How did John the Baptist die?

The marriage John condemned

Herod Antipas, a son of Herod the Great, ruled Galilee and Perea for Rome. On a journey, the historian Josephus says, he fell in love with Herodias, the wife of one of his half-brothers and his own niece, a granddaughter of Herod the Great. They agreed to marry, and Antipas would send away his first wife, a daughter of Aretas IV, king of the Nabataeans of Petra. She found out and fled home to her father (Antiquities 18.109–115).

The law of Moses forbade a man to take his brother’s wife (Leviticus 18:16), and Herodias’s first husband was alive. John said so, in public.

For John had said to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” Herodias set herself against him and desired to kill him, but she couldn’t

Antipas had him arrested. Mark paints a ruler torn in two: he feared John, “knowing that he was a righteous and holy man,” and liked to listen to him (Mark 6:20). Matthew is blunter. Antipas wanted him dead but feared the crowds, who held John to be a prophet (Matthew 14:5).

A birthday banquet

Mark tells the end as a court drama. At Antipas’s birthday dinner for the officers and leading men of Galilee, Herodias’s daughter dances, and the delighted king swears to give her anything, “up to half of my kingdom” (Mark 6:23), the promise the Persian king once made to Queen Esther (Esther 5:3). She asks her mother what to choose. The answer comes back at once.

I want you to give me right now the head of John the Baptizer on a platter.

The king is sorry, Mark says, but he has sworn in front of his guests. A guard beheads John in the prison and brings the head on a platter; the girl hands it to her mother. John’s disciples come for the body and lay it in a tomb (Mark 6:26–29). Later, hearing about Jesus, Antipas is haunted: “This is John, whom I beheaded. He has risen from the dead” (Mark 6:16). Luke tells only the arrest and that one line (Luke 3:19–20; 9:9).

Josephus’s version

Josephus, writing about AD 93, tells it without a dance. Antipas, he says, feared that John’s hold on the people might lead to an uprising, and thought it better to strike first. John was sent in chains to Machaerus and put to death there. Some years later, around AD 36, Aretas avenged his daughter and destroyed Antipas’s army, and some Jews, Josephus says, saw the defeat as God’s punishment for what Antipas had done to John (Antiquities 18.116–119).

Historians usually read the two accounts together: a political killing, with a grudge at court behind it. Josephus never links Herodias to John’s death, and Mark never mentions politics.

Machaerus, Salome and the seven veils

Machaerus was a fortress-palace on a hilltop in Perea, east of the Dead Sea, in today’s Jordan. A Hasmonean king built it, Herod the Great rebuilt it, and Roman troops took it around AD 72, after the fall of Jerusalem (Jewish War 7.163–209). Its ruins stand above the village of Mukawir.

The Gospels never name the dancer; she is “the daughter of Herodias.” Josephus calls her Salome and says she married Philip the tetrarch (Antiquities 18.136). The dance of the seven veils is Oscar Wilde’s, from his play Salome of 1891, which Richard Strauss made into an opera in 1905. Caravaggio painted the beheading in 1608 for the Knights of Malta and signed it in the blood flowing from John’s neck. As for Antipas, the emperor Caligula exiled him to Gaul in AD 39, and Herodias chose to go with him (Antiquities 18.240–255).