be fictitious, but they rarely then go on to pursue in any detail the origins, motivations, and functions of the Gospel accounts. I, however, argue that the implication of women in the death of John the Baptist is a "Christian" fabrication and that, in assigning women the primary responsibility not just for the death of John but for the particular means of his execution, namely, decapitation, the Gospel narratives have their function, and probably also their beginning. They are, in my view, a response to early "Christian" concerns about the vexing relationship between John and Jesus, most particularly the unnerving possibility that Jesus might have been John raised from the dead. The basis for my argument is in part the significant discrepancies between Josephus and the Gospels, not merely on the details of John's death but also on the likelihood that Herodias (or even, in some manuscript traditions, Herod) had a daughter who could have been the ... described as the dancer. These discrepancies, which I will lay out in some detail, are helpful to my argument, and they are what led me to it; but they are not, ironically, the logical crux of my argument. By themselves, these discrepancies do not necessarily demonstrate that the Gospels are wrong: hypothetically Josephus might have it wrong: Mark, at least, might have it right. Furthermore, while Josephus's report happens, in this case, to alert us to difficulties in the Markan and Matthean narratives, the absence of such conflicting accounts would not warrant our assuming the truthfulness of the Gospel account. A fabricated narrative might not necessarily contain the evidence of its own fabrication. As I shall demonstrate, however, in actual fact, Mark's story is made less probable by Josephuss contrary account, by these other, less immediately apparent conflicts between the Markan account and Josephuss accounts of the Herodian period, as well as by the fact that Josephus appears to have less motivation to fabricate in this case (or even to have erroneous information). …