WHO WAS JOHN THE BAPTIST?
Who is John the Baptist? He’s a recurring figure in the New Testament that most non-believers—and many believers, even—have only scattered impressions of. He’s a wild man in the desert eating insects and calling for repentance; a first-century revivalist preacher, baptizing Jesus in the Jordan; a prisoner in a decadent court, his head presented on a platter to Salome after a salacious dance (a particular favorite of a certain type of painter). But all these images, all these events, can be so disjointed and disconnected that they could belong to entirely different people. So, who is John the Baptist, son of Zechariah, descendent of Levi? A prophet, a religious radical, a political prisoner—and a relative of Jesus himself; they were not strangers to each other. John flows in and out of the Gospels, which focus on Jesus. We see him only when their lives and narratives intersect, but even with what little we know about John, he is a fascinating and important figure.
John’s appearances are scattered across all four Gospels, but the first story in his own chronology is of his parents, in the Gospel of Luke. (1) His father Zechariah was a Jewish high priest, of the tribe of Levi, who served in the innermost part of the temple, the Holy of Holies, and thus would have been respected among the priestly class. His wife, Elizabeth, was barren, and both were aged and childless. He was taking his turn serving in the temple when an angel appeared to him and told him that he and his wife would have a son, who would be marked by the Holy Spirit from birth, and who would be a prophet to the nation of Israel. His conception, born to a woman past childbearing age and foretold by an angel, has echoes of numerous stories in the Old Testament, particularly those of Isaac and Samuel, a patriarch and a prophet from Jewish history. John’s birth, foretold by an angel and accompanied by signs, and his name, meaning “graced by God” and given by that same angel, mark him out as being specially chosen by God and set apart. From his birth he was a Nazirite, set apart for God’s use, with special purity and ritual laws beyond the rest of the nation of Israel. (2)
For the most part, John’s conception, birth, and naming are their own story, a small vignette outside the Jesus-centered narrative of the Gospels, but there is one place where these stories cross. After Mary, the mother of Jesus, is visited by an angel and becomes pregnant, she goes to visit her relative Elizabeth, who at the time is pregnant with John. The Gospels don’t give an explanation, but it easy to imagine why. Elizabeth was older, past her childbearing years, and would likely be glad of the helping hand of a younger woman as her pregnancy advanced. As for Mary, the chance to help an older, more esteemed relative, while also having some time away from whatever rumors were circulating about a suddenly pregnant young woman who wasn’t quite married yet is more than understandable. As Mary arrived, the Gospel says that John “leapt for joy” in Elizabeth’s womb, one woman touched by the hand of the Almighty to another. (3) Did Elizabeth and Mary stay in contact as they grew older, swapping stories and concerns about their God-haunted sons, surrounded by prophecy and angels? Did Jesus and John play in the streets of Jerusalem when all the faithful came to the holy city for Passover; did they watch the pilgrims and tell tales and build castles in the dust in the shadow of the Temple? There’s no way for us to know, but I hope so.
The next we hear of John, instead of following in his father’s footsteps as a priest in the temple, he has become a prophet in the desert by the Jordan. This is no small thing in the time in which he lived; sons generally followed in their fathers’ footsteps, and the position of priest to the Temple was prestigious. It would have put John among the religious and political elite of Israel. Instead, John went to the wilderness, to dress in camel’s hair and eat locusts and wild honey; he made himself into a prophet in the mold of those of the heyday of Israel, Samuel and Elijah and Jeremiah, people who existed outside and in opposition to the corrupt power structures in place, and who derived their authority from God-given revelation rather than hierarchy or bloodlines.
He, also like them, preached repentance and reform, lest calamity befall Israel, and did so to everyone—soldiers serving under the occupying armies; Jewish tax collectors considered to be collaborators with Rome (for that was who gave them their positions); Jewish religious leaders; the common people. And this was no safe thing to do. First-century Judea was a hotbed of revolution and revolt, lying under the control of the Roman Empire and not particularly happy about it. Those people in power—Herod and his dynasty, and the religious leaders in the capital of Jerusalem—they ruled by the good graces of the imperial authorities, and only on the condition that they kept the peace by whatever means necessary. A charismatic blue-blood rabble-rouser who preached a morality and repentance outside their control was a threat. There was no way that John could have been ignorant of that context, and he chose to preach all the same. He is repeatedly described as a “voice of one calling out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight,” (4) an echo from Isaiah; John is still surrounded by prophecy, and understood to be a prophet in that old mold. As he preached, he baptized people in the Jordan, and predicted that someone greater than himself was coming.
And in the midst of this revival, this ministry, Jesus comes as one of the multitude to his relative to be baptized. Perhaps it was a reunion after years of childhood friendship, and John hoped for the chance to catch up with his little cousin that he had once played ball with in the shadow of the Temple; perhaps John was estranged from his poor provincial relative, who worked with his hands and came from the backwater of Nazareth. Perhaps he didn’t even know that Jesus was there, until John saw him at the head of the line of people who had come to be washed clean in the Jordan, and perhaps John barely had time to register him there before the sky cracked open and the voice of God spoke. Something new had come into the world by the muddy banks of that river, in the form of his perhaps-childhood playmate, at once familiar and terribly, terribly strange. John understood he had been waiting for someone. Could he had have imagined it to be someone he knew? Did he view Jesus with the loving contempt we so often keep for our families, where we hold them so dear and familiar in our hearts and so can’t imagine them truly touched by the divine, simply because we watched them learn to tie their own shoes?
After Jesus’ baptism, John’s narrative becomes disjointed. At some point before Jesus’ own execution, John is arrested and killed by King Herod, tetrarch of Judea, a Jewish client ruler of the Romans. The reason for John’s arrest was his denunciation of Herod’s second marriage, to his own sister-in-law, illegal under Jewish law and thus invalid. John was imprisoned but not tried; Herod had caught the tiger by the tail. If he released John, he undermined his own authority and validated John’s denunciation of him. If he tried and punished John, he risked an uprising from the population who considered him a prophet.
It was in this limbo state of untried political prisoner that John wrote Jesus a letter from prison, asking him if Jesus was indeed the one he had been expecting. (5) It’s not hard to understand why; John had spoken truth to power and been punished for it, had been dedicated from birth to ritual purity beyond what was expected even of observant Jews, had thrown away all his born privilege. Even with a visitation from the heavens, what was he to think of this cousin of his, who drank with prostitutes and ate with Roman collaborators, who went to wedding feasts and flatly refused to turn his ministry into politics? If John ground his teeth, there in prison, waiting and waiting for Jesus to do something, to speak on his behalf, who could blame him? And who could tell if he found Jesus’ answer—look at what I have done, what miracles have been performed, trust me and wait—at all convincing, or saw it as just an abdication of responsibility, an expression of apolitical apathy. And perhaps he understood that Jesus could hardly say much else, with John in prison and under supervision, unless Jesus wished to prematurely end his own mission in a cell next to John.
The last thing known of John is his death. (6)At some point in the ministry of Jesus, not at the beginning nor at the end, but at some uncertain time in the middle, Herod had John killed. This was not by lawful trial and execution, but by a rash promise and an extrajudicial killing. Even after being imprisoned, John had not renounced his views or stopped his denunciation of Herod and his marriage. While Herod was content in that state of affairs, or at least had yet to find an acceptable way out of the situation he had put himself in, his wife (and former sister-in-law) Herodias was less resigned to the status quo. Her power was her husband’s, after all, and so when he refused to put John to death outright, she forced the issue. When her daughter danced at a celebration of Herod’s, to the enjoyment of him and his guests, Herod rashly promised the girl any prize she wished. She went to her mother for advice and her mother supplied the answer—John the Baptist’s head. Herod was unhappy with the request, but to him his word was more important than legal proceedings or a man’s life. John’s head was duly delivered on a platter to Herodias.
This story is recounted in the Gospels as asides in the narrative, recounting events that have already happened, and many specifics are simply not included. We don’t know there was a show trial, or if John was simply dragged from his cell in the middle of the night, or if he was even told what was happening. He didn’t live long enough for Jesus’s own execution, only marginally more “legal”, and he certainly didn’t live long enough to see Jesus resurrected, or the seed of Jesus’ seemingly non-political mission blossomed into full revolution. We don’t know if he died in despair, seeing all he worked for end at an executioner’s axe, or in hope, remembering God’s intersessions in his and Jesus’ lives.
So, who was John the Baptist? He was a political dissident and firebrand who paid the ultimate price; he was a religious leader who walked away from an easy and prestigious life to live shockingly with God; he was a man who watched himself be eclipsed by a younger, less qualified, less dedicated (or so it seemed) relative, and had to accept it. John is an awkward figure, a precursor to Jesus who didn’t get to see the end of the road he began, a road he had started to make straight. He is, in a way, all of us; called to start the work, to speak out against corruption, to call for repentance, without necessarily getting to see the end of what we’ve begun, or even to understand how God is working in our lives, having to hope and trust in Him by faith.
See Luke 1: 5–80 for John’s infancy narrative.
See Luke 1:15 for John’s Nazirite dedication, and Numbers 6:1-3 for a explanation of the Nazirite restrictions that John was to adhere to.
See Luke 1: 39–45.
See Matthew 3:1–3, Mark 1:2–4, Luke 3: 3–6, and John 1:23.
See Matthew 11: 2–3 and Luke 7:18–23.
See Matthew 14: 1–12, Mark 6: 14–29, Luke 3:19–20, and Luke 9:9.
