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Mat_14:10-11 f. Considering that it would require rather more than two days to return from Machaerus (see note on Mat_14:3), the fortress on the southern frontier between Peraea and the dominion of Aretas, to Tiberias (where Antipas was residing), Fritzsche thinks that it is out of the question to suppose that the head can have been actually delivered at the feast; comp. Lightfoot. But this circumstance, helping as it does to lend a tragic air to the whole proceeding, is just one which the reader naturally takes for granted, and one which is found to be necessary in order to give unity and completeness to the scene (Strauss, I. p. 397); so that, with Maldonatus, Grotius, Baumgarten-Crusius, Gerlach, Keim, we must suppose the festival to have taken place in Machaerus, and not in Tiberias. Not even Wieseler’s view, that the feast was held in Julias in Peraea, and that the head was brought thither by messengers travelling post-haste, can be said to be in sufficient accord with the tragic scenery of the simple narrative. The account in Mark (Mat_6:25, ἐξαυτῆς ; Mat_14:27, ἐνεχθῆναι ) is unfavourable to such a view, as is also the ὧδε in Mat_14:8 and Mat_14:11, which plainly implies that the thing was done there and then.
ἐν τῇ φυλακῇ ] therefore in private by the hand of an assassin. “Trucidatur vir sanctus ne judiciorum quidem ordine servato; nam sontes populo omni inspectanti plecti lex Mosis jubet,” Grotius.
καὶ ἐδόθη τ . κ . καὶ ἤνεγκε τ . μ . ἀ .] the horrible scene in a few simple words.
Mat_14:12. The disciples, to be near their master, had remained somewhere in the neighbourhood of the prison, probably in the town of Machaerus itself. For πτῶμα , a corpse, see Phrynichus, ed. Lobeck, p. 375.