Herodias’ Role in John’s Death

Although Matthew and Mark involve Herodias directly in John’s beheading, Josephus attributes John’s death to Antipas’ fear of John’s popularity (Josephus, Antiquities, 18.118; the Old Slavonic translation of Josephus contains an interpolation after Jewish War 2.168 in which John criticizes Antipas’ marriage to Herodias). Brown notes that the entire story of Salome dancing before Herod “may well be a popular story,” questioning whether a Herodian princess would dance in the way the Gospels describe it (Brown, Introduction to the New Testament, 135–36, n. 23). Gillman, however, argues strongly in favor of the historicity of the detailed narrative in Mark, which was later subject to “Matthew’s truncation and Luke’s squelching,” on the basis that “it was apparently hard or undesirable for Matthew and Luke to let Herodian women be their determined selves on the pages of their gospel texts” (Gillman, Herodias, 77; 33–102).