Herod Agrippa Kills James and Dies at Caesarea

Herod Agrippa I was a grandson of Herod the Great (Josephus, Antiquities 19.274–275). The emperor Gaius made him king of the former tetrarchy of Philip, and Claudius, whom he had helped to the throne, gave him Judea and Samaria as well, so that from AD 41 he ruled the whole of his grandfather’s kingdom (Josephus, Antiquities 18.237) (Josephus, Antiquities 19.274–275) (Cassius Dio, Roman History 60.8.2). Josephus describes him as generous and mild, a king who liked to live in Jerusalem and kept the Jewish law carefully (Josephus, Antiquities 19.328–331). Acts calls him “King Herod” (Acts 12:1).

Acts says that he “stretched out his hands to oppress some of the assembly”. He had James Son of Zebedee, the brother of John and one of the Twelve, killed with the sword. Seeing that this pleased the people, he arrested Peter during the feast of Unleavened Bread and put him under a guard of sixteen soldiers, meaning to bring him out after the Passover (Acts 12:1–4).

On the night before he was to be brought out, Acts says, an angel woke Peter, who was sleeping in chains between two soldiers. The chains fell off, and the angel led him past the guards and through the iron gate, which opened by itself. Peter went to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where many were praying, sent word of his escape “to James, and to the brothers”, and left for another place. Herod had the guards executed (Acts 12:6–19).

The king then went down to Caesarea Maritima. In Acts, envoys from Tyre and Sidon had come to ask for peace. On an appointed day Herod, in royal robes, addressed them from his throne, and the people shouted, “The voice of a god, and not of a man!” At once, Acts says, an angel of the Lord struck him, “because he didn’t give God the glory”, and he was eaten by worms and died (Acts 12:19–23). Josephus, writing some fifty years after the event, tells it this way. At a festival in Caesarea in honour of the emperor, he says, Agrippa entered the theatre at dawn in a robe woven of silver, which blazed in the sun. His flatterers hailed him as a god, and he did not rebuke them. Then he saw an owl perched above him, took it for an omen, and was seized by violent pain in the belly. He was carried to the palace and died five days later, in his fifty-fourth year (Josephus, Antiquities 19.343–350).

The two accounts agree on the place, on a public appearance in splendid dress, on an acclamation that the king did not refuse and on the suddenness of what followed, and both treat his death as a punishment. They differ on what the gathering was and on the manner of his end. Claudius then put the kingdom under a Roman procurator, Cuspius Fadus (Josephus, Antiquities 19.360–363). Acts reports the execution of no other member of the Twelve (Acts 12:2). The James to whom Peter sends word is a different man, usually identified as James the Just, the Lord’s brother, who appears from here on as the leading figure of the Jerusalem church (Acts 12:17) (Acts 15:13) (Galatians 1:19).