Lysanias - Possible Identity of The Two Figures

Possible Identity of The Two Figures

The reference to Lysanias in Luke 3:1, dated to the fifteenth year of Tiberius, has caused some debate over whether this Lysanias is the same person son of Ptolemy, or some different person.

Some say that the Lysanias whose tetrarchy was given to Agrippa cannot be the Lysanias executed by Antony, since his paternal inheritance, even allowing for some curtailment by Pompey, must have been of far greater extent. Therefore the Lysanias in Luke (AD 28-29) is a younger Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene only, one of the districts into which the original kingdom was split up after the death of Lysanias I. This younger Lysanias may have been a son of the latter, and identical with, or the father of, the Claudian Lysanias.

But Josephus does not refer to a second Lysanias. It is therefore suggested by others that he really does refer to the original Lysanias, even though the latter died decades earlier. In BJ 2.215 Josephus refers to the realm as being "called the kingdom of Lysanias", while Ptolemy writing c. 120 AD in his Geography Bk 5 refers to Abila as "called of Lysanias"

The explanation given by M. Krenkel is that Josephus does not mean to imply that Abila was the only possession of Lysanias, and that he calls it the tetrarchy or kingdom of Lysanias because it was the last remnant of the domain of Lysanias which remained under direct Roman administration until the time of Agrippa.