Herod(s)

There's almost a surfeit of Herods in the story of Jesus.

The Biblical tale locates Christ's birth during the reign of Herod the Great, who ruled over all of Israel at the time.

This aspect of the timeline is extremely awkward for Luke's Christmas story, which features Romans and a census operation which in turn requires Joseph, supposedly a descendant of King David, to hurry back to Bethlehem (his own and David's hometown) along with his pregnant wife, in order to be counted — at a moment rather like Easter here, where everybody shows up simultaneously and there are not enough hotel rooms to go around.

Some elite liberals are inclined to characterise this extremely inconvenient situation as akin to being 'a refugee'. But as the devout Catholic author GK Chesterton (OP) once remarked: 'An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.'

Anyway, it is fairly safe to assume that during the time of the ministry and 'rebellion' of Jesus, Herod's son Herod Antipas was the relevant Jewish ruler, but not in Nazareth in Lower Galilee up north, then a fairly mixed society of Jews and Greeks, where the 'Nazarene' was most likely actually born.

By this time the Romans had assumed direct control of a significant part of Judea and so were in a position to start with their census nonsense, but it is very unlikely that they would have needed everyone to suddenly rush back en masse to their birthplaces in order to conduct one.

There's one more Herod for us to worry about: Herod Agrippa, a nephew, who had St Peter imprisoned and did away with the apostle James, aka Santiago, an important figure for the citizens of Antigua, believers or otherwise.

As a Gallilean, an area outside of direct Roman control, Jesus was not at first handed to Pilate after his arrest, but instead to the middle of the three above-mentioned Herods.

This one wanted his captive to perform miracles for him on demand and when this didn't happen, he decided to make the self-proclaimed Messiah a Roman problem, for the circumstances were more visibly and dangerously political than religious at this stage for the King and his subject community.

Right now getting the EFF out of here is exactly what Antigua's roughly 1.3m extra inhabitants — such is the annual population superabundance for the 7-week stretch of Lent and Holy Week — are accomplishing, albeit gradually.

Any foreign guests still lingering inside the Casa Santo Domingo who haven't yet done so are probably wishing that they had.