Abstract
According to Josephus, the townspeople of Caesarea and Sebaste celebrated the death of Herod Agrippa (44 CE) with displays of hostility and mockery against both Agrippa and his young daughters. Soldiers set up statues of Agrippa’s daughters on the roofs of brothels and offered them ‘every possible kind of insult, doing things too indecent to be reported’ (Ant. 19. 358). This paper explores the mocking of Agrippa with attention to two significant lacunae, and a possible third lacuna to which the incident might point. The first lacuna arises in the Josephus description, and is explicitly indicated in the statement that some of the actions were ‘too indecent to be reported’. To explore this further, I discuss the tradition reported by Lucian of Samosata that a young man had sexual intercourse with the famous statue of Aphrodite of Knidos. I also note the words of Photius, the ninth century ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, who includes the passage from Josephus in his Bibliotecha (Cod. 238). Photius suggests that it was not the statues but the daughters themselves who were abused. A second lacuna is apparent in the relative neglect of this passage in New Testament studies. Why does the mockery that followed the death of King Agrippa, not receive more attention for understanding the mocking of Jesus as ‘King of the Jesus’? How might these two mockings (c. 33 CE and 44 CE) be read alongside each in mutually illuminating ways? Might the lacuna that is explicit in Agrippa’s death point to a possible lacuna—the third lacuna considered in the paper —that covers insults too indecent to be reported in the mocking of Jesus? This part of the paper draws on Tombs, The Crucifixion of Jesus (2023) to suggest more attention needs to be given to how the mockery of Jesus in the praetorium is narrated in Mark 15:15-20 and Matthew 27:26-31, and the violence that might be hidden by a lacuna in the text.