Kathie Lee Gifford Tells The Biblical Story Of Herod & Mary
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It's Live in the Bream with the host of Fox News Sunday, Shannon Bream. All right, welcoming back to Live in the Bream this week, somebody who is so, so dear. I love her. I know you love her. She's been on your TV screens and on the stage and screen and everywhere for so long. She feels like part of all of our families. And somehow she also finds time to be a bestselling author. Welcome back, Kathie Lee Gifford. You've got a brand new book.

Yeah, I've lost track. I think it's my 31st. I'm not sure.

Oh, my goodness. I don't even care. I don't even care anymore, Shannon, honestly. Well, the world cares. And we are excited that you are putting these things out because so much of what you've done, especially in recent years, has been so deep theologically, spiritually mixed with the beautiful music and movies that you've put together with this. And it's just so deep and so rich. So when I saw the new book that you have, Herod,

And Mary, the true story of the tyrant king and the mother of the risen savior. I was immediately fascinated because Herod is one of those characters that you've said he's kind of one of the best unknown stories of all time. And you uncovered some amazing things. How did you decide on this topic and tell us what you found out about him?

Okay, sweetheart. Yeah, I mean, once I started studying rabbinically in the Holy Land, meaning what the Old Testament really actually says and what the New Testament really actually says in their original source languages, you know, the Hebrew and the Greek, everything changed for me.

Everything is no longer your grandma's Sunday school. Not at all. And I realized that if Jesus is the greatest story ever told, that Herod is the greatest story never told. I could not believe what I learned about this man. Could not believe it. There are only several references to him in the New Testament. And we all know them that he was the so-called king of the Jews. He wasn't even a Jew.

He wasn't even a Jew. He was from, he was a Mutian, a Mutian, meaning basically he was from Jordan. He was not a Jew. So the Jews hated him. And then he had all of Rome to have to deal with. The Romans hated him. The Romans hated him. So he was, he had his work cut out for him, but he desperately wanted to be a beloved king. So all I'd ever heard was that he's, that's what is, you know, they called him the King Herod,

the king of the Jews, he was the one that the Magi went to searching for, the baby Jesus. They didn't know his name was Jesus, but this new king of the Jews that was being born, and the one that supposedly murdered the little children in Bethlehem. And that's really pretty much, and then these other Herods take over because Herod died.

This king of the Jews, Herod, died. So our story is what was the life of that man. And it's just beyond belief. When I learned what I learned about him, I came home and bought five books about him. I said, I have to make a movie. I'm going to call Mel Gibson and we're going to make a movie about Herod. Un-freaking-believable. This man, he was an incredible architect.

Certain things that he did, they didn't know for centuries and centuries and centuries how he did what he did. And then the other thing, I mean, he was just an amazing political animal. I mean, his contemporaries were Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cleopatra. Cleopatra tried to seduce him. And he said, well, I probably wouldn't go down very well with Mark Antony if I did that. So our story opens with him in his...

In Jericho, he had 11 different magnificent homes, palaces from the north of all of Israel all the way down to just a few feet away from Jordan. Basically, it was an escape route for him.

All of them were one day's journey from the next so that he could escape. Because he was constantly, constantly being, you know, chased. And he had so many enemies. He murdered almost every single person in his family. Murdered them. He murdered the only woman he ever loved, Miriamne. And on the days that he was dying in Jericho, he was losing his mind because of his...

You know, he was just completely in a loss. What can I tell you? The man was his genitals were were dropping off of him. Forgive me, but they were our book starts with his genitals blackened because of his, you know, sexual everything he did sexually, which was completely unlike a good Jew. Good Jews were pretty clean. You know, they have a whole huge thing about being clean. But they were they were I mean, maggots.

were hanging off of him, maggots and just blackened by disease. And he was crying out, going, Mary Omne, Mary Omne, because he murdered her. Only woman he ever loved murdering her.

And he murdered his son, murdered anybody that got in his way. Right. I mean, you talk about that in the book, and it's just fascinating to hear. I mean, you don't think you're going to get all these topics on here, and that's where the book's going to start.

But my goodness, do you think because he did feel unwelcome and pressured from so many sides where he wanted acceptance, like you said, he wanted this adulation of being a king that he just could not operate as somebody with some kind of heart would. I mean, he seemed like he was constantly he felt under threat. And that's why, in part, do you think that explains some of his behavior?

Oh, yes. Very, very much so. He desperately wanted to be loved and appreciated and a beloved king. And he was anything but. Everybody hated his guts, including his entire family. But he never gave up. And so our book starts basically at that point in his life, although we tell great detail. I co-wrote this book with a brilliant man. You can get

all the information on my website. And Brian Lipton, and he's, you know, PhDs out the wazoo. And we found, this is written as a thriller, which is so important to understand. I've never written a thriller before. This keeps you up till every chapter you're going, oh my gosh, what's going to happen next?

What is going to happen next? This is unbelievable. Well, what ultimately happens next is that we introduce Mary earlier on, Mary, the mother of Jesus. We introduce her, but she obviously never met Herod by any means. But the irony of this man coming to his demise, the end of his life, just as the mother of our Savior, the Messiah, is giving birth in Bethlehem.

giving birth and blessing him about just a short couple of minutes away from his place called Herodium, another one of his amazing, amazing palaces. And it just is all about how, you know, in our world today, Shannon, everybody says, do you think the world is more evil today than it was?

you know before and i don't know how you feel about it sweetie but you've written so many great books no evil has evil was there in the in uh the you know since the very beginning very beginning this you know the serpent was there evil has been there but the the joy of our book is that you know ancient evil always been there but living hope

So has the Lord Jesus. So has the God Almighty. So has, you know, our Savior. I believe that Jesus showed up many times before he actually was born as a child. That's a whole other discussion to have, but it's pretty extraordinary. I mean, Jesus was there at creation.

So why would he be here, you know, in other ways that he just expressed himself? Holy, holy God has been there since day one. Since day one when he created everything. So I just want to encourage people by reading this fascinating book on somebody they think they know. You don't know anything about Herod. It's like, I knew nothing. And this is going to be a series of books, we hope.

The next one is going to be about Nero and Paul. You know, good ancient people. So evil, Nero, what he did. But look what the Lord Jesus did with Paul. I mean, changing him from an evil, evil man set out to destroy all of the believers in

to obviously one of the greatest, greatest believers of all time. So it's just fascinating for me to be doing this kind of a thing at this point. We'll have more Live in the Bream in a moment. The Fox True Crime Podcast presents Crimes on Campus, sharing chilling stories of scandal, corruption, and murder. New episodes available every Tuesday this month. Listen and follow at foxtruecrime.com.

It's such a blessing to all of us because we need to take a deeper look. If you're not a person of faith, you're going to be fascinated by these stories. If you are a person of faith, you're going to learn new things through these stories, too. And I love the kind of the juxtaposition of Mary. We know she was a very young mother who obviously was under all kinds of threats and of danger.

And even though they didn't directly meet up and cross paths, I mean, she really was in a fight for her life at times, for the fight of the life of Jesus and preserving him and Joseph, you know, guiding them on this journey away from Herod's danger. I mean, this super evil, manipulative, murderous king and a young woman who was trying to live out God's perfect plan.

Yeah, it's just, you know, Jesus is the greatest story ever told. And you and I both believe that with all our hearts. This one about Herod is he's the greatest story never told.

And I have been just beyond fascinated with him since I read about him and learned about him. And we were at Herodium at the end of this tour I'm telling you about. And our teacher would throw his hat into the dust and go, Herod, Herod. And it would be echoed, echoed, echoed, echoed all over. You could see Bethlehem from there. Just moments away you could see it. And Herod, was it worth it? Was it worth it?

How many people in our lives today are living lives like that? And you want to ask them, was it worth it? What does it profit a man if he gained the whole world and loses his very soul? And people are fighting for...

For money, for power, for significance, for all of these things that in many ways, like if you, if you, when we talk about Herod, just he was motivated by this desperate need for acceptance and for dominance. And like you talk about, I mean, his own family is killing his own family members. Huh?

Hopefully people today that we're dealing with, not that, although I would agree someplace in the world, there are horrible things like that happening at any hour. But for many of us, it's a much more muted but very real problem that we still are struggling and striving after all of these things that are never going to bring us peace. I doubt Herod ever found peace. And at the same time, crowding out the one thing that might bring us peace.

He was just beyond brilliant, beyond brilliant. Everything that he accomplished, you know, you give the man his due for that. But at the same time, he was constantly being chased. He was always paranoid the next person was going to get him. That's why the chain of all the palaces, one day I can get one more day away, one more day away I can get back to Jordan, you know. And just fascinating. And the way he dealt with it was he just murdered people.

And tortured and did everything he could to get rid of every enemy that got in his way. And, of course, our Lord God protected Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus.

But just to juxtapose those two stories up against each other is so thrilling. I just want to encourage everybody that, yes, there is evil everywhere. There's indescribable evil. Look what happened on October 7th. Indescribable evil. But that doesn't mean that living hope isn't right there alongside. He is our living hope.

Our living hope. And we find joy and we find hope, faith, faith if we just can keep looking at him amidst all the evil, amidst it all. It's just a thrilling story. It's an unbelievable story that I hope people will find it interesting to read something different from me than all the kind of books that I've written in the past.

We are always coming up with something new. Always coming up with something new. And like you said, this is just going to be maybe the first installment in this group of books. Again, we're talking to Kathy Lee Gifford. The new book out July 16th is Herod and Mary, the true story of the tyrant king and the mother of the risen savior. I got to ask you, I know that you've had

deep studies and you talked about going to do these rabbinical studies and how it really does come alive when you're in the Holy Land, things that you've always known and experienced. There's something about kind of in your gut, in your spirit, in your soul about being there. So how did you choose these stories and how do you go about researching and finding all these new things you've discovered?

Well, I've got to give my son would be very upset with me, but it's Cody. My son got his master's degree at Oxford and he's brilliant, brilliant mind. And he said, Mom, why don't you take this this incredible interest that you have, this fascination you have with historical historical biblical context?

characters and write their story. Nobody knows about Herod. Nobody really knows about the ones that came afterwards. And they did. They just kept coming and coming and coming trying to destroy the kingdom of God. But they can't. You and I are still talking today because the kingdom of God is alive and well, praise God. So he said, Mom,

Let me find the best writer to help you write this. So he tried. Oh, gosh, he looked at like four or five different brilliant PhDs, writers. And we settled on the writing of this magnificent Dr. Brian Lippman. And we met with him and we said, he's our guy. He's our guy. So I just want to tell old stories in a new way. People think they know Herod. They don't. People think they know Nero. They don't. I didn't.

But I want to. I want to understand what was going on in the world at that time. I want to understand what was going on geopolitically at that time. I mean, I want to know what's happening with Netanyahu right now, geopolitically, culturally. I'm fascinated by those things. I don't want to just go and hear the same stories I've heard over and over and over again in Sunday school. First of all, they're not written according to the Word of God. They're just not. If you're reading any translation...

that is not built on solid ground, meaning the original Greek and the original Hebrew, you might as well not even read it. It's not even true. Jesus was not a carpenter. And if we're wrong about that, we're wrong about everything else. Jesus was a stonemason who worked some in wood. But as you know from Scripture, because you study it, there was no buildable wood in the first century A.D. It was all, you know, floated along the viamarae

Meaning the road of the sea. Road of the sea. And it was... They were made into rafts. Oh, yes. And put it along the Via Maris. Then taken apart. And then shipped over land to wherever they were going. Not shipped, but traveled over land. To be made into whatever... Herod or whoever else was building something of import. You know? And so we... No, he was not...

It was not a carpenter. I want to know what the word of God actually really says, Shannon, you know? And that should be all of our desire to be as closely attuned to what God wants us to learn and what he's saying to us through his word as we possibly can be. I can ask you, we talked about Herod. Do you feel like you discovered new things about Mary or her journey or Joseph? Because we do have a lot of information on that in the scripture. But did you find anything maybe you didn't know before?

Well, there's very little. There's a lot written by Josephus about Herod and some of the other well-known writers of the time. And I read all of that stuff in those books I told you about that I went. And so there's a great deal more about Herod. He's the person in regular history that's quite well-known. But Mary, very little. There are different books that come from different origins.

And they were some of them were a couple of hundred years later. Some of them were pretty early on. We went we go into all of it. But what we do know is that she everybody agrees she was about 12, 13 or 14 years old.

She was a virgin. And a lot of the stuff that we conjecture about Joseph, he was probably not a young man at all as the pictures look. He was an older man. He might have probably also been a widow, a widower, because he had children.

He had other children. So there's other places we went. We're very honest about how we write about that. This is what is written in, you know, the Gospel of Timothy or the Gospel of whatever, other places that were not taken into account into the canon of the Scripture. Some people might be upset with us with that, but, you know, these things have been around for hundreds and hundreds and, you know, a couple of millennia.

They're there. And so we gleaned a lot from those things. We do know that she was a virgin and that Joseph had the same angel came to him that came to Mary and basically said, this is what's going to happen. We know that she could have been stoned for it because she would have been seen in her day as either a woman who sinned with another man or

Or she could have been raped, but they would have believed the man back then. You know, women had no rights, no rights whatsoever. They had a few rights under the Torah, but very few. And when she said, let it be unto you as you have said, she was saying, okay, then I'll die. Then I'll die for it.

Because that's basically what could have happened to her. But of course, Jehovah God protected her.

And it's fascinating on her end, too. The way the book ends is every time I read it now, I sob my eyes out. I don't want to give it away. And you probably haven't had a chance to read the book. But the way it ends is basically, well, I don't want to say it. I don't want to tell anybody about it. Well, see, that's a great tease there. It's worth the trip. Yeah, they are returning. Let me just say they are returning home from Egypt.

where the same angel comes and says, return home for those who have tried to kill the child are dead. So it's just, it's a ride, honey. It is. And like you said, with all of the grit and the terror and the evil, what we end up with is a message of living hope. It's called Herod and Mary, the true story of the tyrant king and the mother of the risen savior. It's out July 16th.

Go check it out. Find out what this cliffhanger of an ending is. Kathleen Gifford, it is such a treat to hang out with you. It seems so quick, but I can't wait to read the finished book and see what comes next because there's always something else brewing with you. Thank you for joining us on Live in the Bream. Nero's coming next, honey. He was even worse than Herod. Buckle up, people.

Thank you so much. I love you to pieces. Say hello to Sheldon for me and Lord bless you and keep you. Make his face to shine upon you and give you peace. Listen ad free with the Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple podcasts and Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad free on the Amazon Music app.

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