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The Jewish landowners and Levites who prospered by dipping into the river of taxes that  flowed from  the peasants to  Rome all favored the rule of Herod Antipas, as Antipatros was called. As the fame of Yohanan grew some  came out to see  his baptism and the healings by his new  disciple. When Yohanan saw the Jewish elite who favored Herod he called  them the get of  vipers, and asked, "Who warned you to flee from the wrath of God?"

One of them said in  reply, "Certainly the blameless  under the law do nothing worthy of repentance."

Yohanan replied, "It  does not  make a  man good  if he  merely refrains from  doing evil. Every  tree which does not  bear good fruit shall soon meet the tree feller."

"Save your admonitions for the foreigners of Galilee," said the Herodian. "We are the children of the Covenant."

Yohanan picked up  two stones  as though  to cast  missiles and said, "Blood alone cannot recommend you to God. The Most High is able of these stones  to raise up  the descendants  he promised Abraham! You load the people with burdens too heavy to bear, but you  yourselves refuse  to carry  even a  light load.  You erect memorials for the very prophets  your fathers killed! I tell you truly,  God has  demanded an  accounting  for the  blood of  the prophets you have shed."

The Herodians advanced to seize  Yohanan, but they saw  how his disciples came to defend  him, stout fellows  all of  them, and some of the mob who had come to hear his preaching began to pick up stones of their own. So they withdrew for a time.

The crowds who  came to  the baptism  of Yohanan  waxed greatly after word   of  Yeshua's  healings  spread   through  Galilee. Yohanan's disciple  Andreia  spoke  to his  brother  Shimon,  a boatman  who  caught fish  on  Lake  Kinneret  to be  dried  and preserved by salt in the city of Magdala. For a time Shimon left his boat in the hands of the  men who worked under  him that he might join his brother and become a disciple like his brother.

Yohanan walked with his growing  retinue of eight  disciples to the capital city  of Tiberias, newly built on  Lake Kinneret. He said, "If a man marries his brother's wife he has dishonored his brother with impurity. They shall be childless."

Herod Antipas heard of this, and knew  Yohanan was deliberately antagonizing him, since he had married Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip, after she had divorced her husband.