Antipas appears in the Gospels chiefly through two episodes he does not narrate himself. Mark and Matthew report that he had John the Baptist arrested for publicly condemning his marriage to Herodias, and that Herodias's daughter, unnamed in the text but identified from Josephus as Salome, danced at his birthday feast and was rewarded with John's head on a platter after Herodias told her what to ask for. Josephus, writing independently and without the Gospels' interest in Herodias's role, gives a different immediate cause, reporting that Antipas had John killed at the fortress of Machaerus out of fear that his popularity with the crowds might tip into rebellion. The two accounts are not easily reconciled into one sequence of events, and most historians treat them as complementary rather than contradictory, a private grievance and a political anxiety reinforcing each other.
Luke's Gospel alone places Antipas in the Passion narrative, reporting that Pilate, on learning Jesus was a Galilean and so under Antipas's jurisdiction, sent him to Antipas, who was in Jerusalem for Passover, questioned him, had his soldiers mock him, and returned him to Pilate without passing judgment, an episode Luke reads as reconciling two rulers who had been enemies. Jesus is elsewhere reported calling Antipas a fox, a term of contempt rather than respect, in response to a warning that Antipas wanted him dead. Neither Gospel episode appears in Josephus, whose interest in Antipas ends with the Aretas war and the exile.