Acts 25:13

King Herod Agrippa II. and his Sister, the Queen Bernice, come down to Cæsarea to visit the new Roman Governor Festus, who tells the King about the strange Accusation hanging over Paul the Nazarene, 13-21.

Acts 25:13. And after certain days King Agrippa and Bernice came unto Cæsarea to salute Festus. King Herod Agrippa II., son of Herod Agrippa I., who died so miserably at the Cæsarea festival, A.D. 44-45 (see chap. Acts 12:21-23),and great-grandson of Herod the Great, was the last of that famous line of Idumean princes, vassals of Rome, who played so distinguished a part in the story of Israel during the last fifty years of the existence of the Jews as a separate nationality. This Agrippa II. was only seventeen years old when his father the king died in the sudden manner above described (Acts 12). The young prince was then at Rome, and was the intimate friend of the imperial family. Claudius, the emperor, had he not been dissuaded from his purpose by his freed men and counsellors, would have at once appointed him to the royal succession in Judæa; but it was urged that he was too young to guide the destinies of that stormy province. So Cuspius Fadius was sent out as Procurator instead; but in about four years, when the young Agrippa was twenty-one years old, Claudius bestowed on him the principality of Chalcis, just then vacant owing to the death of his uncle Herod, king of that territory. With Chalcis, Claudius entrusted the young Agrippa with the presidency of the Jerusalem temple, and the power of appointing at his pleasure the high priest. This was in A.D. 49, the eighth year of his (Claudius') reign. Later on, the emperor added to his friend's dominions the tetrarchy of Philip and Lysanias (see Luke 3:1), and conferred on him the coveted title of king. Agrippa II., then a powerful subject monarch, fixed his residence at Cæsarea Philippi, which he enlarged greatly and beautified, and subsequently called it, in honour of the reigning emperor, Neronias. Nero, on his accession, had also shown much favour to the young Jewish sovereign, and had added to his dominions the city of Tiberias and part of Galilee.

Justice has hardly been done to this ‘last of the Herods.' He had a difficult part to play in the stormy times which preceded the great catastrophe. He owed everything to Rome, and the reigning imperial family, and naturally was strongly attached to the Empire which had adopted him, and that family which seemed never weary of showing him kindness and consideration. This, should surely be taken into account when his Roman tastes and leanings are unfavourably criticised. Josephus writes much of him, and generally in a hostile spirit; for instance, he relates how, during the procuratorship of this very Festus, he had a long and serious quarrel with the Jews about his palace at Jerusalem. They alleged he had built it so high as to overlook the temple and sanctuary. The majority of the Jews, indeed, seemed to have looked upon him, though wrongfully, as a kind of spy set over them by the hated imperial government. But all through the bloody, terrible war which ended in the total collapse and ruin of the Jewish nationality, King Agrippa seems to have acted well and nobly, endeavouring constantly to act the part of a mediator between the Jews, bent on their own destruction, and the haughty Roman claims; at times even, in his longing to bring about a peace, he risked his life.

He died at an advanced age, having survived the fall of the city and the destruction of his nation a great many years, apparently in the third year of the Emperor Trajan, A.D. 99.

His beautiful sister Bernice, who accompanied him on this memorable visit to Cæsarea to salute the new Procurator Festus, when they met the prisoner Paul and listened to one of his marvellous ‘apologies' for Christianity and his own work, unfortunately has earned for herself a very different place in the gallery of historical portraits of the first age of our faith. Famous for her great beauty, and apparently her commanding talents, her history, even in that dissolute and wicked age, reads, to use the graphic words of Professor Plumptre, ‘like a terrible romance or a page from the chronicles of the Borgias.' Married at an early age to her uncle, Herod, king of Chalcis, she was left a widow comparatively young, and then came to reside with her brother, Agrippa II., whose career we have sketched above. By this period of her life she had already acquired a wide-spread evil reputation. Attracted by her beauty and wealth, Polemo, king of Cilicia, adopted the Jewish religion and made her his wife. But the princess soon deserted him, and again returned to her brother. It was after the dissolution of the second marriage of the wanton queen with Polemo that the visit to Cæsarea to salute Festus was made, on which occasion Paul made the famous defence before the brother and sister related in the next (26th) chapter of these ‘Acts,' A.D. 61-62. In the bitter quarrels which heralded the last terrible collision between the doomed Jewish nation and the Romans, Bernice played certainly a noble and heroic part, endeavouring, as did her brother King Agrippa II., to mediate between her countrymen and the Romans. On one occasion we read how, at the risk of her life, she stood barefoot and a suppliant before the tribunal of Festus the procurator, beseeching him to spare the rebel Jews.

During the last war, however, like her brother, she ranged herself on the Roman side. The Emperor Vespasian allowed himself to be much influenced by her persuasion and counsel, and grave suspicions were excited that a too close intimacy existed between the old emperor and the princess. But the strangest and most momentous page in her dark history was her connection and friendship with the son of Vespasian, the hero Titus, who brought Bernice with him to Rome, and is said to have promised to wed her, had not a storm of public indignation at the bare notion of such an alliance for the brilliant heir to the Empire induced him at the eleventh hour to dismiss her as Suetonius (Titus) pithily puts it: ‘Dimisit invitus invitam.'

The salutation of Festus here alluded to was no doubt a formal visit of congratulation from the Jewish prince (one of whose offices was the superintendence of the Jerusalem temple) to the new procurator of Judæa, under whose supreme authority Agrippa to a certain extent was placed. It was also important for the vassal kings to be on terms of intimacy and close friendship with the powerful Roman lieutenant commanding in the provinces of which they were nominally the sovereigns.