Who Was John the Baptist? The Voice Before Jesus

The last prophet of the old covenant and the first voice of the new, standing in the Jordan where the Gospel begins

East of Jericho, the road drops into the Jordan Valley until it reaches the lowest inhabited ground on earth. The air is heavy and warm, the hills behind are bare, and the river itself is narrower than most visitors expect: a green, slow band of water between reeds and tamarisk. Two thousand years ago, crowds walked down from Jerusalem to this same stretch of river to hear a man in camel's hair tell them that God was about to act, and that they had better be ready.

Every one of the four Gospels begins the public story of Jesus with that man. Before the miracles, before the Sermon on the Mount, before the call of the fishermen in Galilee, there is John, standing in the water. The river where he worked is the subject of our article on the Jordan River and its Christian meaning, and the rite he gave his name to is explained in our guide to what baptism is and why Christians practise it. This article asks a simpler question: who was John the Baptist himself?

John the Baptist was a Jewish prophet of the early first century who preached repentance in the Judean wilderness and baptized people in the Jordan River to prepare them for the coming of God's kingdom. He baptized Jesus at the start of his public ministry, pointed his own followers toward him, and was later imprisoned and executed under Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee and Perea. The precise year of his death is uncertain. Christians honour him as the Forerunner of Christ, and the Jewish historian Josephus also records his preaching, popularity and execution.

Announced Before He Was Born

Long before John was born, the prophets had spoken of someone who would come first. Isaiah heard a voice calling for a road to be made ready for God through the desert (Isaiah 40:3). Malachi, the last book of the Hebrew prophets in the Christian Old Testament, promised that God would send a messenger to prepare the way, and that Elijah the prophet would return before the great day of the Lord to turn the hearts of parents to their children (Malachi 3:1; 4:5–6, numbered 3:23–24 in some Bibles). Then came a long wait. A later Jewish book recalls a time of distress such as Israel had not known since prophets stopped appearing among them (1 Maccabees 9:27).

"The voice of one crying in the desert: Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the wilderness the paths of our God."

— Isaiah 40:3 (Douay-Rheims)

Luke's Gospel opens that silence in the Temple in Jerusalem. An elderly priest named Zechariah, of the priestly division of Abijah, was chosen by lot to burn incense in the sanctuary, and his wife Elizabeth, herself from the priestly family of Aaron, had never been able to have children (Luke 1:5–9). There the angel Gabriel appeared to Zechariah and told him that Elizabeth would bear a son, and that he was to name him John. The child would never drink wine or strong drink, would be filled with the Holy Spirit even before his birth, and would go ahead of the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn many in Israel back to God and make ready a people prepared for him (Luke 1:13–17). Zechariah doubted, and was left unable to speak until the promise was fulfilled.

Six months later, Gabriel was sent to Nazareth, to Mary, who was Elizabeth's relative (Luke 1:36). When Mary came to visit, the child in Elizabeth's womb leapt for joy at the sound of her greeting (Luke 1:41–44), an encounter remembered in the Visitation, one of the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary. So John's first act of witness, in Luke's telling, happened before he had drawn breath. At his circumcision, the neighbours expected him to be named after his father, but Elizabeth insisted on John, and Zechariah wrote on a tablet that John was his name. His voice returned at once, and he praised God in the prophecy the Church still prays every morning, the Benedictus, which calls his son the prophet of the Most High who will go before the Lord to prepare his ways (Luke 1:59–79). The name itself, Yohanan in Hebrew, means "the Lord has been gracious."

Luke places the family's home only in "the hill country" of Judea, in a town he does not name (Luke 1:39). Christian tradition identifies it with Ein Karem, a village in the hills west of Jerusalem. That identification is old, but it is tradition rather than Scripture: the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land notes that the earliest evidence is a Georgian lectionary of the seventh or eighth century, which records a feast of Elizabeth at a church in "Encharim." Today two churches there recall John's birth and Mary's visit. Luke closes the story of John's childhood in a single sentence: the boy grew strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel (Luke 1:80).

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A Man of the Judean Wilderness

The wilderness of Judea begins almost at the edge of Jerusalem. East of the Mount of Olives the land falls away in folds of chalk and limestone, brown for most of the year, cut by dry ravines that run down to the Jordan and the Dead Sea. There are springs, caves and a few oases, and very little else. In the Bible, this kind of place is never empty of meaning. Israel wandered forty years in the wilderness and met God there. Moses and Elijah heard God on desert mountains. Hosea imagined God leading his people back into the wilderness to speak tenderly to them again (Hosea 2:14).

John chose to live there. Mark describes him dressed in camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, eating locusts and wild honey (Mark 1:6). Every detail mattered to a Jewish listener. The Second Book of Kings describes Elijah as a hairy man with a leather belt around his waist (2 Kings 1:8), and John's clothing recalls him. Locusts were among the few insects the Law of Moses allowed people to eat (Leviticus 11:22), and wild honey could be gathered from rock crevices. His diet suggests a life of austerity and dependence on what the wilderness provided, although the Gospels do not explain every practical detail of how he lived. Jesus later contrasted John, who came eating no bread and drinking no wine, with himself, who ate and drank with sinners (Luke 7:33–34).

John's disciples fasted (Mark 2:18), and he taught them to pray (Luke 11:1). His was a prophetic asceticism: not self-punishment, but a life stripped down so that nothing would compete with the message. The same instinct runs through the whole Christian practice of self-denial, described in our guide to Christian fasting and why believers still choose it. Within a few years of John's ministry, Jesus himself would go into this same wilderness to fast for forty days after his baptism.

Some scholars have suggested a possible connection between John and the Jewish community at Qumran, near the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. The community associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls also looked to the wilderness as a place of preparation and applied Isaiah's words about preparing the way of the Lord to its own religious life. The geographical proximity, emphasis on purification and expectation of God's coming intervention make the comparison interesting. But there is no direct historical evidence that John belonged to Qumran or studied there. His open preaching to crowds, tax collectors and soldiers also differed from the community's more restricted way of life. The relationship remains a scholarly possibility, not an established fact.

The wilderness strips a person down to what is necessary. John lived there until he had nothing left to say but the one thing he was sent to say.

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John at the Jordan: The Baptism of Jesus

Luke dates the beginning of John's public preaching with unusual precision: the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate governed Judea and Herod Antipas ruled Galilee (Luke 3:1–3). That points to about AD 28 or 29. Mark says that people from the whole Judean countryside and all of Jerusalem went out to him, confessed their sins, and were baptized by him in the Jordan (Mark 1:5). John's Gospel gives two places where he baptized: Bethany beyond the Jordan, on the river's eastern side (John 1:28), and Aenon near Salim, where there was plenty of water (John 3:23).

Jews of the time knew ritual washing well. Excavations in Jerusalem and across the land have uncovered many stepped immersion pools from this period. But John's baptism was different. It was a single act, received from him rather than performed alone, and it was tied to a decision: Mark calls it a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Mark 1:4). Josephus, writing in the 90s AD, adds a careful note: John taught that baptism would be acceptable to God only if the soul had already been made clean by right living. The water marked a change of heart. It did not replace one.

Then, one day, Jesus came from Nazareth to be baptized. Matthew records John's protest: he was the one who needed to be baptized by Jesus, so why was Jesus coming to him? Jesus answered that it was right for them to do this, to fulfil everything God required, and John agreed (Matthew 3:13–15). As Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens opened, the Spirit of God came down on him like a dove, and a voice from heaven declared him the beloved Son with whom the Father was well pleased (Matthew 3:16–17; Mark 1:9–11). The Eastern churches call this feast Theophany, the revealing of God, because Father, Son and Spirit are all made known at once at the river.

The Gospel of John does not narrate the baptism itself. It gives John's testimony instead. Priests and Levites came from Jerusalem to ask who he was. He told them plainly that he was not the Messiah, not Elijah, and not the prophet Moses had promised, but only the voice from Isaiah calling for a straight road for the Lord (John 1:19–23). The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and spoke the words that Catholics still hear before every Communion:

"Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sin of the world."

— John 1:29 (Douay-Rheims)

John said he had seen the Spirit come down and remain on Jesus, and that this was the sign God had given him to recognise the one who would baptize with the Holy Spirit (John 1:32–34). The day after, he pointed Jesus out to two of his own disciples. They left John and followed Jesus, and one of them was Andrew, who went to find his brother Simon Peter (John 1:35–42). The first apostles, in other words, came to Jesus by way of John; their wider story is told in our guide to the Twelve Apostles. The traditional places along the river where all this is remembered, on the Jordanian and Israeli banks, are compared in our guide to the Jordan River baptism sites.

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What John Preached

Matthew sums up John's message in one line: repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near (Matthew 3:2). The Greek word for repentance, metanoia, means a change of mind, a turning around. John did not soften it. When religious leaders came to watch, he called them a brood of snakes and warned them not to rely on being descendants of Abraham, because God could raise up children for Abraham from the stones of the riverbank. The axe, he said, was already at the root of the trees (Matthew 3:7–10).

Yet when ordinary people asked him what they should do, his answers were strikingly practical. Anyone with two coats should give one to someone who had none, and the same with food. Tax collectors should take no more than they were owed. Soldiers should not extort money or make false accusations, and should be content with their pay (Luke 3:10–14). John did not tell them to leave their jobs or move to the desert. He told them to be honest and generous exactly where they were. Repentance, for John, was something you could see in how a person treated money and neighbours.

The centre of his preaching, though, was not himself or even repentance. It was the one coming after him. John said he was not worthy to untie that man's sandals, the work of a household slave. He baptized with water, but the coming one would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire (Mark 1:7–8; Matthew 3:11). When his own disciples later worried that everyone was now going to Jesus instead, John compared himself to the friend of a bridegroom, who is full of joy simply to hear the bridegroom's voice, and said that Jesus must grow greater while he himself grew less (John 3:27–30).

The table below gathers the main things John the Baptist says in the Bible about himself and about Jesus.

It is rare for a teacher to spend his best words telling his own followers to leave him for someone else. John did exactly that, and he called it joy.

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Prison and Death at Machaerus

John's preaching did not stay on the riverbank. Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, had divorced his first wife and married Herodias, who had been the wife of his half-brother. John told Herod plainly that the marriage was against the Law (Mark 6:17–18; Leviticus 18:16), and Herod had him arrested. Mark adds a surprising detail: Herod feared John, knew him to be a righteous and holy man, protected him, and liked to listen to him even though what John said left him greatly perplexed (Mark 6:20). Herodias felt no such hesitation.

From prison, John sent his disciples to ask Jesus whether he was the one who was to come, or whether they should wait for someone else. Jesus did not answer with a title. He told them to report what they had seen: the blind seeing, the lame walking, the sick healed, the dead raised, and good news brought to the poor, all signs Isaiah had promised (Matthew 11:2–6). Then, as John's messengers left, Jesus spoke about John to the crowd. They had not gone into the wilderness to see a reed blown by the wind or a man in fine clothes, but a prophet, and more than a prophet. Among those born of women, Jesus said, no one had arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he (Matthew 11:7–11). The second half of that sentence is not a put-down. It describes how new the kingdom was: John stood at its threshold, and pointed through the door.

At a banquet for Herod's birthday, the daughter of Herodias danced for the guests, and Herod rashly promised her anything she asked. Prompted by her mother, she asked for John's head on a platter. Herod was deeply grieved, but would not break an oath sworn in front of his guests, and he sent a soldier to behead John in the prison (Mark 6:21–28). The Gospels do not give the girl's name. Josephus names Herodias's daughter as Salome, which is why later tradition calls her that. Mark ends the account with quiet dignity: when John's disciples heard, they came, took his body, and laid it in a tomb (Mark 6:29). Matthew adds that they went and told Jesus, and that Jesus withdrew by boat to a deserted place (Matthew 14:12–13).

Josephus gives a different perspective on John's execution. In his Jewish Antiquities (18.116–119), he explains that Herod feared John's influence over the crowds might encourage rebellion. Rather than risk an uprising, Herod had John imprisoned at the fortress of Machaerus and ordered his death. The Gospels focus instead on John's condemnation of Herod's marriage to Herodias and the circumstances of the fatal banquet. These accounts may describe different dimensions of the same conflict: John's public criticism threatened Herod's reputation, while his popularity could have made him politically dangerous. But neither source establishes Herod's complete motives, and we should not pretend that every detail can be reconciled with certainty. What both accounts agree on is that Herod Antipas ordered John's execution. Machaerus stands on a hilltop east of the Dead Sea in present-day Jordan, where archaeological investigations have uncovered substantial remains of Herod's palace, including a courtyard associated by some researchers with the setting of the banquet.

Early Christian tradition placed John's tomb at Sebaste, the old city of Samaria. Jerome, writing in Bethlehem around AD 400, mentions it, and the fifth-century historian Theodoret reports that under the emperor Julian (361–363) pagans opened the tomb and burned the bones. Several churches have since claimed relics of John, most famously his head, and the honest position is that these claims rest on later tradition and cannot be verified historically. What is certain is the shape of his death. A prophet told the truth to a powerful man, was silenced for it, and was buried by the few who loved him. Christians have always seen in it a foreshadowing of a greater death and burial, told in our article on the death and resurrection of Jesus.

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Where John's Story Took Place

Few figures in the Bible are tied to the land as closely as John. Almost every stage of his life can be placed on a map of the Holy Land, though some places rest on Scripture and others on later tradition, as the table below makes clear.

The distinction between Scripture, tradition and archaeology matters particularly at the Jordan River. The Gospel of John names Bethany beyond the Jordan as a place where John baptized (John 1:28), but it does not provide the precise coordinates of Jesus' baptism. Today, Al-Maghtas, on the Jordanian side, is internationally recognised as a major traditional baptism site. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2015, recognising its religious significance, pilgrimage history and archaeological remains, including early Christian churches and baptismal installations. That recognition supports the site's importance in Christian history; it does not independently prove the exact spot where Jesus entered the water.

Across the river, Qasr al-Yahud is another longstanding pilgrimage destination associated with the baptism of Jesus. Farther north, Yardenit, near the Sea of Galilee, is a modern baptism facility rather than a claimed location of the biblical event. Each serves a different purpose for today's pilgrims. Our Jordan River baptism sites guide compares these locations, while our article on the Jordan River's Christian significance explores the river's wider biblical history.

One place deserves a moment more. On the Jordanian side of the river, close to the baptism site, rises a small hill called Tell al-Kharrar, known locally as Elijah's Hill. The Second Book of Kings says Elijah crossed the Jordan near Jericho before he was taken up into heaven (2 Kings 2:4–11), and Byzantine Christians built a monastery on this hill to remember him. If the tradition is right, then the prophet who left Israel in a whirlwind and the prophet who came in his spirit stood on the same riverbank, centuries apart. This small stretch of the Jordan sits at the heart of a much larger landscape, introduced in our complete guide to the Holy Land.

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Why John the Baptist Still Matters

Who was John the Baptist to the first Christians? He was where the story started. When the apostles chose someone to replace Judas, they looked for a man who had been with them from the baptism of John until the Ascension (Acts 1:21–22). When Peter preached to the household of Cornelius, he began with the baptism that John proclaimed (Acts 10:37). Mark's Gospel opens not with a birth but with John in the wilderness. The movement that became the Church, traced in our account of how Christianity began in Jerusalem, counted its beginning from the day Jesus came to John at the river. Some of John's own disciples were still found decades later, in Ephesus, where Paul taught them about the Holy Spirit and baptized them in the name of Jesus (Acts 19:1–7).

The Church has kept him close ever since. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls him "more than a prophet" and says that in him the Holy Spirit completes the work of speaking through the prophets (CCC 719). The Orthodox call him the Forerunner, Prodromos in Greek, and in the icon known as the Deësis he stands with the Virgin Mary on either side of Christ, the two great intercessors of the Church. Some icons even give him angel's wings, because Malachi's word for "messenger" can also mean angel.

He is among the few saints whose birth, and not only death, is celebrated as a major feast. Catholics, Orthodox and many Anglicans and Lutherans commemorate his Nativity on 24 June. His death is commemorated on 29 August in Catholic, Orthodox and some Anglican calendars; in the Orthodox tradition, it is observed as a strict fast day. Orthodox Christians also celebrate the Synaxis of John the Baptist on 7 January, following Theophany. These are the traditional liturgical dates, not necessarily the corresponding dates on today's civil calendar. Churches using the Julian calendar currently celebrate these fixed feasts thirteen days later on the Gregorian calendar, while other churches follow different calendar arrangements.

For ordinary believers, John's lasting gift is a pattern of life. He told the truth when it was costly. He asked people to change in concrete ways, with their coats, their food and their wages. He knew exactly who he was not. And when the one he had waited for finally came, he stepped aside gladly.

Every year in Advent, the Church sends Christians back to the riverbank. The Gospels of the second and third Sundays of Advent are about John, and for good reason: anyone preparing for Christ still has to pass through John's questions. His call to prepare is central to the Christian season of Advent. What needs to change? What am I holding on to? Who am I trying to be? And the place itself has not gone away. The water still runs past Bethany beyond the Jordan. The wilderness still rises toward Jerusalem. Pilgrims still walk down the bank and step into the river where John stood.

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Water from John's River

Not everyone can travel to the Jordan, and many Christians who have been there wish to keep something of it at home. For centuries pilgrims have carried its water away as a devotional reminder of the river associated with John's preaching and the baptism of Jesus. Our Holy Water from the Jordan River is drawn from this historic river and offered by our Christian family in the Holy Land. Its significance lies in the biblical history and prayerful remembrance associated with the Jordan, not in a promise of miraculous results.

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