Mark 6:22 — Herodias’s Daughter or Herod’s Daughter Herodias?

“When the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod.” — Mark 6:22

The girl who dances at Herod’s birthday banquet is introduced differently across the manuscripts. The received text calls her “the daughter of Herodias herself.” The difficult critical reading can mean “his daughter Herodias,” making the girl Herod’s daughter and apparently naming her Herodias. Verse 24, however, has her ask “her mother,” and the mother is Herodias.

The difference turns on autēs (“herself/her”) and autou (“his”), forms easily confused in copying. An intermediate reading omits the pronoun and says simply “the daughter of Herodias.”

When difficulty creates history

Some editors prefer “his daughter Herodias” because it is hard. Scribes, they argue, corrected the sentence to match what they knew: Herodias had a daughter, traditionally identified as Salome, who was not Herod Antipas’s biological child. The received form would then be a historical repair.

Yet the critical form does more than surprise. It strains the narrative’s own immediate identification. If the girl herself were named Herodias, the next verse’s “her mother” must introduce another Herodias without clarification. If “his daughter” is taken loosely as stepdaughter, the possessive can be defended, but the proper-name construction remains awkward.

The received Greek is Semitic in shape: the pronoun anticipates and emphasizes the noun, “the daughter of Herodias herself.” A copyist unfamiliar with that redundancy could change feminine autēs to masculine autou, especially with Herod as the nearest male figure. The alteration then produced the puzzling name.

The easier form without either pronoun may represent a different repair. It removes the redundant grammar without creating Herod’s daughter Herodias. The existence of more than one simplification shows that the line troubled readers from early on.

Textual criticism should not reward nonsense merely because sense can be called correction. A genuinely difficult original reading can be right, but it still must function in its author’s sentence. Here the received wording fits verse 24, explains the unusual grammar, and has a credible route to the masculine pronoun.

Historical sources outside Mark can illuminate family relationships, but they should not become silent editors of the Gospel. Josephus’s information about Salome makes the received relation familiar; the internal wording of verses 22 and 24 already supplies the main case. External history is corroboration, not permission to discard an awkward Greek form merely because a modern reconstruction finds it inconvenient.

Herodias’s daughter therefore remains the best reading. The textual decision also keeps moral responsibility where Mark places it: the mother prompts the request for John’s head, the daughter carries it, and Herod yields because he fears his guests more than God.

Sources and further reading

• F. H. A. Scrivener, ed., The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version (Cambridge, 1894).
• Michael W. Holmes, ed., The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, 2010), text and apparatus.
• Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., notes on the stated passage.
• Mark 6:17–29; Josephus, Antiquities 18.5.4.