Baptist John

John the Baptist, also called John the Baptizer, was a Jewish preacher and prophet of the early first century whose life and death are attested both in the New Testament Gospels and independently by the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. According to the Gospel of Luke, he was the son of Zechariah, a priest of the division of Abijah who served in the Jerusalem Temple, and of Elizabeth, described as a kinswoman of Mary the mother of Jesus. Luke places the annunciation of his birth, his conception in Elizabeth’s old age, and his nativity in the reign of Herod the Great, in an unnamed town in the hill country of Judea. The same Gospel records his circumcision on the eighth day and the giving of the name John, contrary to family custom. Later Christian tradition associated the birthplace with Ein Karem near Jerusalem, but that localization is not found in the earliest sources. Luke presents John as living in the wilderness until the day of his public appearance to Israel.

John’s public ministry is set by Luke in the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judea and Herod Antipas tetrarch of Galilee. He appeared in the wilderness of Judea and along the Jordan River, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins and warning of coming judgment. He is depicted as an ascetic, clothed in camel’s hair with a leather belt and living on locusts and wild honey, in a manner that early Christian writers associated with the prophet Elijah. Crowds from Jerusalem, Judea, and the Jordan region came to him; the Gospels mention Pharisees, Sadducees, tax collectors, and soldiers among those who heard him. All four canonical Gospels present him as the forerunner who prepared the way for Jesus of Nazareth. They report that Jesus came to John and was baptized in the Jordan. John’s own disciples formed a recognizable group that continued after his death; the Acts of the Apostles still knows of people in Ephesus who had received only the baptism of John.

The Gospels state that John publicly reproved Herod Antipas for marrying Herodias, who had been the wife of Herod’s brother (named Philip in Mark and Matthew). This denunciation led to John’s arrest. Mark and Matthew describe a banquet at which Herodias’s daughter—unnamed in the Gospels and called Salome in later tradition—danced before Herod, who swore to grant her whatever she asked. Prompted by her mother, she requested the head of John the Baptist, and John was beheaded in prison. Josephus, writing in the Antiquities of the Jews, independently confirms that Herod Antipas seized John and put him to death at the fortress of Machaerus, east of the Dead Sea in Perea. Josephus portrays John as a good man who exhorted Jews to exercise virtue, to practise justice toward one another and piety toward God, and to come to baptism as a washing of the body after the soul had already been purified by righteousness. Josephus attributes the execution to Herod’s fear that John’s influence over the people might lead to sedition, and he links popular opinion that Herod’s later military defeat by the Nabataean king Aretas IV was divine punishment for the killing of John.

According to the Gospel of Mark, John’s disciples came, took his body, and laid it in a tomb; the historical place of burial is unknown. Later claims associated his remains or his head with Sebaste in Samaria, with various churches in the Latin West, and with the shrine in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, but these localizations cannot be verified from first-century evidence. Veneration of John as a prophet and martyr began in the earliest Christian communities. He is honored as the last of the prophets of Israel and as the immediate forerunner of Christ. The feast of his nativity on 24 June is among the oldest in the Christian calendar and is unusual in commemorating a saint’s birth rather than death; the beheading is kept on 29 August. He is a major figure in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and many Protestant traditions, and he is also recognized as a prophet in Islam under the name Yahya. He was not the subject of a later papal canonization process; his cult is of apostolic and biblical origin.