The death of John the Baptist is narrated by the Synoptic Gospels and by the Jewish historian Josephus.

Both Gospel and extra-testamental accounts note the offensive adulterous union between Herod Antipas and his niece Herodias, and the fact of the daughter born of Herodias’ first marriage to Antipas’ half-brother Herod Philip.

Mark reports that the Baptist’s charge infuriates Herodias who finds an appropriate occasion for revenge on Herod’s birthday.

Josephus, instead, focuses on the political angle: Herod imprisoned and executed the Baptist because he feared a political uprising.

John’s proclamation of the unlawfulness of his marriage to Herodias could be interpreted as a call to insurrection from within his territory. He imprisoned John in Machaerus, a fortress in the Trans-Jordan, northeast of the Dead Sea.

In order to marry Herodias, Antipas repudiated his former wife, the daughter of Aretas IV, king of Nabatea.

In AD 36, the Nabatean hordes swept down on Antipas and administered a stinging defeat to his army. The people, Josephus says, interpreted it as an act of God avenging the murder of John the Baptist.

Speaking of Herod in a homily, Pope Francis said that at first, Herod “believed John was a prophet,” listened to him willingly and protected him to a certain extent but held him in prison. He was undecided because John reproached him for the sin of adultery.

The king heard God’s voice asking him to change his life, but he could not because he was corrupt, and it is very difficult to get out of corruption.

Herod could not come out of the tangle as he tried to make “diplomatic balances” between his adulterous life and many injustices and the awareness of the holiness of the prophet whom he decapitated (Homily, Feb. 8, 2019).