ONE
JOHN THE BAPTIST
Rival Messiah, Bones of Contention
The island of Sveti Ivan does not immediately strike a visitor as the likeliest place to solve one of the most puzzling mysteries of Christian history.
Just a quarter-mile square, the hardscrabble patch of land sits in the Black Sea, near the coast of Bulgaria, half a mile from the resort town of Sozòpol and nearly fourteen hundred long miles from Jerusalem. Yet the island always had a rather outsize strategic and cultural importance. After the Romans conquered the area in 72 BCE, they built a lighthouse on the island, and next to an ancient Thracian sanctuary they constructed a temple that featured a forty-three-foot-tall bronze statue of Apollo.
The complex of buildings around the temple eventually fell, along with the fortunes of the empire, and in the fifth century CE, as Christianity began arriving in the region and filling the vacuum left by the Romans, a monastic complex was built on the ruins, and the low-lying island was christened Sveti Ivan, or St. Ivan-or, as the English-speaking world would translate the name, St. John, as in John the Baptist.
In the New Testament, John is known as the Baptizer, or the Immerser, because of his fame for drawing repentant souls to his river baptisms. Yet Christians also know him as the Precursor, or the Forerunner, the man who famously predicted the coming Messiah and then identified Jesus as that man when he baptized him in the River Jordan. John was a plainspoken prophet, a fearless herald of the coming Kingdom of God, the original street preacher who instead of a sandwich board screaming "Repent!" wore camel's hair as his only garment and subsisted on locusts and wild honey.
John lived by the words he proclaimed, and was imprisoned by Herod Antipas, Rome's puppet king in Judea, for denouncing Herod's incestuous remarriage to Herodias, his own niece. John then famously lost his life when Herod agreed to grant his daughter, traditionally identified as Salome, anything she wanted if she danced for his dinner party guests. She did so, apparently quite convincingly, and asked for the Baptist's head on a platter, which Herod delivered.
Sveti Ivan, St. John's Island, suffered various tribulations over the centuries. The original basilica was abandoned and then reconstructed in the tenth century, and it flourished in the 1200s along with the growing devotion to John the Baptist. Two patriarchs of Constantinople may have been buried there, a great honor for such a small site. The Ottoman Muslims who would overrun Christian Byzantium sacked St. John's Island, in 1453, though a church was rebuilt on the site. Then, in the 1600s, Cossack pirates used the island as a refuge, and the church as a feasting hall. The Ottomans eventually leveled all the buildings in order to deprive the pirates of any sanctuary, and the island was last used as a field hospital for Russian soldiers in the nineteenth century.
In the 1980s there was some talk of turning the island into a tourist destination, with a hotel and shops and such. Yet that stalled, and for the most part Sveti Ivan is home only to wildlife, chiefly dozens of species of birds, some of them endangered. Even the rare monk seals that once populated the island's rocks, their name an echo of the island's monastic past, are gone.
So it was something of a leap of faith when archeologists began excavating the island's old ruins, and truly astonishing when, in July 2010, they discovered beneath the ruins of the original altar a small marble reliquary (or box for relics) that contained a number of bones. Three of the bones were from livestock-one each from a sheep, a cow, and a horse. "The animal bones are the biggest of the group, and they may have just been put there to bulk up what looks like a pretty minimal collection of bones," Thomas Higham, a professor of archaeological science at the University of Oxford, told Reuters. Higham was a member of the team brought in to test the DNA of the bones to determine if there were any way they could actually belong to John the Baptist.
Along with the animal bits were five human bones: a knucklebone from the right hand, a tooth, part of a skull, a rib, and an ulna, which is a bone from the forearm. Higham and the team took these bones back to the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, one of the world's top laboratories for carbon-dating archaeological material, and two years later produced a result that left even Higham astounded: the human bones dated right to the middle of the first century CE, the time of Jesus. Testing of the genetic material by experts at the University of Copenhagen showed that the bones all came from the same man, and he apparently came from the Middle East.
Moreover, buried in an older part of the church was a small box made of volcanic stone. The box is inscribed with the name of "Saint John," in Greek, and the feast day of John the Baptist, June 24, the day tradition says he was born. The stone from which the box was made, called tuff, came from an area in modern-day Turkey, along one of the routes used to take relics from the Holy Land to Constantinople (now Istanbul), where Roman emperors and various aristocrats, as well as patriarchs and bishops, were eager to acquire them.
"They were often bestowed as a sign of favor. The monastery of Sveti Ivan may well have received a portion of relics as a gift from a patron, a member of Constantinople's elite," said Oxford archaeologist Georges Kazan, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the movement of relics in the fifth and sixth centuries. He noted that the island was an easy distance from the Byzantine capital, on a major Black Sea trading route.
"It's really stretching it to think that material from the first century can end up all the way in this church in Bulgaria and still be there for archaeologists to excavate," Higham said. "But stranger things have happened." Higham, a professed atheist with no motive to make religious claims look good, told reporters that when he first heard about the relics in 2010, "I thought it was a bit of a joke, to be honest." Going into the testing phase, he thought the age of the original church (about the fifth century) would give a likely age for the material. "We thought that perhaps these bones would be fourth or fifth century as well. But we were surprised when they turned out to be much older than that."
Could these be the bones of John the Baptist? So far there is no way to be sure, since there is no DNA database to compare, no genome for the Baptist's family-which tradition says would include his first cousin Jesus of Nazareth. Even so, just finding these bones-all from the middle of the first century, all from one man who lived in the Middle East-stands as a remarkable discovery.
John the Baptist was in many ways the Humpty Dumpty of martyrs. He was beheaded, and over the centuries so many different churches and shrines and mosques-John is a revered prophet in Islam-claimed his skull and various bones that church wags liked to quip that John must have had six heads and twelve hands. Putting a single John the Baptist together again may be impossible, though the task and the popularity of his remains provide a window onto the truly important questions: Who was John the Baptist and why was he so important to Jesus of Nazareth? Why did Jesus go to John to be baptized? Was John really a more popular figure than the Son of God? And why did John's movement fade away, as he himself predicted it would, while Jesus's movement became a global religion?
"NOT TO UNDERSTAND THE BAPTIST IS NOT TO UNDERSTAND JESUS"
What John the Baptist provides to the Christian story above all is a historical and religious context, and that context is vitally important to understanding Jesus. Yet it can also be profoundly threatening to many of his followers.
The threat emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the rise of "biblical criticism," the academic movement to examine the Scriptures from a dispassionate, scholarly, "just-the-facts" perspective rather than viewing the Christian texts chiefly as a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, an account about the one true God sending his only son into the world to live and die as a man for the sins of the world, and to rise from the tomb and point the way to eternal salvation. Along the way, this divine man, Jesus Christ, also demonstrated and instructed his followers on how to live. For centuries, the New Testament was taught as a set of beliefs one must follow to get to heaven and a handbook of morality to guide one's life in this world. For most believers, science only got in the way of meaning, and historical context only diminished the uniqueness of Jesus.
Scholars increasingly thought otherwise, and most of them were viewed as debunkers who highlighted inconsistencies or outright contradictions among the gospels and who dismissed the accounts of the miracles (the Resurrection first among them) as obvious myths that were outright inventions by early Christians, a misinterpretation of natural phenomena, or a mass hallucination.
Some Christian scholars have tried to use science to support the Scriptures and confound the biblical skeptics. One of the earliest examples was a seventeenth-century Anglican archbishop, James Ussher, whose complex calculations based on the Bible established the time and date of the Creation as the night preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 BCE. Other have followed in Ussher's footsteps in efforts to explain away scientific theories that appear to conflict with the Bible's claims, or to divine the exact date and time of the end of the world.
Such efforts have tended to end badly or have wound up a mirror image of the views of rationalists, focusing so intently on justifying the Scriptures scientifically that they have obscured the higher purpose and theology of Christianity.
When it came to Jesus of Nazareth, the fear for many believers was that by portraying him as a Jewish man living in first-century Judea, a rabbi and prophet among the many who populated the land in those tumultuous days of the Roman Empire, Jesus as the Christ would be compromised. Better to see him solely as the Son of God, the first Christian, emerging in the pages of holy writ fully formed, starting a new faith, and dying for it.
The structure of the gospels themselves fostered this view: two of the four gospels, Mark and John, begin abruptly with Jesus starting his public ministry in Galilee, an unmarried man around thirty years of age. Luke and Matthew begin with the so-called infancy narratives, retelling the beloved Christmas story of the birth in a manger in Bethlehem, and the Holy Family's flight into Egypt to escape the terrible edict from Herod that every male child under two be slain in order to snuff out the Messiah before he could grow up and pose a danger to Roman rule.
The Gospel of Luke mentions the story of Jesus at the age of twelve accompanying Mary and Joseph to Jerusalem for Passover. On that visit, they lose track of the boy, only to find him three days later in the Temple discussing Jewish teaching with the elders, who were astounded by his learning and wisdom.
Other than that episode, which also shows Jesus as preternaturally mature, the gospels jump from Jesus as infant to Jesus as full-grown Savior, and skip any growing pains or backstory. Hence the proliferation of fanciful theories about "the lost years" of Jesus. Believers in the Middle Ages loved the stories that Jesus visited Britain in those gap years, while believers with modern sensibilities prefer theories that he went to India (like the Beatles visiting an ashram) and maybe even discovered Buddhism, which would explain what these latter see as the "eat, pray, love" vibe of his teachings.
Yet modern believers who dismiss any such musings also need not fear efforts to understand Jesus, and the faith he preached, by understanding the historical context of his upbringing. And this starts with his mentor, John the Baptist.
"All too often in books on the historical Jesus, the Baptist, like the miracle stories, gets a perfunctory nod and short shrift," the Rev. John P. Meier writes in his sweeping multivolume survey, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. "Yet one of the most certain things we know about Jesus is that he voluntarily submitted himself to John's baptism for the remission of sins, an embarrassing event each evangelist tries to neutralize in his own way." As Meier notes, the very first followers of Jesus were apparently eager that he not be "contextualized" out of his uniqueness. Yet that's not a desirable approach, Meier says, nor possible: "Not to understand the Baptist is not to understand Jesus."
And understanding John the Baptist starts with the four canonical gospels of the New Testament. That John the Baptist appears in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is a record of consistency that undergirds claims that he was a real historical figure. That he receives extensive treatment by Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, as we will see later, makes the fact of his existence a veritable slam dunk. Meier has several criteria for determining the historical reliability of a person or statement or story recounted in the New Testament, a chief one being the "criterion of multiple attestation"-that is, if someone or something is mentioned in various sources, it is likely true, and John the Baptist fits that bill.
Yet the Baptist also fits under Meier's "criterion of embarrassment," which holds that if something or someone in the New Testament creates embarrassment or theological difficulties that Jesus's followers have to explain, then it is likely true because it's not something early Christians would have invented-on the contrary. This criterion of embarrassment will also come into play in discussions of Mary Magdalene (a woman as the first witness to the Resurrection!) and Judas Iscariot (all-knowing Jesus chooses an apostle who will betray him!).
John the Baptist fits that bill given that he baptized Jesus, who ostensibly had no need to be cleansed of sin. Explaining this theological conundrum in part accounts for why John is portrayed differently in different sources.
By way of background: three of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are so close in form and content that they are called the synoptics, from the Greek word meaning "to look at from the same point of view." Scholars believe these three gospels were written first, starting a few decades after the Crucifixion, and were based on oral accounts that had been circulating since the days of Jesus's public ministry, which would have begun about 30 CE.
The Gospel of Mark was likely the earliest of the three, composed between 65 and 75 CE, with Matthew and Luke taking their cues from its narrative. The fourth gospel, the Gospel of John, was written later, perhaps as late as 100 CE, and has a markedly different style. Tradition (which is disputed by many if not most scholars) attributes this last gospel to the apostle John, the "beloved disciple" who, custom holds, also composed the Book of Revelation as an aged man living in exile on the island of Patmos, off the coast of what is modern-day Turkey.
Mark, the earliest gospel, opens without a preamble, diving straight into the story of Jesus by starting with John the Baptist: he is introduced as fulfilling the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah, "a voice of one crying out in the desert," preparing the way of the Lord to "make straight his paths." Mark continues:
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.
All the chief elements of the Baptist's story are there: his prophetic voice, his role as a baptizer, his broad appeal, and his ascetic lifestyle. Yet lest anyone think John was too important, Mark immediately records the Baptist as announcing, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."
On cue, Jesus appears to be baptized by John, and Mark says that on coming out of the waters of the River Jordan-this was full immersion, mind you, no sprinkling-Jesus "saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him." He adds: "a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.'" Whether anyone else saw that sign or heard that voice is not made clear.
This moment, this baptism, clearly launches Jesus's ministry. Like John might have done, Jesus heads straight out into the desert to endure the wild beasts and temptations by Satan, and then, after hearing that John has been arrested, Jesus begins his public ministry in the Galilee region in northern Judea, where he was raised.
Midway through Mark's gospel, Jesus returns to complete John's story, recounting the circumstances of John's imprisonment and grisly death: that John denounced Herod for marrying his brother's wife and was thrown in prison, but that Herod was afraid to kill John. His wife, Herodias, wanted him dead, but Herod knew that John was viewed as "a righteous and holy man," and Herod himself liked to listen to John preach, though he wasn't quite sure he understood what John was saying.
Then came the famous banquet, at which Herod's daughter, identified elsewhere as Salome, danced for the guests and in return was given the head of John the Baptizer on a platter, which she then gave to her mother. Herod was "deeply grieved," Mark says, and that may be one reason he allowed John's disciples to collect his body and lay it in a tomb-a story that in many respects prefigures the Passion of Jesus. John was so popular, in fact, that when Herod later hears about Jesus, he first thinks that John has been raised from the dead.
The Gospel of Matthew is more expansive. It picks up on Mark's narrative about John only after recounting the infancy story of Jesus. The Baptist is then introduced in much the same way, only Matthew has him specifically criticizing the Pharisees and Sadducees-two other Jewish groups that wielded power in Jerusalem at the time and were the focus of resentment by many prophets. John the Baptist denounces them as "a brood of vipers" and intimates that they will be cut down and cast into the fire.
When the Baptist predicts the coming Messiah, who will be Jesus, he also invokes the "unquenchable fire" that Jesus will bring to consume those who do not repent. When Jesus does show up at the Jordan River, John recognizes him as the One, and protests that Jesus should be baptizing him, not the other way around. Jesus says no: "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." Then the baptism, the dove descending, and the voice of God confirming Jesus as his Son.
This is followed, as in Mark, by Jesus spending forty days in the desert, with some elaboration on the temptations, and then Jesus commencing his public ministry of preaching-repenting, as John did-and teaching, but also working wonders. These miracles are a key difference between John and Jesus, and in fact, later on in Matthew, when the imprisoned John hears what Jesus is doing, he sends two of his followers to ask for confirmation that he is the Messiah: "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?"
Apparently John the Baptist did not see the dove or hear the voice of God there at the river, or still harbored doubts. Jesus instructs John's disciples, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."
Jesus then goes on a tear in praising John the Baptist to the crowds. "Truly I tell you," he says, "among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist." He notes also that "the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he," but this is high praise coming from the Son of God.
The last reference to the Baptist in Matthew's gospel is one of the most telling and poignant moments in the story: after John is killed, his own disciples claim his body and bury it, and immediately go to tell Jesus. At the news, Jesus "withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself," apparently pained, and perhaps sobered by what might await him.
Luke's gospel fleshes out the backstory of John and Jesus even more, as Luke does with so many aspects of the story, though they are the sort of details on which scholars cast doubt. Chief among these claims is the story, which only Luke tells, of the elderly and infertile couple, Elizabeth and the priest Zechariah, who are visited by an angel, Gabriel. The angel announces that Elizabeth will bear him a son, and he will be called John and will be a seer prophet who will turn many of the people of Israel back to God. Elizabeth goes into seclusion, Luke says, until one day, when she is six months pregnant, she is visited by a young woman-she may even have been a teenage girl-named Mary, who announces to Elizabeth that she, too, is miraculously pregnant. The child in Elizabeth's womb immediately leaps, which Elizabeth announces as a sign that John recognized Jesus as the Son of God.
Luke says the women are related, and a tradition naturally grew up that the elderly Elizabeth and the young Mary were cousins. So, too, then, were John the Baptist and Jesus. The evangelist says that Mary stayed with Elizabeth for three months, which would have been until Elizabeth gave birth, a date traditionally named as June 24, exactly six months before the birth of Jesus, the first Christmas, which Luke recounts in splendid detail.
Luke later picks up the story of John in the wilderness "preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." John again denies he is the Messiah, but points to Jesus, whom he baptizes. Again the Holy Spirit "descended upon him in bodily form like a dove," God gives his approval, and Jesus begins his own public ministry after enduring forty days in the desert, while Herod locks John in jail and has him beheaded.
The Gospel of John, fourth in the New Testament and also the last to be written, begins like the first gospel, Mark, and dives right in with John as the herald of the Word, Jesus Christ: "He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world." John again protests that he is not the Messiah, as some wonder, but instead of describing his baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, he tells his listeners that he saw the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus like a dove, and that Jesus was indeed the Son of God.
John the Evangelist is most focused on emphasizing the divinity of Jesus, with everything tailored to highlighting Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God-and that is what John the Baptist does. When the Baptist sees Jesus coming toward him, he tells his followers, "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" His disciples then go to off to follow Jesus. In the third chapter, some of John the Baptist's remaining disciples note that Jesus and his disciples are also baptizing, and they question him about why everyone is going to see Jesus. The Baptist again extols Jesus as the chosen one, and in a famous phrase says, "He must increase, but I must decrease."
John the Baptist then exits the narrative, and no reference is made to his death.
"GOD STOOD IN LINE"
If the evangelists were concerned here to show that Jesus was indeed greater than his mentor, and surpassed him both as a religious figure and a spiritual teacher, historians of the era show no such deference.
The greatest of these chroniclers was Flavius Josephus, a Jew who was born in 37 CE, just after the events recorded in the gospels, and who went on to fight for the Jewish people in the 66-70 CE revolt against the Romans. Captured by Roman forces and facing execution, he instead defected to the imperial camp and became Romanized, though he still considered himself Jewish.
After the defeat of the Jewish rebels and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, an apocalyptic event that many later saw as a fulfillment of the dire warnings delivered to the people of Israel by John the Baptist, Jesus, and others, Josephus retired to Rome and wrote several extensive and excellent histories of the era. In them, he twice refers to Jesus, once only in passing, in discussing the death of Jesus's brother James; and once a bit more fully, when he describes Jesus as a "wise man" and "a doer of wonderful works" who was crucified by Pontius Pilate and rose again on the third day. Scholars believe that some of elements of that passage may have been embellishments by later Christian translators, but there is no doubt about Josephus's treatment of John the Baptist, who comes across as a more successful and more influential figure than Jesus.
In all extant manuscripts of his history, the Jewish Antiquities, Josephus writes about a battle that Herod fought against a rival who routed Herod's army:
Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist: for Herod slew him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism ...
Josephus goes on to explain that the Baptist was drawing large crowds around him, and that Herod feared John would use his influence over the people to start a rebellion, "for they seemed ready to do any thing [John the Baptist] should advise." So he decided, in a preemptive strike, to have John imprisoned in the Machaerus, a fortified palace on the other side of the Dead Sea, east of Jerusalem. There he put the Baptist to death. Josephus does not mention Herod's dancing daughter or the head on a platter, but he does provide the daughter's name, Salome.
All this information adds up to a fuller portrait than we have of many other central New Testament figures, such as Mary Magdalene or Judas Iscariot. Yet what does it tell us?
First, it is clear that the land of Israel in the first century was a powder keg with a short fuse. It always had been, to a great degree. The Jewish people were fiercely independent, and had a long, proud history as the chosen people of the one true God, an identity that was manifest in a fusion of religious tradition and nationalist fervor. Yet the province of Judea was also relatively small, and sat at the intersection of history, where great armies clashed and empires rose and fell. Often the Jews were collateral damage, but they could exploit any moment of inattention by the ancient world's superpowers to try to shuck off the oppressor's yoke.
In the second century before Jesus, in 164 BCE, the Maccabee clan led a rebel Jewish army that successfully established independence from the Seleucid Empire, an event recalled each year at Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, which commemorates the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem. Judea's autonomy lasted until 63 BCE, when a rising Roman Empire conquered Judea and established a malleable ruler, a client-king, to govern in Rome's name. That never sat well with the Jews, and periodically a rebel leader would rise-as Judas of Galilee did in 6 CE-only to be crushed.
This constant restiveness among the populace kept Judea's rulers in a state of perpetual paranoia. One clue to the state of mind of Rome's client-kings emerges in the gospel account of Herod the Great's order, after hearing the prophecy that baby who had been born in a manger would grow up to be King of the Jews, that all newborn boys be slaughtered. Herod the Great's son and successor, Herod Antipas, shared his father's anxious nature and took no chances, as the account by Josephus makes clear.
"When you get a popular leader arising in a particular context in time, it's because things have preceded that have made people desperate for some kind of change," says Joan Taylor, a professor of early Christianity at King's College in London. "And if you look at Josephus ... and what he says, there was a tremendous amount of social upheaval and worry that the Romans were taking over."
Was John the Baptist really a threat? Nothing in the Baptist's actions, or those of his followers, would seem to support such a view. "As Josephus makes clear, any idea of revolt lay in Herod's ever-suspicious brain, not in John's message and deeds," says Meier.
Yet Herod's suspicions ruled, and John was killed-a fate that foreshadowed that of Jesus, except that Antipas evidently respected the Baptist enough to have him beheaded, a punishment normally reserved for Roman citizens because it was considered swift and merciful. Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand, was crucified, a slow, cruel, and humiliating punishment meted out to lowly criminals, such as the two tortured to death on crosses with Christ.
Second, it's also clear that there was religious ferment in the land to match the political tumult. The 1979 Monty Python movie, Life of Brian, was a hugely controversial, and commercially successful, satire of the gospels-and, in a way, of the growing faddism of gospel scholars-that wrapped its blasphemies around kernels of truth. One of those insights comes in a scene in which Brian, who is mistaken for the Messiah, passes before a series of street-corner prophets and sages spouting hellfire or spinning incomprehensible parables. One senses that the Judea of John the Baptist's day was not terribly different, with Rome's heavy hand fueling not only political and military plots but also fevered dreams of divine deliverance.
"It's important to realize that not all Jews were expecting a Messiah, but some were," says Rabbi Joshua Garroway, associate professor of early Christian history at Hebrew Union College. "The kind of Messiah that those Jews were expecting ranges across a broad spectrum. Some Jews were expecting simply a human leader that would collect all of the Jews from around the world, or ... simply challenge Roman hegemony in the land of Israel and reestablish a Davidic kingdom with its capital at Jerusalem. Other people were expecting a Messiah who would be a great prophet or a great teacher, or work miracles. Perhaps even bring about the end of the world as we know it, through some kind of judgment."
There were certainly more than a few candidates from which to choose. Josephus, our most reliable source on first-century Judaism, mentions a number of prophets and pseudo-messiahs. One of them, called Theudas, rallied hundreds of followers to the Jordan River with promises of miracles and then sent them against a squadron of cavalry, who of course cut them down. Theudas also had his head cut off-shades of John's fate-and paraded in Jerusalem. Theudas and his fate are also mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament. (That book, which historians generally see as an extension of the Gospel of Luke, and by the same writer, recounts the founding of the early Church and its initial growth throughout the Roman Empire.)
The Book of Acts also has the tribune who arrests the apostle Paul in Jerusalem, asking if Paul is "the Egyptian who recently stirred up a revolt and led the four thousand assassins out into the wilderness." This is a reference to a messianic figure from Egypt, whom Josephus calls a "false prophet," who gathered thousands (or, more likely, hundreds) of followers near Jerusalem and promised to bring the city walls down at his command. That didn't happen, but the Roman forces did kill and capture most of those gathered, though the unnamed prophet from Egypt escaped into the wilderness, never to be heard from again.
When it comes to the religious diversity of Judaism in that era, Josephus knows whereof he speaks. During his years of youthful exploration he aligned himself alternately with the Sadducees and the Pharisees and also with the Essenes, a quasi-monastic community of mainly celibate men who lived out in the desert, perhaps by the settlement at Qumran, near where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1940s and '50s.
There is much debate over whether the Essenes authored the scrolls and whether they lived at Qumran, but their existence and influence are in no doubt. They were an ascetic community focused on living simple lives marked by chastity, poverty, and religious study. They "cultivate seriousness," Josephus writes with obvious admiration, "shun the pleasures as vice" and "consider self-control and not succumbing to the passions virtue."
At the age of sixteen, Josephus writes, he joined the Essenes for three years: "I consigned myself to hardship, and underwent great difficulties, and went through them all. Nor did I content myself with the trying of these three only, for when I was informed that one whose name was Bannus lived in the desert, and used no other clothing than what grew upon trees, and had no other food than what grew of its own accord, and bathed himself in cold water frequently, both night and day, to purify himself, I imitated him in those things, and continued with him three years."
Little wonder that Josephus writes about John the Baptist with sympathy, or that many have argued that John, who appears to be so similar to Bannus, must have been an Essene. Yet Meier argues that "the Qumran connection, especially the romantic picture of John being raised in a prep school in the Judean desert, can be overdone." And Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary, notes that "what's different about [John] is that he comes out of that community and he becomes a lone soul figure, calling other people to repentance, ordinary people to repentance."
In fact, several traits mark John off from the Essenes, and from other Jewish variants of the time. These include his focus on a one-time baptism, his outreach to all of Judaism, and his relative disregard for the niceties of Jewish laws and customs.
True, the practice of baptizing was not wholly unfamiliar. "Indeed, immersion in water was one of the primary ways in which Jews could cleanse themselves through ritual purity in order to qualify themselves for participation in the Temple," says Garroway. "But in Jewish circles, there was also the notion that some kind of cleansing with water could also remove the stain of moral sin. This actually goes all the way back to the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, who use immersion in water as a metaphor for transforming oneself morally and returning to God. So I suspect that John understood his baptism along the lines of some kind of moral transformation that would prepare Jews for the end times judgment which he considered to be imminent."
Yet John's style of baptizing might be better described more actively: as "dunking" rather than traditional self-immersion in a pool, said Liz Carmichael of St. John's College at Oxford, in a 2011 conference on the Baptist. "In doing the dunking, immersing other people in the water of the Jordan or of a spring, John seems to have introduced something new." In addition, no one else at the time was known by the name Baptist or Baptizer, as John was.
Third, it became obvious that John was bigger than Jesus-at least at first. "I think it's very clear that during their lifetimes, John the Baptist was much more successful than Jesus," says Candida Moss, a professor of early Christianity and ancient Judaism at Notre Dame. "It might seem to us today obvious that Jesus is more important, but at the time, if we'd been alive in first-century Palestine, we would know the name of John the Baptist but we might not know the name of Jesus."
Jesus, following the custom of the day, apparently sought out a religious community-maybe the Essenes, as Josephus later would-and a mentor in John. Yet that context would later prove embarrassing as Jesus's followers tried to explain his uniqueness. That's also why the gospel passages on the Baptist seem to indicate a clear progression. In Mark, as Joan Taylor says, "Jesus is just kind of swept up in this great avalanche of people going to the River Jordan, so that's the reason he's there." Then, in Matthew, John the Baptist protests that, no, Jesus should be baptizing him. Luke then links the Baptist by blood to Jesus, by giving the story of the cousins meeting in the womb, so to speak, and by doing so, embeds the Baptist into Jesus's story.
The Gospel of John, more than that of Matthew, Luke, or Mark, finally elevates Jesus as the Christ and has John the Baptist stressing once again, in case there is any doubt, that he is not the Messiah but that Jesus is. In John's gospel, says Mark Goodacre, professor of New Testament and Christian origins at Duke University, the Baptist "is not the prophet, he is not Elijah. He is simply someone who prepares the way for Jesus."
"The Gospels are trying in different ways to decrease the role of John," Goodacre says. "We know that John was hugely popular. We know that many people must have thought of him as a prophet. And one of the things the Gospel writers are trying to do is really a kind of a damage-limitation exercise, to make him solely Jesus's forerunner, and not give him any independent identity of his own." Paul had to do much the same, as recorded in Acts, when he went to Ephesus and found disciples who had not been baptized in the name of Jesus but "into John's baptism" only. Paul quickly sets this aright, informing them that John was only a herald of the Son of God, providing a baptism of repentance, while Jesus offered a baptism of the Holy Spirit-which Paul then administers.
No matter how much the Gospel writers or others try to diminish John's role or contextualize it in the larger Jesus story, however, it still begs a central question: why did Jesus need to be baptized? "If anything, shouldn't the Son of God be doing the baptizing?" says Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage.
In the Gospel of Matthew, John asks Jesus the same question, and Jesus provides an answer: "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." Then John agrees to baptize him.
What does Jesus's response mean? As Martin says, "It is an obscure answer that may have confused both John the Baptist and the early readers of Matthew's gospel."
The great Protestant theologian Karl Barth posited that because Jesus came to take on the sins of the world, no one was in greater need of baptism. Martin speculates that Jesus felt it was important that he go through what the others had, and to identify himself with the "good fruit" of John's preaching. Perhaps Jesus knew he needed to take some ritual, public step to launch his ministry, which is what came next.
Martin also points to a more compelling reason: "Jesus decided to enter even more deeply into the human condition." It is not that the sinless Jesus needed baptism, but it was "an act of solidarity, a human act from the Son of God, who casts his lot with the people of his time." At his baptism at the Jordan River, Jesus symbolically, and physically, waited his turn with his people.
As Martin puts it, "God stood in line."
The central dogma of Christianity is the Incarnation, the belief that God became man, and suffered and died with, and for, all people, good, bad, or indifferent. It is perhaps the most affecting claim Christianity makes, but it is also a belief that has caused great consternation and opposition. Some would see John the Baptist's position as a kind of elder brother and mentor to Jesus as undermining belief in what Jesus's followers believed about him. Yet perhaps Jesus's submission and immersion into the community, and into the River Jordan, were further evidence of his identification with humanity.
WHY THE JESUS MOVEMENT SUCCEEDED AND THE BAPTIST'S DID NOT
Yet, as John the Baptist prophesied, he himself would decrease while Jesus would increase. That prediction certainly came true. Still, why was the movement Jesus started successful-apart from his divinely ordained role-while John's withered? There are four main reasons:
One, Jesus rose from the dead; John did not.
"It's the Resurrection that really singles out Jesus as something completely different," says Taylor. John "always wanted to be a reformer within Judaism, he wanted to call Jews to a righteous path in anticipation of this transformation." He made no claims about himself as anything more than a prophet. "Following John's death, a lot of his followers may have migrated over to the Jesus movement because, unlike Jesus, when John died, he stayed dead," says Geoffrey Smith, a professor of early Christianity at the University of Texas at Austin. "They might also have perceived a connection between the two movements."
Two, as Ben Witherington puts it, "Jesus performs miracles. John performs baptisms. Two different kinds of ministry." Both were important. The gospels note that Judas was presumably among the disciples whom Jesus sent out healing the sick and casting out demons. The early Church Fathers also noted, as Augustine did, that "even wicked men can perform some miracles that the saints cannot," and that one's way of life is the key test.
Three, the miracles surely helped convey Jesus's message, and he used miracles to accomplish another goal that differentiated him from the Baptist: he created a community around him, and for others to share in. In fact, when Jesus heard the news that John had been killed, he was clearly upset-whether out of grief or foreboding over his own fate, or both-and sought to withdraw "to a deserted place by himself," as the Gospel of Matthew records it. Yet the crowds who had gathered around him insisted on following him, and Jesus "had compassion for them and cured their sick." Later that evening, seeing them hungry and without food, he performed the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, multiplying a few loaves and fishes to feed the crowds.
John the Baptist, on the other hand, was more of a loner who did not seem interested in establishing a following. "Rather, the Baptist's main concern was to direct a call to all Israel to repent and share in his baptism," says Meier. "The vast majority of those baptized seemed to have returned to their homes." A few hung around with the Baptist, Meier says, but they seemed to come and go as they liked, and his greatest devotees migrated to the Jesus movement after John was killed. The Baptist was more of a classic prophet, Bible scholar Ben Meyer once observed, preaching conversion first and community second. "The daring of Jesus' initiative," Meyer writes, "lay in its reversal of this structure: communion first, conversion second."
One of the most intriguing recruits to the Jesus camp may have been a woman named Joanna, who was later named by Luke as one of the women Jesus healed and who, along with Mary Magdalene, was one of several women who supported the early Jesus movement "out of their own means." Joanna is also mentioned as the wife of Chuza, who managed Herod's royal household. Hence she likely had the inside scoop on the lifestyle Herod led, and on the events surrounding the Baptist's execution. This may explain why the gospel accounts have more details about John's death than Josephus provides.
The fourth and final reason the movement Jesus started was successful and John's was not was that Jesus-or at least his followers-set out to evangelize the whole world. Whether it was the result a divine command or a savvy marketing strategy or a bit of both, it worked.
The bottom line is that John's was different from the other movements in Judaism at that time, and Jesus was different from John. If the Jesus movement was more successful in terms of growth, John had an afterlife of sorts that Jesus could not rival. His relics, pieces of his body venerated by believers, were dispersed throughout Christendom as the reverence for the martyrs grew into the cult of the saints.
"THE VERY SPECIAL DEAD"
"Of all religions, Christianity is the one most concerned with dead bodies," Robert Bartlett writes at the start of his engrossing survey of sainthood, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? The title is a line from St. Augustine of Hippo, a fourth-century bishop from North Africa and one of the Church's foundational writers and thinkers. It was Augustine who summed up the divergent views of "the very special dead," as author Peter Brown has called the saints: "We pray for our dead but to the martyrs," Augustine wrote.
In both cases, the attitude of holy reverence of saints and martyrs would be mirrored by a decidedly different treatment of their bodies, a treatment that by the year 200 CE set Christians apart from Jews, from the Greek and Roman pagans, and, later, from Muslims. Like their Jewish forebears, the early Christians believed the corpse should be treated with respect. This is evident from the gospels themselves, as the followers of John the Baptist took care to recover and bury his body, just as Jesus's disciples would later do with his corpse. As per the customs of the Abrahamic tradition, immediate burial was preferred, cemeteries were sacred ground, and the tombs of holy men were treated as pilgrimage sites. Yet Christians changed the equation when they incorporated the dead, and pieces of their bodies, into their daily lives and living spaces, constructing churches over tombs or decreeing that a saint's body or some physical relic had to be embedded in an altar.
"Moving the remains of the dead into the city churches broke the ancient taboo demarcating the places of the living and the dead, and disregarded deeply felt legal and moral prohibitions on both the disturbance of human remains and on the presence of the dead in the city," Bartlett writes. "It was a development that marked off Christianity sharply from pagan and Jewish religions, which knew the difference between a place of worship and a cemetery, and regarded the cult of corporeal relics as ghoulish."
One of the earliest examples of the Christian devotion to the body of a holy person was the account of the martyrdom of Polycarp, the aged bishop of Smyrna, in modern-day Turkey, which took place sometime after the year 150 CE. Polycarp was burned at the stake in a Roman arena for refusing to light incense to the emperor. Afterward, the Christians in his flock took care to collect his ashes and remains "to have a share in his holy flesh."
What really distinguished Christians from Jews and Muslims was how Christians broke up corpses willy-nilly and moved the pieces here and there-and often fought among themselves over who had the rights to a relic. The earliest recording of this devotion dates to the year 300 CE in the account of a wealthy woman in Carthage who used to kiss the bone of a martyr before receiving the Eucharist. The woman, Lucilla, was in fact rebuked by the local deacon. The Roman authorities were not enamored of the growing practice, either. An imperial law of 386 CE ruled that "no one should divide up or trade in a martyr."
Yet there was no stopping the devotion. Early medieval accounts are full of tales of thefts of bits and bones of the saints. St. Nicholas of Bari, who would later be revered in a more secular fashion as St. Nick, or Santa Claus, had his ribs, arms, and teeth pilfered in the eleventh century by zealous monks. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, offered a chance to venerate the arm of Mary Magdalene at a French monastery, cut away the silk sheath encasing the treasured relic and, to the horror of the monks looking on, tried to cut off a piece for himself. He then set to work on the Magdalene's index finger with his teeth, "first with the incisors and finally with the molars," gnawing away until he successfully broke off two bits.
Indeed, as the eminent Cambridge University church historian Eamon Duffy has written, by the early Middle Ages, "relics and relic fragments were distributed by monasteries, bishops, and popes as marks of favor or tokens of esteem, missionaries carried them with them into pagan territory to protect and overawe, soldiers bore them into battle as an army of heavenly auxiliaries. Church, monasteries, and cities gained power, wealth, and prestige from the possession of notable relics, and fairs and markets to mark the saints' feast days became crucial to the prosperity of whole regions."
Relics were increasingly associated with miracles, and if holy men and women had worked no wonders in their earthly lives-as John the Baptist apparently did not-that didn't stop people from believing that their remains produced miraculous healings, visions, and the like.
To be sure, the early centuries of Christianity certainly offered up plenty of martyrs, and hence relics, given the imperial persecutions that continued off and on until the emperor Constantine effectively legalized the faith in 313 CE with the Edict of Milan. (It wasn't until 380 CE that Constantine's successors made Christianity the official state religion, a stunning triumph for what was once considered an inconsequential sect, but an altar-and-throne alliance that in many ways would haunt the faith in later centuries.)
Still, there were never enough very special dead to populate the rapidly expanding number of churches, and the trade in sacred body parts (or their facsimiles) began in earnest early on. Around 401 CE, St. Augustine criticized monks who "offer for sale pieces of the martyrs," yet the black market trade grew along with the veneration of saints and their relics. An occasional voice of protest arose, such as that of the brave French monk Guibert de Nogent, who in the twelfth century wrote a treatise on relics in which he related examples of bones and bodies passed off as the relics of saints-for a price, of course.
"I can recall so many like deeds in all parts that I lack time and strength to tell them here," Guibert writes. "For fraudulent bargains are made, not so much in whole bodies as in limbs or portions of limbs, common bones being sold as relics of the saints. The men who do this are plainly such of whom Saint Paul speaks, that they suppose gain to be godliness; for they make into a mere excrement of their money-bags the things which (if they but knew it) would tend to the salvation of their souls."
In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century send-up of English society and the Church of the day, the pilgrims on a journey to Canterbury encounter the Pardoner, an unscrupulous seller of church pardons who also claims to have a bunch of holy relics (some of which are pig bones), which he tries to foist on the pilgrims. Such stories were apparently not too far from the truth, and helped fuel the zeal of the Protestant reformers who would try to put an end to much of the cult of relics over the next few centuries. They weren't entirely successful, and in his 1869 book, The Innocents Abroad, about a trip through Europe and the Holy Land, American humorist Mark Twain found in the various relics much fodder for his characteristically tart observances. In a chapel in Genoa, coming upon another set of the Baptist's relics (his ashes and the chain that purportedly held him in Herod's prison), Twain feigns confusion: "We did not desire to disbelieve these statements, and yet we could not feel certain that they were correct-partly because we could have broken that chain, and so could St. John, and partly because we had seen St. John's ashes before, in another church. We could not bring ourselves to think St. John had two sets of ashes."
A SAINT FOR OUR TIMES?
Indeed, John the Baptist proved to be especially fertile in terms of relics, and enduring as far as devotion. Part of this could be chalked up to the fact that he was beheaded. "Of all the body parts, the human head has the most complex significance," writes Bartlett, "as the locus of all five senses, the most easily identifiable marker of personal identity." So it was no surprise that head relics were highly prized, but also the source of great scandal.
The earliest mention of John the Baptist's head appears in writings near the end of the fourth century, when Christians believed they had located his tomb at Sebaste, near modern-day Nablus in the West Bank. The ancient writers say that the monastery where the saint's remains were housed was attacked in 361 CE by pagans during a revival of the old religion-remember, Christianity was newly regnant-and the Baptist's relics were damaged in the fire. The remnants, apparently including his head, were gathered by the monks and sent to Egypt and other places for safekeeping. In 391, as Georges Kazan wrote in a 2011 paper on the Baptist, the emperor Theodosius had the head relic taken to Constantinople, where it was enclosed in a small casket or urn, wrapped in a cloak of imperial purple, and transported to the Hebdomon, just outside Constantinople, where Theodosius built a large church to hold it. The description of the small casket, interestingly, closely tracks the reliquary that was unearthed more than sixteen hundred years later, on the Black Sea island of Sveti Ivan.
Then again, there was the so-called Second Finding of the Baptist's Head in the year 453. The Baptist himself is said to have revealed the location of the relic in a dream to monks during their visit to Jerusalem. "They discovered the head, still wrapped in a cloth sack, within what is described as the former palace of King Herod the Great," Kazan wrote. That was only the start of the picaresque tale: "As they journeyed into Syria on their way home, a potter who had been travelling with them, made off with the head to his home city of Emesa"-modern-day Homs, in Syria-"also under the instructions of the Baptist, who had appeared to him in a dream. The relic was still concealed within its bag, and the potter is said not to have known what this contained. Eventually, before he died, he placed it in a sealed urn and left it to his sister, who had no knowledge of what it was."
A priest finally obtained it and, on his expulsion from the city for heresy, left it buried in a cave that later came to be used by other monks, who discovered it, thanks to another vision, in 453. During the subsequent Arab invasions, this head was also taken to Constantinople, where it supplanted the head recovered by Theodosius as the true one in the hearts of the faithful. The Western crusaders who sacked the city in 1204 also found the head still in place.
Not to be outdone, a French pretender emerged in the tenth century with a claim that the Baptist's head was in fact in a monastery in Saint-Jean-d'Angély, near Bordeaux. That claim prompted the monk Guibert to protest that, no, "there were not two John the Baptists, nor one with two heads!" That didn't stop the French from cherishing their head of the Baptist, or the Baptist's head and other remains from multiplying on their journeys across the centuries.
Numerous churches and shrines and mosques claim to have various arms-important because they were used to baptize Jesus-and various fingers are housed in various places, including one in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
A church in Rome claims to have the head of the Baptist, and Islamic tradition holds that John's head is in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the site of a former church. A cathedral was built in Amiens, in northern France, around 1200 to house the Baptist's head, which was reportedly brought by a crusader returning from the sack of Constantinople. Also, churches in Munich, in Germany, and Mount Athos, in Greece, also claim to have parts of the Baptist's skull, while another piece of the head remains in Istanbul, and still another in a church in Egypt.
The town of Halifax in West Yorkshire, in Great Britain, even has the Baptist's head on the official coat of arms, thanks to a legend from the sixteenth century that says the first religious settlers to the area brought with them the "holy face" of John the Baptist-holy rendered halig in Old English, and face as fax, hence Halifax.
The only place that seems oddly bereft of a relic of the Baptist is Florence, where John is revered as the city's patron saint. In 1411 it was rumored that Pope John XXIII-who would be deposed and denounced as a false claimant to the Throne of St. Peter during the Great Western Schism-had a skull of the Baptist that he was offering for sale for the enormous price of fifty thousand florins. Negotiations failed to bring the price down, and the buyer had to settle for a finger. A plot to steal the head also failed, and the Florentines were especially upset when Pope Pius II later donated an entire arm of the Baptist to Siena, his hometown and Florence's bitter Tuscan rival.
Little wonder that an 1881 article in the New York Times that sniffed at "the silly worship of relics" recounted the story of two rival French monasteries that each claimed to have a head of the Baptist. They explained this away by saying that the first skull belonged to John as a man and the smaller skull was from "when he was a boy." Alas, Kazan said this story is apocryphal and appears to come from a footnote to a translation of John Calvin's A Treatise on Relics. (Calvin was not in favor of them.) It shows how easily claims about the Baptist's relics could proliferate, even among skeptics.
The problem with all this colorful history is that, however entertaining, it can understandably prompt a mockery of the importance, and power, of relics, for believers and nonbelievers. John the Baptist's bones provide a window onto a crucial chapter in history, and into a legacy shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
In fact, what is often obscured by our fascination with the Baptist's relics, or his relationship to Jesus, is his own unique role: John is a Christian saint, but he is also pre-Christian. He died before Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross, and later theologians argued that because of that timing, John went down to hell, not straight to heaven, as one would assume. The third-century Church Father Origen, among others, sought to mitigate John's fate by preaching that the Baptist's role in the netherworld was the same as it was here on earth: to announce the coming of Jesus. So when Jesus descended to hell, as the gospels say he did, between the Crucifixion on Good Friday and the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, he rescued for eternity all the righteous who had died since the beginning of the world-including John the Baptist.
This border-straddling role makes John the Baptist something of a bridge among traditions, and across the ages. Eastern Orthodox Christianity views John as the last of the Old Testament prophets as well as a Christian saint, a man of the Jewish world and of the Christian Church. Muslims, as we saw, revere John the Baptists as a prophet, and so do those of the Baha'i faith. The small community of Mandaeans, which formed in the first centuries after Jesus in what we now call Iraq, even view John the Baptist, not Jesus, as the true Messiah. His appeal as a prophet is as old as the Baptist himself, and endures to the present day.
John the Baptist was known as John the Precursor, John the Forerunner, John the Immerser. Just as important, though, he was John the Truth-Teller. In eleventh-century England, two churchmen debated whether Christians revered as saints should be considered martyrs if they were killed trying to protect their people during an invasion. In the Christian tradition, a martyr is one who is killed for defending the faith, for refusing to deny Christ. One of these churchmen, Anselm, a future archbishop of Canterbury, replied to his correspondent that, yes, those saints were martyrs because if they were willing to die rather than fail to shield the people, then they would certainly have died rather than deny Christ, seen as a much more serious sin.
To make his point, Anselm noted that John the Baptist was killed not for refusing to deny Christ but for denouncing Herod's sinfulness. "What distinction is there between dying for justice and dying for truth? Moreover, since by the witness of holy writ ... Christ is truth and justice, he who dies for truth and justice dies for Christ."
That is why John the Baptist can be invoked as a forerunner of latter-day martyrs to the truth, such as the Lutheran pastor and Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Salvadorean archbishop Óscar Romero. There is a universal quality to John, "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness," that commands respect in every day and age. John's model is perhaps especially powerful, and poignant, today, as stories and videos from the land where he preached tell of so many who suffer the same grisly fate he did-which is why he may be the perfect saint for today.
Copyright © 2015 by David Gibson and Michael McKinley
