The answer is No... and Yes.
But first we need to know more about Livia Julia, Herod Philip, and what year it is. |
The Sea of Galilee seen from Bethsaida.
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Livia Drusilla Julia Augustus
That's a mouthful for a name, and there's a complex story of how she got it. Her birth name was Livia and her father was Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, a senator of the Roman Republic in the first century BC. "Drusilla" is a diminutive for Drusus. She was born about 58 BC, and was married about 43 BC to Tiberius Claudius Nero, her cousin of patrician status who was fighting alongside Julius Caesar and Mark Antony against Octavian. In 42 BC she gave birth to the future emperor Tiberius and then a second son. But she ended up on the wrong side of that war when Octavian prevailed as part of the new Triumvirate ruling Rome, and she fled with her family to Sicily.
When peace came and an amnesty was declared, Livia returned to Rome with her first son (pregnant with her second), and was personally introduced to Octavian in 39 BC. Legend has it that Octavian fell instantly in love with her, despite the fact that both he and Livia were already married. He immediately divorced his pregnant wife and persuaded or forced Livia's husband to divorce her. Within days, he married Livia, with her ex-husband giving her in marriage as if he were her father. (Important political liaisons between patrician families may be a more rational explanation for these actions.)
The rest of the Triumvirate fell away, and Octavian was left as sole emperor. He took for himself the honor-title of Augustus. Livia and Augustus remained married for the next 51 years. However, they had no children of their own, which caused a problem in accession to the Roman throne. Augustus solved that by adopting Livia's two sons, making them successors to power in Rome. Augustus died in AD 14 and was made a god by the senate. In his will, Augustus adopted Livia into the Julian family and gave her the honor-title of Augusta. Thus her new name became Julia Augusta.
Julia was portrayed as a woman of proud and queenly attributes, faithful and skillful as consort, mother, and later widow and dowager. She was a prime recipient of the emperor-adulation cultivated by Augustus, and became the idealization of Roman feminine qualities and eventually a goddess-like representation of virtue. She was the first woman to appear on Roman coins, and her coins may be dated by her hairstyles, which kept up with the times. She didn't wear excess jewelry or pretentious costumes, took care of the household and her husband (even to the extent of making his clothes), faithful and dedicated. In 35 BC Augustus gave her the honor of ruling her own finances and dedicated a public statue to her. She had her own protégés and clients that she pushed into political office, including the grandfathers of two later emperors. She was truly the "First Lady" of Rome, and an advisor to her emperor-husband.
At Augustus' death her son Tiberius became Emperor and before too long Julia became known as the power behind the throne. At first she and her son got along well. In AD 24 Tiberius granted his mother a theater seat among the Vestal Virgins. She exercised unofficial but very real power in Rome. Eventually Tiberius became resentful of his mother's political status, particularly the idea that his mother had given him the throne. Ancient historians say that Tiberius retired to the island of Capri because he could no longer endure his mother.
Julia died in AD 29 amid the scandal of her disaffection with her son. But later her honor was restored, and she was deified as The Divine Augusta. A statue of her was set up in the Temple of Augustus, races were held in her honor, and women were to invoke her name in their sacred oaths.
Herod Antipas and Herod Philip
Philip was one of the sons of Herod the Great. Most of Herod's family were sent to Rome for their education and for learning the ways and political habits of the Romans. Two of his sons came to special prominence: Herod Antipas and Herod Philip, both of whom came into power about 4 BC at the death of their father.
Herod Antipas is the biblical Herod that interacted with Jesus and with John the Baptist. He was the tetrarch (ruler of a quarter) of Galilee on the west bank of the Sea of Galilee, and Perea on the east bank of the Dead Sea. He ruled for about 42 years.
Antipas' most noted construction was a capital city for Galilee, on the shore of its sea. He named it Tiberias to honor his patron Tiberius, who succeeded as emperor of Rome in 14 AD. Warm bathing springs were nearby, and the city included a stadium, palace, and prayer sanctuary. However, Jews at first refused to live in it because it was built over an ancient graveyard, and Antipas had to bring in foreigners, forced migrants, poor people, and freed slaves to populate it. The city lent its name to the adjoining lake, and for centuries maps showed the Lake of Tiberias rather than the Sea of Galilee.
Herod Philip is mentioned in the Bible only at Luke 3:4. There he is identified as the tetrarch of Iturea and Trachonitis, which lay to the north and east of the Sea of Galilee and included the fishing town of Bethsaida. He never used the family title "Herod" to refer to himself. About AD 34 he married Salomé, the famous dancing girl involved in the death of John the Baptist, and he died before AD 37.
Philip's most noted construction was his Greek-style modernization of Caesarea Philippi, to which he gave his own name so as to differentiate if from Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast. In AD 30 he renamed Bethsaida to Julias, in honor of the mother of Emperor Tiberius, and gave it the title of a Roman polis. There he had begun Greek-style modernization with the building of a stadium and other structures. Some Christian reference materials say that he named it Julias in honor of a certain daughter of Augustus, but this is incorrect. It is also said that he used the name Julias to curry favor with Rome, which is possible. But we must also remember that Philip was educated in Rome during the reign of Augustus with his consort Julia and he may well have been impressed with that particularly formidable woman.
Bethsaida: What Year Is This, Anyway?
Now we are armed with enough background material to tackle the question at hand: was Bethsaida a sleepy little Jewish fishing town with a synagogue, or a bustling Greek-style city with a pagan temple?
Bethsaida was home to five apostles—far more than any other
New Testament town. And it was the target of Jesus’ “Woe” saying in which he
lashes out at Bethsaida and two other towns for their failure to repent (Matthew
11:21). But where was Bethsaida?
Archeologists conducted digs at three mounds near the Galilee’s
northern shore. Only one had ruins old enough to be biblical Bethsaida. The
State of Israel and many scholars accepted this identification, though some
controversy lingers, for the mound lies a mile from the shoreline. But here they uncovered a fisherman’s house that was used in Jesus’s day. They also unearthed the walls of a 20- by 65-foot building. Was it a synagogue? To judge by other finds, Bethsaida was a majority Jewish town. But this structure had no benches or other hallmarks of an early synagogue.
Instead, the archaeologists discovered evidence of pagan worship: bronze incense shovels like those found in Roman temples and votive objects in the shape of boat anchors and grape clusters. Also they found terra-cotta figurines of a woman who resembled Julia, the wife of the Roman Emperor Augustus and mother of Tiberius, who came to the throne in the year AD 14.
It didn’t make sense. The Romans did regard their rulers as
both human and divine, worshiping them as deities. But Herod the Great and his
son Antipas didn’t build pagan structures in Judea or Galilee, and they kept
their faces off the local coins.
However, Bethsaida lay northeast of the Galilee border in a
region that was home to gentile villages and ruled by another of Herod’s sons,
Philip, the only Jew of that time to put his face on a coin. In the year 30
Philip dedicated Bethsaida to Julia, who had died the year before. Did he build a pagan temple to the emperor’s mother? Jews lived here. Did their ruler Philip, himself a Jew, erect a temple to a Roman goddess in their very midst? And did he do so in the same period when Jesus was visiting Bethsaida? A writer for Smithsonian thinks that was possible (see link below). Did some of the fishermen—such as Peter, Andrew, Philip, James and John—look at that pagan temple and say, “Enough!”? Did Jesus come along, offering what looked like a clearer path back to God?
There is a slight timing problem with this thinking: Jesus’
ministry most likely took place in the three or four years before AD 30, and John the Baptist had already been killed by then.
I find it unlikely that Philip would have built this temple before dedicating
the town to Julia. But even without the temple, it might be possible that
adulation of the exemplary character of Julia had spread this far from Rome
many years before Jesus began his ministry.
In any case, the infusion of pagan culture into Jewish
territory was a distinct problem for the time of the disciples, and while
sleepy little Nazareth was off by itself, some six miles from a major pagan town,
Bethsaida was at the bulls-eye of a planned city where pagans would be moving in
next door to Jewish fishermen.
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