(Continued)
It has been suggested that John died as late as 32 CE,46 but that seems not to fit the case, or any accepted chronology of Jesus’ life. Indeed, the late dating of John’s death has caused Joan Taylor to imagine a radically revised chronology of Jesus’ death: John may have been killed as late as 33 or early in 34. For all we know, Jesus’ death may have followed quite soon after, or as late as 36.47
That view comes, however, of accepting Josephus’ association of the death of John with the tenure of Vitellius, when Josephus himself introduces the material about John as a flashback. That analeptic technique is as natural to Josephus as compressed narration is in the Gospels. Account of both needs to be taken in establishing the time of John’s death, which therefore need not be placed immediately before Antipas’ defeat, nor near the time of Jesus’ execution.
F. F. Bruce long ago warned about pressing Josephus’ presentation literally:
It may well be, as Josephus says, that some of Antipas’s subjects saw in this defeat the divine nemesis for Antipas’s execution of John the Baptist; but it is unimaginative to conclude that John’s execution must therefore have been much more recent than the Evangelists indicate. The Pharisees and many other Jews believed that the mills of God ground slowly; if divine nemesis could wait fifteen years before Pompey for violating the sanctity of the holies of holies in Jerusalem [here Bruce notes Psalms of Solomon 2:30f.), it is not extraordinary that it would have waited a mere seven years before taking vengeance for the death of John.
What I find interesting about this disagreement is that, in their opposition over whether to take the notice of time in Luke 3:1-3 as accurate, the lines of discussion represented by Taylor and Bruce nonetheless accept it as the terminus post quem. That seems to me odd, because that same reference to the fifteen year of Tiberius is also taken as the standard point of departure for Jesus’ public activity. Luke is evidently compressing, and the compression extends to conflating John and Jesus. What if we were to entertain the possibility of a Josephan chronology for John, and dispense with the Synoptic chronology?
Psalms of Solomon 2 (“Concerning Jerusalem”) is usually taken to refer to the siege of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 BC. The psalm begins:
When the sinner became proud, he struck down fortified walls
with a battering-ram,
and you [God] did not prevent him.
Foreign nations went up to your altar;
in pride they trampled it with their sandals,
because the sons of Ierousalem had defiled the sanctuary of the Lord,
had profaned the gifts of God with acts of lawlessness.
In particular, this particular psalm can be dated after 48 BC, since it refers to Pompey’s assassination in that year (2.22-30).
And I saw and entreated the face of the Lord and said:
Long enough, Lord, has your hand been heavy on Ierousalem
in bringing the nations upon her.
For they mocked and spared not, in wrath and fierce anger,
and they will be brought to an end,
unless you, Lord,
rebuke them in your wrath.
For it was not out of zeal that they acted,
but out of the desire of the soul,
so as to pour out their wrath upon us in plunder.
Do not delay, O God, to repay them on their heads,
to declare in dishonor the arrogance of the dragon.
And I did not wait long until God showed me his insolence,
pierced, on the mountains of Egypt,
more than the least despised on land and sea.
His body, carried about on the waves in great insolence,
and there was no one to bury,
for he had rejected him in dishonor.
He did not consider that he was a human,
Nor did he consider the hereafter.
He said, “I will be lord of earth and sea,”
And he did not recognize that God is great,
Mighty in his great strength.
He is king over the heavens,
also judging kings and authorities.
It is he who raises me up to glory
and puts the arrogant to sleep for
everlasting destruction in dishonor,
because they did not know him.
Note the words “He did not delay long.” Apparently, for the author of this psalm, the period of
fifteen years between the siege and the death of Pompey isn’t too long a wait. I might also note for comparison the early Christian idea that the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 was divine retribution for Jesus’ death around forty years earlier. In comparison to these two examples, supposed divine vindication for John’s execution actually came pretty swiftly.**
So far you just keep telling me to buy his books: it’d be fine if I had money, but I’m currently a college student who can’t always eat a decent lunch because I’m short on cash - I can’t even buy books like I used to.
Or well, you can just imagine that I’m really an obese, balding, unemployed forty-year old living in a basement somewhere in my underpants. Your mental image will probably be worlds more handsome than what I actually look. 
