And when he would have put him to death, he feared the multitude, because they counted him as a prophet.
All Commentaries on Matthew 14:5 Go To Matthew 14
Jerome
AD 420
One of the Ecclesiastical interpreters asks what caused Herod to think that John was risen from the dead; as though we had to account for the errors of analien, or as though the heresy of metempsychosis was at all supported by this place—a heresy which teaches that souls pass through various bodies after along period of years—for the Lord was thirty years old when John was beheaded.
The old history tells us that Philip the son of Herod the greater, the brother of this Herod, had taken to wife Herodias daughter of Aretas, king of the Arabs; and that he, the father-in-law, having afterwards cause of quarrel with his son-in-law, took away his daughter, and to grieve her husband gave her in marriage to his enemy Herod.He preferred to endanger himself with the King, than to be forgetful of the commandments of God in commending himself to him.
He feared a disturbance among the people for John’s sake, for he knew that multitudes had been baptized by him in Jordan; but he was overcome by love of his wife, which had already made him neglect the commands of God.
