John the Baptist

• 1. Introduction

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  John the Baptist is the only saint whose birth and death are both commemorated in the Roman martyrology. He was a Jewish preacher who worked along the Jordan River in the early first century AD, and he is thought to have been born around 6 BC. Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christians call him Saint John the Forerunner. The Baptist tradition calls him the Immerser, and in Islam he is the prophet Yahya ibn Zakariya. The Roman Jewish historian Josephus also wrote about him, so his name survives in a source outside scripture. Yet the accounts of his life do not agree with one another. Did he know that Jesus was the Messiah, or did he come to doubt it? Why did a ruler fear a man whose central act was baptism? And why do churches, a mosque and a museum in several countries each claim to hold a piece of his body?

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• 2. Four Gospel Portraits

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  The Gospel of Mark opens with a voice crying out in the wilderness. Mark presents John as the fulfilment of a prophecy attributed to Isaiah, though the quoted words blend texts from Isaiah, Malachi and Exodus. This John wears clothes of camel's hair and lives on locusts and wild honey. He proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin. He also says that someone coming after him will baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit.

  In Mark, Jesus comes to John and is baptized in the River Jordan. As he rises from the water, he sees the heavens open and the Spirit descend on him like a dove. A voice from heaven says, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased". Mark's John shows no sign that he recognizes Jesus as the leader he has been predicting.

  Matthew gives John a sharper voice and a quicker eye. When Jesus arrives to be baptized, John objects that he is unworthy, because Jesus is the one who brings baptism in the Spirit. Matthew adds that the coming figure will baptize with the Holy Spirit "and fire". This John also turns on the Pharisees and Sadducees, calling them a "brood of vipers", and he preaches that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand". In Matthew the voice from heaven speaks about Jesus rather than directly to him.

  Luke is the only Gospel to tell of John's infancy. His father Zechariah, an old priest, is serving in the temple at Jerusalem when the angel Gabriel announces that a son will be born. His mother Elizabeth is past menopause and had been unable to have children. Zechariah belongs to the priestly course of Abijah, and Elizabeth is a daughter of Aaron. That would make John a descendant of Aaron on both sides of his family.

  Luke's adult John is also a teacher of practical conduct. He urges charity, baptizes tax-collectors, advises soldiers and teaches his disciples to pray. Frederic Farrar notes a contrast with the other Gospels. In Luke, John travels around the Jordan region to reach people, while elsewhere the crowds come to him. Both Matthew and Luke later show John sending disciples with a question for Jesus: "Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?"

  The Gospel of John describes him as "a man sent from God" who "was not the light". He came only as a witness to that light. In this Gospel it is John himself who testifies that he saw the Spirit come down from heaven. He announces Jesus as the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit and as the "Lamb of God".

  A dispute over purification breaks out between some of John's disciples and another Jew. John answers that Jesus "must become greater", while he himself "must become less". The Gospel then notes that Jesus' disciples were baptizing more people than John. Jesus later calls him "a burning and shining lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light".

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• 3. Death at Machaerus

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  Herod Antipas, the tetrarch, hears stories about Jesus and imagines that this must be John the Baptist raised from the dead. Mark uses that moment to explain how John died. John had rebuked Herod for marrying Herodias, the former wife of Herod's brother, whom Mark names as Philip. Herodias demands John's execution. Herod is reluctant, because he "liked to listen" to John and feared him, knowing he was a "righteous and holy man".

  The turning point is a dance. Herodias' unnamed daughter dances before Herod, and he is so pleased that he offers her anything she asks. The girl consults her mother and is told to demand the head of John the Baptist. Herod reluctantly orders the beheading, and the head is brought on a plate. John's disciples take the body away and bury it in a tomb.

  The other Gospels reshape the scene. Matthew has Herod want John dead from the start and adds that John's disciples report the death to Jesus. Matthew thereby shifts attention from Herod to John as a prototype of Jesus. Luke mentions the imprisonment and beheading only briefly and omits the dancing girl entirely. Many scholars see the arrest, execution and burial in a tomb as a deliberate foreshadowing of what would happen to Jesus.

  Mark's account contains several oddities. It calls Antipas "King" although he held a lesser title. It names Herodias' first husband as Philip, who is known to have been called Herod II. Many early and significant texts describe the girl as "Herod's daughter, Herodias", a difficult reading that many scholars therefore treat as the original. Josephus supplies a name for Herodias' daughter: Salome.

  Josephus, who lived from 37 to 100, tells a quite different story in book 18 of his Antiquities of the Jews. He calls John a good man who urged the Jews to practise righteousness toward one another and piety toward God, and to come to baptism. In his telling, the washing was for purifying the body, on the assumption that the soul had already been made pure by righteousness. Crowds were greatly moved by John's words, and Herod feared that such influence could lead to a rebellion. So Herod sent John as a prisoner to the fortress of Macherus and had him put to death there.

  For Josephus, the consequences came later. Some Jews believed the destruction of Herod's army was divine punishment for what he had done to John. A few readers have tied John's death to the army's defeat in AD 36. But Josephus elsewhere says that the end of Herod's marriage to the daughter of Aretas, which preceded John's killing, was only the start of hostilities between the two men. The New Testament places the beheading around AD 30, and tradition locates it at Machaerus, in central Jordan.

  Mark's mention of a tomb is the last thing the Gospels say about John's body. Later traditions would try to answer the question the Gospels leave open.

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• 4. Elijah and Rivalry

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  The final lines of the Book of Malachi promise that God will send the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord. The Jews of Jesus' day expected Elijah to arrive before the Messiah. Some Jews still wait for him, which is why a Cup of Elijah the Prophet is set out at the Passover Seder. In Matthew 17:10 the disciples ask Jesus, "Why then say the scribes that Elias must first come?" Jesus replies that Elijah has already come and that people did not recognize him.

  Matthew's Jesus names John outright as "Elijah who was to come". Matthew and Mark both describe John in language that echoes 2 Kings 1:8, where Elijah wears a garment of hair and a leather belt. Luke has the angel tell Zechariah that his son will go forth "in the spirit and power of Elijah". Mark and Luke never say outright that John is Elijah.

  The Gospel of John flatly contradicts Matthew. When priests and Levites from Jerusalem ask whether he is Elijah, John answers, "I am not." Asked if he is the Prophet, he says no. The Unification Church argues that this denial hurt Jesus' mission, because many Jews could not accept a Messiah whose Elijah had disowned the role. The Druze take another route entirely. They believe in reincarnation, and they hold that Elijah, whom they call al-Khidr, came back as John the Baptist.

  Scholars are most divided over the relationship between John and Jesus. James F. McGrath notes that many historians think Jesus was once a disciple of John before breaking away, and he inclines to agree. Michael H. Crosby finds no biblical evidence that John ever became a disciple of Jesus, and suggests that John's idea of a messiah clashed with how Jesus presented himself. Charles Croll counters that five of John's disciples followed Jesus at once, and four of them became apostles.

  Candida Moss calls the two men "de facto competitors in the ancient religious marketplace". After John's death, she says, Jesus' followers had to separate him from the executed prophet, since some people thought Jesus was John raised from the dead. Harold W. Attridge goes further. He says most contemporary scholars regard John as Jesus' forerunner only because the early church built that idea. Being baptized by John implied a kind of subordination that would have embarrassed early believers.

  Simon J. Joseph argues that the Gospels demote the historical John, whose ministry actually complemented that of Jesus. John Dominic Crossan sees John as an apocalyptic preacher who expected God to descend very soon and remove the world's evil. He also draws a sharp commercial contrast: "John had a monopoly, but Jesus had a franchise." Crossan's point is that people had to go to John to be baptized, so stopping John stopped the movement. Jesus' way of living the kingdom could survive without him.

  The family tie in Luke also draws doubt. Luke calls Elizabeth a relative of Mary, but no other Gospel mentions kinship. Raymond E. Brown describes it as "of dubious historicity", and Géza Vermes calls it "artificial and undoubtedly Luke's creation".

  Other debates concern where John belonged. Many scholars think he was an Essene or was associated with the community at Khirbet Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Barbara Thiering suggests the Essenes' Teacher of Righteousness may have been John himself, while Croll calls the similarities superficial. The Book of Acts adds that Paul met some "disciples of John" in Ephesus. John's followers survived into the second century AD, and some proclaimed him the awaited Messiah.

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• 5. Relics Across Continents

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  The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome and Amiens Cathedral in France each claim to hold the head of John the Baptist. Amiens says a French king had the head brought from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade. A fourth claim comes from the Residenz Museum in Munich, which keeps a reliquary containing what the Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria believed was the head. The trail of that head is difficult to follow.

  The ancient historians Josephus, Nicephorus and Symeon Metaphrastes assumed that Herodias had it buried in the fortress of Machaerus. An Eastern Orthodox tradition says John's followers found the head after burial and took it to the Mount of Olives. There it was twice buried and twice discovered, which gave rise to the feast of the First and Second Finding. Other writers say the head lay in Herod's palace in Jerusalem until the reign of Constantine. From there it was secretly carried to Emesa, now Homs in Syria, and hidden until a revelation disclosed it in 452. The Orthodox Church celebrates that as the Third Finding.

  The body has its own stories. The theologian Joseph Benson suggests that the disciples could bury it because it had probably been thrown over the prison walls, perhaps on Herodias' order. According to Armenian tradition, Gregory the Illuminator moved the remains to the Saint Karapet Armenian Monastery. Another legend says the remains were burned in the fourth century, under Julian the Apostate, to stop pilgrimages.

  The right arm has been claimed in several places. The Christian Arab Ibn Butlan wrote that the church of Cassian in Antioch kept it until it was smuggled to Chalcedon and then to Constantinople. A monastery in Cetinje, Montenegro, and the cathedral of Siena in Italy both say they hold the arm that baptized Jesus. In 1464 Pope Pius II gave Siena a relic whose donation charter reads, "the arm of blessed John the Baptist. And this is the very arm that baptized the Lord." It is shown on the cathedral's high altar each June.

  Smaller pieces are scattered even more widely. Topkapi Palace in Istanbul claims John's right index finger. The Armenian Church of St. John at Chinsurah, West Bengal, says it keeps his right hand, and each January on "Chinsurah Day" the relic blesses the Armenian Christians of Calcutta. Aachen Cathedral in Germany is said to keep the cloth that covered his head after the execution. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, holds what it says is a bone of a left finger, in a gilded silver Gothic monstrance from fourteenth-century Lower Saxony.

  Two modern finds raise the stakes. In 2010, bones turned up in the ruins of the St. John the Forerunner Monastery on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan. Two years later DNA and radiocarbon testing showed they belonged to a Middle Eastern man of the first century AD. Scientists said the remains could conceivably be John's, and they are now kept in the Sts. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral in Sozopol. In 1969 restoration work at the Church of St. Macarius, in the Monastery of Saint Macarius the Great in Scetes, Egypt, uncovered a crypt and relics said to be John's. Eleventh- and sixteenth-century manuscripts mention them. Gandzasar Monastery's Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, in Nagorno-Karabakh, makes a further claim.

  The most obscure claim comes from Halifax in West Yorkshire, where John is patron saint and his head appears on the town's coat of arms. One legend derives the town's name from "halig", meaning holy, and "fax", meaning hair, as if a relic of his head or face once lay there.

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• 6. Many Faiths One Prophet

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  Mandaeans know him as Yuhana Maṣbana, and they treat him as their greatest and final prophet. They also call him Yuhana bar Zakria, John son of Zechariah. He features prominently in their texts, including the Ginza Rabba and the Mandaean Book of John. Mandaeans believe they descend directly from his original disciples, but they trace their religion back to their first prophet, Adam, not to John. Their texts describe him as a teacher and a renewer of the faith, a messenger of Light and Truth who had the power of healing. They also say he was married to a woman named Anhar and had children, and that his mother was Enišbai. Scholars including Rudolf Macúch, E. S. Drower, Jorunn J. Buckley and Şinasi Gündüz think the Mandaeans probably do have a historical link to his disciples.

  In the Quran, Zechariah prays steadily for a son even though his wife is barren and he is very old. God answers with the news that the boy will be named John, a name never given to anyone before. Zechariah asks for a sign and is told he will be unable to speak to people for three nights despite being healthy. As a child John is told to hold firmly to the scriptures and is given wisdom. He is described as pure, devout, kind to his parents and neither arrogant nor disobedient. Peace is pronounced on him on the day he was born, the day he dies and the day he is raised.

  Muslims consider Yaḥyā ibn Zakariyā a maternal cousin of Jesus and a prophet like his father. Islamic tradition says Muhammad met John, along with Jesus, in the second heaven on the night of the Mi'raj. Muslim commentators add that Jesus sent John out with twelve disciples before calling his own. His tomb in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus is a major pilgrimage site. Sufis honour him especially for the Quran's emphasis on his chastity and kindness.

  The Baháʼí Faith counts John as a prophet of God, though a lesser one. Bahá'u'lláh claimed that the Báb, his own forerunner, was the spiritual return of John the Baptist. He called the Báb "My Forerunner", a title Christians reserve for John. Baháʼís consider the Báb a far greater Prophet than John.

  Christian groups hold varied beliefs of their own. Catholic teaching says John leaped in his mother's womb when Mary visited Elizabeth, and that he was then cleansed from original sin. The Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches call him the last Old Testament prophet, a bridge to the New Covenant. They teach that after his death he descended into Hades and announced Jesus' coming there, as he had on earth. The Ebionites, an early Judeo-Christian group, revered him as a vegetarian. Epiphanius of Salamis records that they altered their version of Matthew so that his food was honey cakes or manna.

  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that John appeared on the banks of the Susquehanna River, near Harmony Township in Pennsylvania, on the 15th of May 1829. As a resurrected being, he ordained Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery to the Aaronic priesthood. Latter-day Saints say his ministry spans three dispensations, as the last prophet under the law of Moses, the first of the New Testament prophets and the restorer of that priesthood.

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• 7. Art and Music

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  By the fifth century, the figure of John was already fixed in Early Christian art as tall, thin, even gaunt, and bearded. He first appears in scenes of the Baptism of Christ. Only he and Jesus were consistently shown with long hair, at a time when the apostles had trim classical cuts. In Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox art he stands beside the Virgin Mary on either side of Christ in the Deesis, a composition found in every Eastern Orthodox church. Orthodox icons often give him angel's wings, because Mark 1:2 calls him a messenger.

  Western art settled on an ascetic in camel hair with a staff and a scroll reading "Ecce Agnus Dei", often with a lamb. Florence made him its patron saint, so his image fills the city. The Florence Baptistery holds vault mosaics, bronze doors by Andrea Pisano and a great silver altar. Giotto painted scenes of his life in the Peruzzi Chapel of Santa Croce, and Andrea del Sarto's largest work is the grisaille fresco series in the Chiostro dello Scalzo. Domenico Ghirlandaio frescoed the Tornabuoni Chapel, and Filippo Lippi painted a cycle in Prato Cathedral.

  His birth scenes grew popular in the late Middle Ages because, unlike Jesus' nativity, they allowed painters to show a relatively wealthy domestic interior. Jan van Eyck's Turin-Milan Hours is among the best known. Executions were common subjects too. Israhel van Meckenem's engraving is clearly as interested in Herod's court, dressed in contemporary clothes, as in the martyrdom. Salome carrying the head became part of a Northern Renaissance fashion called the Power of Women, painted often by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Carlo Dolci painted at least three versions. The severed head alone on a platter became a motif known as "Ioannes in disco", Latin for John on a plate.

  Leonardo da Vinci's two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks helped start a fashion for Madonna and Child pictures that included the young John. Raphael painted many such compositions, including the Alba Madonna and the Madonna della seggiola. Caravaggio painted John unusually often, from at least five largely nude youths to three late works about his death, among them the great Execution in Malta. John Everett Millais showed the boy John hurrying into the carpenter's shop with a bowl of water in Christ in the House of His Parents. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Symbolists Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes revived interest, and Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Oscar Wilde's play Salome.

  Music owes John a debt too. The Benedictine monk Guido D'Arezzo built the standard music stave on a hymn to Saint John the Baptist that begins Ut Queant Laxis. Each line starts on a higher note, and its first syllables, Ut (later Do), Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, became the solmization syllables. Martin Luther wrote the hymn "Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam" in 1541, and Johann Sebastian Bach drew on it for a cantata, BWV 7, in 1724. Alessandro Stradella wrote a St. John the Baptist oratorio in 1676. Richard Strauss gave John, as Jokanaan, a baritone role in his opera Salome, which premiered in Dresden in 1905. Bob Dylan gave him four lines in "Tombstone Blues" on the 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited.

  On screen, Robert Ryan played John in King of Kings in 1961, and Charlton Heston played him in The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965. An Indian Malayalam-language film from 1963, Snapaka Yohannan, is devoted to his life and death.

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• 8. Midsummer and Patron Saints

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  The Catholic Church marks John twice, on the 24th of June for his Nativity and the 29th of August for his Beheading. The June date falls six months before Christmas, following Luke's account. The Eastern Orthodox Church keeps six feast days for him. His main one is the 7th of January, the day after Theophany, and every Tuesday of the year is also dedicated to his memory. Serbian Orthodox Christians call the 20th of January "Jovanjdan", or John's Day, and often make it a family patron-saint celebration. The Russian Orthodox Church marks the 12th of October for the transfer of his right hand from Malta to Gatchina in 1799.

  The 24th of June sits close to the June solstice, and most countries hold their festivities on the night before, called Saint John's Eve. One English explanation links the date to John's words, "He must increase, but I must decrease". The sun begins to weaken just after midsummer, while Christmas, six months later, comes as the days start to lengthen.

  The city of Porto, in Portugal, celebrates its patron saint on the night of the 23rd of June into the 24th. The Guardian wrote in June 2004 that the Festa de São João is one of Europe's liveliest street festivals but little known outside Portugal. In Scotland, Perth was once called St. John's Toun, its main church is still the medieval Kirk of St. John the Baptist, and its football club is St Johnstone F.C. Penzance in Cornwall also claims him as patron. As patron of the original Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John, he is also patron of the Knights Hospitaller and of Malta as a whole.

  In Brazil, Saint John's Day anchors the traditional June festivals known as "Festas Juninas". Cities in the Northeast such as Campina Grande and Caruaru stage huge celebrations with bonfires, square dances called quadrilhas, fireworks and corn and peanut foods like pamonha, canjica and pé-de-moleque. In the state of Amazonas, the Festival de Parintins adds Boi-Bumbá folklore, with theatrical retellings of Amazonian myths.

  Puerto Rico's story is a map error. In 1521 the island was formally named "San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico". Over time, through a cartographic mistake, the city took the name Puerto Rico and the island took San Juan Bautista. By 1746 the two names had swapped, and the official motto still carries the saint's name: "Joannes Est Nomen Eius". In Canada, St. John's, Newfoundland (1497), Saint John, New Brunswick (1604), and Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec (1665), were all named for him. His feast day of the 24th of June is now Quebec's Fête Nationale and was once Newfoundland's Discovery Day.

  In the Philippines, towns such as Calamba, Calumpit, Balayan and Taytay venerate John as patron. Many of their fiestas include bathing and dousing people with water in memory of his baptizing. The source compares the custom to Songkran and Holi, calling it a playful respite from the tropical heat.

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