the suspicious 'double return' of Vitellius to Antioch in Josephus

copyright 2008 Stephan Huller

Scholars never know what to make of this Samaritan messianic narrative. They say it ‘had to have occurred in 36 CE” for reasons which are quite easily disproved. The truth is that there can only be one date possible for this event which is the Samaritan Passover of 37 CE. It we know for certain that it fell in late March that year, likely a few days before the Jewish date of March 21st. In my mind Agrippa’s announcement (Flaccus ) that his release out of a Jerusalem prison signaled the first sign of Caligula’s ascension (March 28th) makes it at least possible that he was one of the one’s arrested at that gathering mentioned in Antiquities 18:3. There are several circumstantial bits of evidence we should consider including the interesting fact that he is later crowned as “king of Samaria.”

For the moment however I am content to merely demonstrate that the existing narrative of Josephus is unmistakably corrupt. A later editor doesn’t want the readers to know that this Agrippa – the eight year old Marcus Julius Agrippa – is the one who was placed in prison and ‘miraculously’ released. In other words, there can be no mistake now that the Samaritan messianic narrative frame the context which for Agrippa’s imprisonment. This becomes obvious when we return again to our outline of the material which follows the section.

Remember that story about ‘little Agrippa’ being the one whom Vitellius gave the robes to? It appears immediately after the Pilate’s departure to Rome (March 25th?) “Vitellius sent Marcellus … to take care of the affairs of Judea.” Yet who is this “little Mark” who has never appeared in the narrative before? The text now says that he was just “a friend of his” but this is likely an editor’s gloss. In my mind there is good reason to suppose that he might well be the nine year old Marcus Agrippa who ultimately receives this post from Caligula a few months later.

For the moment however we need only note that just as chapter 15 connected “little Agrippa” with Vitellius and the high priests robes almost the very next line in the narrative deals with this very issue. We read that:

Vitellius came into Judea, and went up to Jerusalem; it was at the time of that festival which is called the Passover. Vitellius was there magnificently received, and released the inhabitants of Jerusalem from all the taxes upon the fruits that were bought and sold, and gave them leave to have the care of the high priest's vestments, with all their ornaments, and to have them under the custody of the priests in the temple, which power they used to have formerly, although at this time they were laid up in the tower of Antonia

What follows is almost an exact retelling of the information which appears three chapters earlier only now without specific mention of “little Agrippa.”
Clearly the editor doesn’t want us to see that Agrippa received the robes of the high priest because we will immediately release that he was an eight year old boy. In order to perpetuate the false story of ‘Agrippa I” the text has to obscure Josephus’ original chronological account.

To this end immediately following the repeat of historical information from chapter fifteen we read Josephus write that:

Vitellius put those garments into our own power, as in the days of our forefathers, and ordered the captain of the guard not to trouble himself to inquire where they were laid, or when they were to be used; and this he did as an act of kindness, to oblige the nation to him. Besides which, he also deprived Joseph, who was also called Caiaphas, of the high priesthood, and appointed Jonathan the son of Ananus, the former high priest, to succeed him. After which, he took his journey back to Antioch.
This particular line “after which [Vitellius] took his journey back to Antioch” is absolutely critical to make sense of the adultery which took place to the original text. This because immediately after these words “Josephus” is made to go back in time and tell stories about things Tiberius supposedly instructed Vitellius to do in previous years. Once again we must remind the readers that the exact timing of Pilate’s dismissal was the Passover of 37 CE. The reason the text ‘goes back’ to previous years is a later development.

So it is that we read in the surviving text:

After which, he took his journey back to Antioch. Moreover, Tiberius sent a letter to Vitellius, and commanded him to make a league of friendship with Artabanus, the king of Parthia …

Now the details which follow all come from things which the Roman historian Tacitus make clear occurred in 34 CE. Vitellius went to dictate the terms of peace with the king of Parthia over the issue of the ruler of Armenia. There is no doubt about this. This is followed by a series of stories which also can be framed in 34 CE including:

• death of Philip identified as 34 CE (Chapter Four)
• Herod’s war with Aretas the Arab king (Chapter Five)
• recollection of John the Baptist (who died c. 34 CE) (Chapter Five)
• more on Herod’s war with Aretas (Chapter Five)

There can be no doubt about any of these dates. They certainly can’t be understood to have occurred in the four week period that it took Pilate to sail to Rome!

Why does the text ‘jump back’ to 34 CE? The editor doesn’t want our eyes to fixate on that last chronological reference to Vitellius being said to have taken “his journey back to Antioch” in Chapter Four. If we go to the end of the sections just mentioned we find a parallel statement that after Vitellius defeated Aretas the Arabian king in battle it is said now that:

he ordered the army to march along the great plain, while he himself, with Herod the tetrarch and his friends, went up to Jerusalem to offer sacrifice to God, an ancient festival of the Jews being then just approaching; and when he had been there, and been honorably entertained by the multitude of the Jews, he made a stay there for three days, within which time he deprived Jonathan of the high priesthood, and gave it to his brother Theophilus. But when on the fourth day letters came to him, which informed him of the death of Tiberius, he obliged the multitude to take an oath of fidelity to Caius; he also recalled his army, and made them every one go home, and take their winter quarters there, since, upon the devolution of the empire upon Caius, he had not the like authority of making this war which he had before. It was also reported, that when Aretas heard of the coming of Vitellius to fight him, he said, upon his consulting the diviners, that it was impossible that this army of Vitellius's could enter Petra; for that one of the rulers would die, either he that gave orders for the war, or he that was marching at the other's desire, in order to be subservient to his will, or else he against whom this army is prepared. So Vitellius truly retired to Antioch [emphasis mine]

I know what scholars have been trained to think here. They tell us that Pilate leaves for Rome and then all this other stuff happened including a war with a foreign king and then suddenly - wham! – he gets the news that Tiberius has died. Yet this simply doesn’t make sense. The Christian editor has been casting sand in our eyes for two thousand years.

The Samaritan messianic gathering had to have happened on a religious holiday. It is unimaginable that they would have gotten together on just any day of the week. In order for them to have acknowledged someone as ‘the one predicted by Moses’ in this way we have to imagine a religious holiday on which they assembled and one which is also naturally close enough to Tiberius’ death that Pilate could have left thinking Tiberius’ was still the ruler only to arrive four weeks later and discover otherwise.

The only holiday which fits the bill here is the Samaritan Passover of 37 CE. If it was Sukkoth of 36 CE the month would be September and Pilate would have to be imagined to be riding a donkey through Asia Minor in order to arrive sometime after March 26th 37 CE! Thus once we accept March 37 CE it becomes utterly impossible to believe that any of the material which makes its way into the existing text was actually there originally. A Christian editor added it in order to obscure Marcus Agrippa’s presence.

Just look at what happens when you remove all the stuff which actually happened in 34 CE from the narrative. We jump from Antiquities Book 18 chapter 4 line which reads:
So Vitellius sent Marcellus, a friend of his, to take care of the affairs of Judea, and ordered Pilate to go to Rome, to answer before the emperor to the accusations of the Jews.

We read the story about Vitellius coming to Jerusalem as the Passover week was still taking place when he gave the high priest garments back to the Jewish people which concludes with the words:

he also deprived Joseph, who was also called Caiaphas, of the high priesthood, and appointed Jonathan the son of Ananus, the former high priest, to succeed him. After which, he took his journey back to Antioch.
Then when we get rid of all these recycled details from 34 CE falsely claimed to have happened in 37 CE we read:

So Vitellius truly retired to Antioch; but Agrippa, the son of Aristobulus, went up to Rome

There can be no doubt now why the editor has perpetrated this greatest fraud in history. He doesn’t want us to take for granted that ‘Agrippa’ was here in Jerusalem (as it is claimed in Philo’s Embassy to Gaius) rather than imprisoned in Rome (as is later claimed in the counterfeit text of Josephus).

I take the ‘second return’ of Vitellius to Antioch as especially suspicious. The use of the emphasizing word ‘truly’ strikes me as a little like the liar who always says ‘honestly’ whenever he is lying. There must have been well known in the period that the Christian editor manipulated the text that Agrippa was here liberated from prison and was now heading to Rome to ultimately receive his kingdom from Caligula. Yet the piling on of layer after layer of what amounts to being literary ‘garbage’ serves only to obscure that realization.

Indeed the problem actually goes well beyond this issue. If we go back to the story in Book Fifteen which we cited earlier here there is no doubt how corrupt the narrative is. I will cite the whole section as it appears now:

Now on the north side [of the temple] was built a citadel, whose walls were square, and strong, and of extraordinary firmness. This citadel was built by the kings of the Asamonean race, who were also high priests before Herod, and they called it the Tower, in which were reposited the vestments of the high priest, which the high priest only put on at the time when he was to offer sacrifice. These vestments king Herod kept in that place; and after his death they were under the power of the Romans, until the time of Tiberius Caesar; under whose reign Vitellius, the president of Syria, when he once came to Jerusalem, and had been most magnificently received by the multitude, he had a mind to make them some requital for the kindness they had shewn him; so, upon their petition to have those holy vestments in their own power, he wrote about them to Tiberius Caesar, who granted his request: and this their power over the sacerdotal vestments continued with the Jews till the death of king Agrippa; but after that, Cassius Longinus, who was president of Syria, and Cuspius Fadus, who was procurator of Judea, enjoined the Jews to reposit those vestments in the tower of Antonia, for that they ought to have them in their power, as they formerly had. However, the Jews sent ambassadors to Claudius Caesar, to intercede with him for them; upon whose coming, king Agrippa, junior, being then at Rome, asked for and obtained the power over them from the emperor, who gave command to Vitellius, who was then commander in Syria, to give it them accordingly.

The typical approach of the scholar is to see repeated mention of something in the text and simply go along with what is written. For some reason they are reluctant or unable to actually calculate the Passover of the Jews in relation to the death of Tiberius in order to see how corrupt the material here actually is.

Tacitus makes clear that Vitellius left for Armenia at the end of 34 CE. He was almost exclusively involved with affairs of this region during the summers of 35 and 36 CE. He arrived back in Syria in the fall of 36 CE and a few months later found himself engaged in cleaning up the mess from Pilate’s Samaritan Passover debacle. It is simply impossible that Vitellius managed to send Tiberius a letter which answered his question regarding what to do with the high priest robes after attending the Jewish Passover that year. Tiberius was at the latest assassinated March 26th, 37 CE. The Jewish Passover March 21st, 37 CE. Tiberius could not have responded to this letter.

Thus it is my belief that the whole business about the holy garments being given to Agrippa Jr. during the reign of Caligula’s successor Claudius is false. It deliberately avoids the obvious idea that which follows from our reconstruction of the text that Agrippa simply went to Rome and got Caligula to let him take possession of the garments that year. Indeed the reader needn’t think that my claims for a deliberate transfer of material dealing with Agrippa from Caligula to Claudius is without precedent. Schwartz actually makes the case for us over a stretch of three or four pages in his work.

Schwartz acknowledges to his readers that it might seem outlandish at first but he can’t accept the existing narrative in Josephus about things which supposedly occurred to Agrippa I at the beginning of his reign. He notes that the section begins with a statement that Claudius sent Agrippa “to take up his kingdom” and in what followed he notes Agrippa “thereupon took part in the Temple cult, regulated the affairs of the high priesthood and certain tax in Jerusalem and appointed a commander in chief for his army.”

As Schwartz goes on to note “the second purportedly refers to the year 41 CE … however it seems that serious considerations indicate that Josephus erred and that this section is really from [the original narrative dealing with] … Agrippa’s inheritance of Philip’s territory and describes his return to Palestine in 38 CE.” Indeed I would counter that the two accounts can be brought together in another way entirely. makes clear that in 38 CE Agrippa received from Caligula all that was formerly held by his grandfather Herod the Great. In other words, even the claim that Judea and Samaria fell under his control only in 41 CE has been deliberately disconnected from his miraculous good fortune under Caligula.

The point now clearly is that the definitive work on the figure of Agrippa I acknowledges that ‘things were moved around’ in his story. Schwartz figures that many of the details of Agrippa’s authority over the religious institutions of Judea have been conveniently removed away from association with Caligula. He points to the fact that “in both cases the emperor sent Agrippa back to Palestine to organize his new kingdom” and offers up the following “considerations” to prove that a “confusion” occurred on the part of Josephus including:

1) Josephus places the hanging up of the chains which formerly bound Agrippa in prison to the Claudian period. He spends “two paragraphs [to] explain that the dedication was meant to memorialize Agrippa’s release from prison and rise from the depths to the royal heights.” As Schwartz notes it doesn’t make sense why Agrippa would wait until 41 CE as the text now claims. Yet beyond this Caligula had just tried to destroy the temple a few months earlier. Indeed as he notes “dedicating a gift from Caligula [at this time] and one from Beelzebub would in popular estimation have stood on a par.”
2) While the Christianized texts of Josephus say that Agrippa appointed a certain Simon as high priest in Claudius reign the rabbinic tradition says it was done during the reign of Caligula.
3) His appointment of Silas as his military commander is placed under Claudius but is better suited for the previous reign of Caligula.
4) There was no Roman governor in Judea during Caligula’s reign which makes it all the more likely that “Agrippa would have been entrusted with some authority with regard to the Holy City and the Temple.”
5) The name “Claudius” does not appear anywhere in the main body of the narrative outside of the introductory sentence which connects the events to his reign. All the details are attributed simply to “Caesar.”

Now the underlying question which is never answered by Schwartz is why someone would have done this. Why would the existing text of Josephus deliberately misrepresent these details? Schwartz in my mind cops out by claiming that it was all a misunderstanding on Josephus’ part. It couldn’t have been a misunderstanding. He was living under the authority of a man scholar’s claim was the son of this man. Surely he would have known critical details which stemmed from his miraculous release from prison. Yet then again this is the very point. The real Josephus of history like all the Jews ever since his time knew that there was only one Agrippa – Marcus Julius Agrippa – and so his text wouldn’t just have said that after the details of the Samaritan Passover debacle “Vitellius retired to Antioch; but Agrippa, the son of Aristobulus, went up to Rome.” As we read at the end of the narrative in chapter fifteen the idea would also have been present that “upon whose coming, king Agrippa, junior, being then at Rome, asked for and obtained the power over them from the emperor, who gave command to Vitellius, who was then commander in Syria, to give it them accordingly.”