Juan Bautista

Juan Bautista is the Spanish form of the name John the Baptist. In Christian hagiography and in the historical record the name refers first of all to the first-century Jewish preacher described in the New Testament Gospels and independently mentioned by Flavius Josephus in the Antiquities of the Jews. Those sources present him as an ascetic who called Israel to repentance, administered a baptism of conversion in the Jordan, and was put to death by the tetrarch Herod Antipas. Josephus locates the execution at the fortress of Machaerus and attributes it to Herod’s fear of John’s influence over the crowds; the Synoptic Gospels add the well-known narrative of John’s denunciation of Herod’s marriage to Herodias. No contemporary document gives a precise year of birth or death, and later tradition (including the association of his birth with Ein Karem in the Judean hill country) cannot be treated as verified chronology. Because the Wikidata identifier supplied for this entry could not be matched with certainty to a single historical individual, those biblical and Josephan facts are recorded here only as the primary referent of the name, not as a demonstrated identification of Q11717199.

The same name was later borne by many Catholics in the Spanish-speaking world and in the overseas missions of the early modern Church—reformers, missionaries, and martyrs among them. Examples that appear in standard hagiographical calendars include the Trinitarian reformer Juan Bautista de la Concepción (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Spain) and various martyrs commemorated in Japan, Vietnam, and Spanish America. Each of those persons has a distinct, source-based biography. None of them can be equated with Q11717199 without an external confirmation that this item does not provide. Accordingly no office-taking year, religious order, or place of death is entered above, and no attempt is made to substitute a well-known namesake’s dates for an unidentified subject.

Liturgical practice in the Latin Church keeps the Nativity of John the Baptist on 24 June and his Passion (Beheading) on 29 August; he is invoked as patron of baptism, of converts, and of numerous places named San Juan Bautista. Those feast days and patronages belong to the biblical prophet and to churches dedicated in his honour. They are not assigned here to Q11717199. Likewise there is no verified evidence in the material available for this entry that the subject was Bishop of Rome, Coptic Pope of Alexandria, or patriarch or catholicos of an Eastern see, nor that he belonged to a particular religious order, married, or had children.

The gender field is given as male solely on onomastic grounds: Juan Bautista is a masculine Spanish given name. All other structured fields are left empty in accordance with the rule that an unverified value must not be guessed. A documented biography of this Wikidata item would require the underlying sitelinks or statements of Q11717199 itself, which could not be confirmed from the information supplied.