Herod Kills James

Herod Kills James
Acts 12.1-5

What makes a monarch act violently towards his subjects?

That question presses upon us at this point in Acts, because up to now we have heard nothing of Herod in this book. Parallels from other places, and other periods of history, may or may not be instructive. Everybody knows (in England, at least) about Henry VIII and his attack on the monasteries; most people think he was using public discontent at the increasing arrogance of the church as an excuse to get his hands on a large amount of valuable land. But he wanted stability in his realm, and he saw the early English Reformers as undermining it; so he went after them as well. English church history has tended to look back to Mary’s reign, later in the sixteenth century, as the time when so many reforming church leaders were burnt at the stake. But it was Henry, ten or more years before, who had begun the process. Coming nearer to our own day, the threat from Scotland of a Jacobite rebellion in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was enough to provoke massive and brutal reprisals from the kings of the time. There are, sadly, plenty of more modern examples of the same phenomena around the world...

Taken from Acts for Everyone Part 1 by Tom Wright