CHAPTER XVII. THE FIFTEENTH YEAR OF THE REIGN OF "Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cæsar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituræa and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias, the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the High Priests" (Luke iii. 1, 2). LONG period of thirty years has elapsed since the days when Herod the Great reigned over the Jews, and Cæsar Augustus commanded that all the world should be taxed, and Christ was born in Bethlehem. In entering upon the second part of his Gospel, St. Luke again fixes his chronology by enumerating the contemporary sovereigns. And this would be enough to enable the contemporaries of the Evangelist at once to synchronise his narrative with the general history of the times, and to recal to their minds the political condition of the countries in which the events of the narrative occurred. But we at this distance of time and place need some research and reflection in order to prepare our minds with this preliminary knowledge. In Chapter IV. we sketched the course of the history down to the tine of Herod the king, and the political condition of the country in the latter part of his reign. But in the interval of thirty years many important political changes had taken place, as the sentence which we have quoted from St. Luke is enough to indicate. These it will be necessary to explain, and to add a few notes on the religious condition of the people, in order to lay before the reader a sketch of the circumstances in which the public life of the Lord was lived. "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius." Tiberius succeeded Augustus eighteen years after the birth of Christ (A.D. 14), but made no change in the imperial policy towards the nations of the East, and has no personal connexion with the Gospel history. About four years after the nativity, the magnificent tyrant Herod died at Jericho in horrible suffering of body and mind. He left a will, by which, subject to its confirmation by Augustus, he named his son Archelaus to succeed him in the kingdom; but he diminished the extent of his dominion by severing from it Galilee and Perea, i.e., the country beyond Jordan, which he left under the name of a tetrarchy to Antipas; and erected Gaulonitis, Trachonitis, and Paneas into another tetrarchy in favour of Philip. The Herodian princes flocked to Rome "to receive their kingdoms and to return," while some went to plead against Archelaus and to say, "We do not wish to have this man to reign over us." In the end the Emperor confirmed the will of Herod, with the exception that he only allowed Archelaus to assume the title of Ethnarch, promising to give him the royal dignity hereafter if he should so reign as to prove himself worthy of it. The opposition offered to the sovereignty of Archelaus, and the distrust of him shown by Augustus even while giving effect to his father's disposition in his favour, were justified by the event. After nine years of misgovernment, the principal of his subjects sent a formal embassy to Rome to complain of his tyranny. They sustained their accusations before Augustus, and Archelaus was deposed and banished. Augustus did not replace Archelaus by another king, or add his dominions to those of one of his brothers, but included his government in the Province of Syria, and placed it under the immediate care of a Procurator. 1 1 The office of a Procurator, strictly speaking, was to act under the governor of a province, as chief of the revenue department; but sometimes, in a small territory contiguous to a larger Josephus says that "after the death of Herod and Archelaus the government became an aristocracy, and the high priests were entrusted with a dominion over the nation." The relations of Imperial Rome with the kingdoms of the East are well illustrated by the relations of Imperial England now with the kingdoms of India. The Procurator of Judea seems to have been imme diately appointed by and responsible to the Emperor. He represented the imperial authority. The Roman troops and garrisons were under his command. He only had the power of capital punishment. The taxes were farmed according to the financial system of the Roman Empire. The chief lessors were Roman Equites, who sublet special taxes or special localities to speculators, who again employed inferior agents in the actual collection. The system gave rise to much chicanery and oppression, and the Publicani were always an unpopular class. But in Judea the actual collectors of the taxes, who were mostly Jews, were specially hated as men who lent their services to the conqueror and made gain of the degradation and oppression of their own country. province, and dependent upon it, the Procurator was the head of the administration, and had full military and judicial authority,-being, however, responsible to the President of the province. The position of the Procurator of Judea partook more of the latter character, though with some special modifications. "Antiquities," XX., x. 10. 1 In other respects the Emperor allowed the administration to revert to something like its ancient condition before the Senate had conferred on Herod the title and authority of king. The ancient laws and customs were administered by the High Priest, assisted by the ancient council of the Sanhedrim, a council consisting of the chief priests,—that is, the heads of the twenty-four courses into which the priesthood was divided,—and others of the most influential men of the nation. If, as is probable, the ancient constitution was carried out, there were judges appointed in every town, with Scribes as their assessors, from whom there was an appeal to the Sanhedrim.1 The Sanhedrim appears to have exercised a considerable ecclesiastical authority over Jews beyond the limits of its civil jurisdiction. The Procurator usually resided at the new city of Cæsarea, which Herod had built on the sea coast, and thus maintained his communications with Italy. A strong Roman garrison in the Castle of Antonia held possession of Jerusalem. At the great feasts, when Jerusalem was crowded by a vast multitude of Jews, filled with religious and patriotic fervour, the Governor was accustomed to go up with a reinforcement of troops as a precaution against any sudden fanatical outbreak, to which the Jewish temper was liable, and 1 Josephus, "Antiquities," IV., viii. 14. |