Who was John the Baptist?

A priest’s son

Luke opens his Gospel with John’s parents. Zechariah is a priest serving in the Temple, his wife Elizabeth is old and childless, and an angel promises them a son: “you shall call his name John” (Luke 1:13). His Hebrew name, Yohanan, means that God has shown favor. Elizabeth is a relative of Mary (Luke 1:36), so in Luke’s telling John and Jesus are kin, born six months apart. That is why churches keep John’s birthday on June 24, six months before Christmas.

Then Luke covers thirty years in a line: the child “was in the desert until the day of his public appearance to Israel” (Luke 1:80). When he does appear, Luke dates it like a historian, to the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius, AD 28 or 29 (Luke 3:1–2).

Camel’s hair, locusts and wild honey

John was clothed with camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist. He ate locusts and wild honey.

Every detail is a message. The prophet Elijah was remembered as a hairy man with “a leather belt around his waist” (2 Kings 1:8), and the last lines of the prophets promise that God will send Elijah back before the great day of judgment (Malachi 4:5). Jesus later says of John, “this is Elijah, who is to come” (Matthew 11:14), though in John’s Gospel the Baptist himself denies it: “I am not” (John 1:21).

The menu is real desert food. Locusts are among the few insects the law of Moses allows (Leviticus 11:22), and Bedouin and Yemenite Jews ate them into modern times. The honey came from wild bees in the rocks. Some later Christians, uneasy with insects, decided the locusts were carob pods, which is why carob is still called Saint John’s bread.

What he preached

John came “preaching the baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). Jews already washed in ritual baths to become pure. John’s plunge in the Jordan was done once, at his hands, as a sign of turning back to God before the judgment he saw coming. The Greek baptizō means to dip or plunge. He did not flatter the crowds.

You offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore produce fruits worthy of repentance

Asked what to do, he gave plain answers. Whoever has two coats should share with whoever has none. Tax collectors should take only what is owed. Soldiers should extort from no one and be content with their pay (Luke 3:10–14). And he pointed past himself, to one “mightier than I” whose sandal strap he was not worthy to untie (Mark 1:7). Jesus came to be baptized, and later John told his own followers, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). His preaching cost him his life, as told in How did John the Baptist die?

John outside the Bible

John is one of the few Gospel figures described by an outside writer. The Jewish historian Josephus, around AD 93, calls him a good man who urged Jews to live justly and come to baptism, and says Herod Antipas feared his hold on the crowds (Antiquities 18.116–119). Josephus explains the baptism differently from Mark: not to win pardon for sins, but to purify the body once the soul had been cleansed by right living.

His movement outlived him. Some twenty-five years later Paul met disciples at Ephesus who knew only “John’s baptism” (Acts 19:1–7). The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran still honor him as their great teacher and baptize in running water. In the Quran he is the prophet Yahya, son of Zakariya, and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus keeps a shrine said to hold his head.