JOHN THE BAPTIST, SAINT

born 1st century AD Jewish prophet of priestly origin who preached the imminence of God's Final Judgment and baptized those who repented in self-preparation for it; he is revered in the Christian Church as the forerunner of Jesus Christ. After a period of desert solitude, he attained notice as a prophet in the region of the lower Jordan Valley. He had a circle of disciples, and Jesus was among the recipients of his rite of baptism. Sources of information about John. The primary sources for information about John's life and activity are the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the Acts of the Apostles, and the Jewish historian Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews. In using these works for historical reconstruction, allowances must be made for the known tendencies of each writer. All four Gospels recognize in John the start of the Christian Era, and each in its own way tries to reconcile John's precedence in time and Jesus' acceptance of his message and of a baptism of repentance from his hands (elements suggesting subordination to John), with the author's belief in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God. The Gospel According to Mark presents Jesus as the hidden Messiah, known only to a narrow circle, and John as the prophet Elijah returned and as the one who had to come first to restore all things but who also remained hidden and suffered death with little acknowledgment of his true status (Mark 9). An early collection of sayings of Jesus, known to biblical scholars simply as Q, similarly represents the Baptist as the herald of the Coming One and of the imminent Kingdom, yet tries to stress his preparatory character, and so his subordination to Jesus. Matthew and Luke develop these two sources. The Gospel According to Matthew emphatically identifies John as the returning Elijah, herald of the Kingdom of God (Matt. 3). For Matthew, John's death, like that of Jesus, illustrates the old Israel's hostility to God's offer of salvation. Luke, in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, neglects the identification with Elijah but describes John as Jesus' forerunner and as inaugurator of the time of fulfillment of prophecy. Luke's account of the infancy of John and of Jesus does not necessarily derive from an underlying document composed in a Baptist sect, although it uses material perhaps transmitted by former disciples of the Baptist. It depicts the birth of Jesus and John in two parallel series of scenes, each with an angelic annunciation, conception, marvellous birth, circumcision, hymns greeting the children and predicting their destiny, and infancy. Even in his mother's womb John recognizes Jesusalso still in his mother's wombas his Lord. The Gospel According to John reduces the Baptist from an Elijah to a model Christian preacher, a mere voice; it omits any description of Jesus' baptism. Its tendency has often been labelled polemic against a continuing group of disciples of John, but it is more plausibly explained by the evangelist's desire that this ideal witness recognize the full character of the Christ as he is presented in the Gospel According to John and as a necessary consequence of the tension between the highly developed understanding of Christ in this Gospel and those details in early Christian tradition that suggested Jesus' subordination to John. The Gospels are thus primarily interested in the relations between John and Jesus. Josephus sought to present Jewish religious phenomena in Hellenistic categories and to deemphasize any political elements unfavourable to Roman imperial control. Additional reading On the ancient sources, see the standard commentaries on the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and Josephus (Loeb Classical Library). Among recent monographs, Carl H. Kraeling, John the Baptist (1951), is primarily a historical investigation, while Walter Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition (1968), studies the Gospels' tendencies and their differing representations of John. For analogous contemporary baptizing groups, see J. Thomas, Le Mouvement baptiste en Palestine et Syrie . . . (1935), and more recent literature on the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most encyclopaedias of religion or biblical studies contain articles on John. Representative are: P. Vielhauer in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3rd ed., vol. 3, pp. 804808 (1959), who offers the mainline view of critical New Testament scholarship; and W.R. Farmer in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 2, pp. 955962 (1962), who stresses the political aspects of John's activity.